Fresh Tracks

Dear Reader,

On Friday, the twelfth of September, 2025, I had the distinct honor of being 1 of 16 people to interview live for the NYLA (New York Live Arts) Fresh Tracks Residency and I blew it...

NYLA describes the interview as a rigorous and engaged interview style audition but it could also be described as an elaborate shame ritual invented up by a sadistic greek life tradition chair. No no no... ok ... i'm mostly joking. The whole thing was only 20 mins, 5 of which included me sitting in a cuck-esque chair across from the Esteemed Panel and avoiding being obvious about how I was watching them watch me watch my 5 minute video. The room was set up so my little interviewee chair was positioned next to the roll-in 90's cube television facing the panel and their tables so I had to turn my body and crane my neck the whole time the video played giving the panel not only a clear viewing of my thesis but also my exposed left jugular vein.

The panel ... absolutely insane

across from me sat Duke Dang, Neil Greenberg, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Joanna Kotze, and Seta Morton.

The Questions they asked.... i thought they were a good sign!

What about this video excites you now after watching it again?

What are some questions you would ask your cohort in a feedback session?

Where is the imagined setting of this piece?

What is important to you about mentorship?

Do you have a cast of dancers you are interested in working with?

My answers? Well, we will get that in a sec...

Over burgers with Joe, the other night I processed the whole thing aloud and realized how much I wanted to write about it, get it on paper, on the page, and just sort of learn from it while also sharing it. so Hello?! welcome to that...

I started writing this by talking to myself on my way out of the subway after burgers with Joe. Coincidentally, while we sat and talked we ran into Aaron who was on the phone with his husband while walking from Angelikas Film Center where he had seen Paul Mescal fall in love with Josh O'Connor which is exactly! where I had been ... directly after the audition on friday the twelveth of September. 2025.

By processing out loud with joe and coming out of the train, I found some truth about how I wish the rigorous and engaged interview style audition went. Like a post argument car ride where you finally find the logic and clarity and oh so obvious cutting double leg takedown that would have lead you to bloody victory. So this writing will be some of that mixed with some of what actually happened.

~~what i wish i had said~~

"Hi I'm Gabriel, I am currently Dancing with Tere O'Connor and this is a solo I called Midwest Princess (frfr)."

~We watch the 5 min solo in my cuck chair with my yummy stabbable neck vein ~

From cuck (“a cuckold or cuckquean: one who is married to an unfaithful partner”) +‎ chair, alluding to a scenario where the person being cucked sits in the chair while watching their partner have sexual intercourse with another. Attested as early as the 2010s but first popularised as a meme in 2022.

Then we'd have an open conversation about what I wanted from The Residency and how the dance is saying something deeply moving through a intriguing and confident new voice. I would have painted a clear picture of an important work. A timely work. One that deserved the level of prestige of the residency, one that took advantage of this rare career launching opportunity, all while understanding the risk I would be as a complete unknown and tempering any hesitations the panel had about how I was new to making dance in The City by dazzling them with a brilliantly shiny display of pure sleek early-mid-late 20's potential.

The annual Fresh Tracks Residency & Performance program for emerging movement-based artists will continue to celebrate its 60th year featuring Juliana May as Artistic Advisor. The program originated at Dance Theater Workshop in 1965 to bring new choreographic artistry to the forefront.

I imagine myself breaking down the relevance of my dance in sleek Bayonetta spectacles, an oversized dress shirt, expensive looking prada sneakers dupes and tiny little athletic shorts that showed off my shapely dancer legs. I'd say that I created this solo with three goals 1. To create a smaller, portable version of My Current Research 2. To honor and remix Tere's own Fresh Tracks Era solo and 3. To reflect and respond to the current unstable moment through my distinct artistic lens

3. In this solo the current times are reflected through my use of the monster. A metaphor often applied to the queer body through the society which rejects it and reclaimed through finding commonalities amongst the dehumanized other. The monster continues to allow me liberation in the form of escape from rigid standards and categorizations by: transforming beauty into expression, camp into high art, and a failing to blend into a generator of creativity. Making this solo allowed me to take on my humorous, foolish, truthful and human nature. In this solo it is legible that I am perhaps not a disciplined class taker, that I detest the current reality that if you are sexy enough, trained with enough tricks, and know how to work the camera on a gimble, it is possible to gain 10k followers and dance with lady ga ga. I mean power to those who can and I do not mean to mock or sound bitter but truthfully, I have not devoted this much time to capital D Dance, for fame. I am currently dancing, and making dance because I find it to be a truly artful way to live; to be forced to deal with people, to look people in the eyes, to trust people. To dance is to be in communication with the needs of your body's demands and the demands people have for your body. In communication with the particularity of other's bodies and other's time. This solo. reflects the times. contains the times where bodies. the particularities. are being scapegoated. are being monster-ized. and it is not like this has never before. that's the issue. this has happened before. this will continue to happen. and is deeply known. deeply accessible in all of us. to be monster. to call others monsters. to fear. and to scare.

My current train read is Deep House, by Jeremy Atherton Lin. A book with a second chapter devoted to recounting the legal battle towards gay marriage. An event so recent, that the next scapegoat for societal chaos has always felt obvious to me. With the current detestation for trans people, the FBI's newest terrorist group, we have a pretty clear sense of what was lost through a premature celebration of Oberfell v Hodges. And I don't think that is out of this solo. It was not made without that in mind.

To dance is to deal with a body in history. Tomorrow I might not be able to do this move, today I can only do this move because I worked with the right teacher, one who was able to give an instruction, a correction, an inspiration, in a way that clicked. Because of the time and effort and sweat and sacrifice devoted, I can now convince an audience of a truth. Midwest Princess (frfr) shows a body in history as a monster in flight, an effortful exertion of technique and power through superhuman jumping, twisting, turning, and precision. I want audience to ask themselves: Why can this creature, this monster move this way? What studio, what warm up practice, what technique class has allowed for this to take shape? And are there more like him? What gender roles are betrayed on the daily? What demoralizing racialization has been unburdened for this creature to be so liberated? To be dancing so Bigly?

But reader,

That isn't what I said.

Instead I showed this video.

(12:30-17:30)

Instead I describe the work in the NYLA Google Doc as:

Stunning! is a multimedia dance work for eight performers, four green screens, two monitors, a karaoke machine, and Zoom.com. It stages the messy labor behind curated digital life by finding its choreography through doomscrolling’s heightened embodied states of anxiety, confusion, sex, fatigue, and anger. Dancers appear as interdependent problem-solvers, vulnerable to failure and software updates that threaten to undo everything and wholly dependant on working Together. As screens blur live and recorded movement, the piece mirrors our reliance on unstable systems. Through absurdity, queerness, and real-time collaboration, Stunning! becomes a toolkit for building together, dancing together, and whatevers next.

Instead I answer their question of How Are you An Emerging Choreographer by saying:

I create work at the intersection of my generation’s digital saturation and my love for the sweaty, fleeting, earnest reality of live performance. I grew up before the race of artificial intelligence, and now I watch a future lean toward surveillance, scarcity, and algorithmic control. My work resists that.

I push dancers to engage as 21st-century people: navigating distrust in democratic systems, digital selves, and the constant pull of distraction. On stage, we build messy systems of communication that depend on collaboration and trust. In a world moving toward disconnection, performance becomes a site for risk, and presence.

Through rehearsal, we create a shared vocabulary of movement and language. I want to hack the systems we’re already in so they work for us again. My process values knowing how things work without mystifying them. The work holds both rigor and accessibility, insisting on the messy human skills we've already built.

Instead, when they asked

What about this video excites you now about this after watching it again?

What are some questions you would ask your cohort in a feedback session?

Where is the imagined setting of this piece?

What is important to you about mentorship?

Do you have a cast of dancers you are interested in working with?

I answered with a nervous energy and a confession that I had just moved to Crown Heights in August. I failed to name drop Tere, to show my dancing, to commit to the timely manner of the work. I felt in the question of casting, so excited about the idea of bringing Urbana people to NYC, of re-staging Stunning! for a NYC audience, of jumping into the world and creative methods. I remember answering that I loved working in cohorts and would ask questions about peoples creative process, that I'd ask to see previous works so I could better understand their lineage and clarify how whatever they were showing now contained the history of their artistry. I remember saying that the green screening made the dance able to take on any space like water to a vessel. I remember saying that exactly. That the green screens were purposefully screenshoting the messy back stage in order to highlight the precarity and real-time editing of the zoom video. I remember saying mentorship was everything to me. That I wanted to continue to be an educator, to reimagine the purpose of the university, that I wouldn't be here without mentorship or advocacy. I remember saying I was excited about the choreographic toolkit I had created to make this work possible and that I was most excited about jumping into the world myself and making the work more thematic to an artistic mission rather than just proof that I could stage a work on 8 other dancers.

I remember leaving and being handed a slip of paper from one of the panelists with the name of two other residencies they thought I should apply to. And i remember the feeling of my stomach dropping because I wasn't sure if it was a good sign or not. Like saying "girl try here". but Ultimately I've decided it was one of the kindest gestures one could have closed an audition like that with.

2. Okay Back to my Delusions and Processing of what I could have said or: To honor and remix Tere's own Fresh Tracks Era solo

Focusing now on my feelings of only in the room because of Tere yet failing to mention how his idea of choreography literally shaped my making of Stunning! and Midwest Princess (frfr). I realize now how Important it was that I made this opportunity one not only to benefit me but the entire cast of Stunning! or at least those who I could fly out. I had this grand idea of bringing people to NYLA and creating an unforgettable evening with a cast I trusted and who were completely ready to commit to the performance. And in doing so, I think I relied too much on a low quality video that failed to capture the performance. And I failed to showcase my beautiful dancer body and the ways I was creating an homage to Tere's solo after having worked with him in the summer of 2024.

I make this solo piece thinking of Tere's 1983 solo, Construct-A-Guy which I had seen for the first time. He made this dance at 26. In the Archival List of Fresh Tracks Choreographers he is there presenting May-June 1984 at the Choreographers Showcase. I think I could have really drawn some similarities to how this 2025 dance was an homage, especially to the unexpected moment early on where he walks off stage at the beginning of the dance. In this video from the New England Foundation for the Arts Grant announcement page, maybe you can see how the solo is totally reactive to this dance. The costume being a complete copy, I also think there is a similar investigation into the "Capricious rhythmic change, constant energy reversals, spatial fragmentation, a collagist sensibility, slippery, multiple meanings and continuous persona shifts are all forged from the complex psychological imprint of a closeted childhood."

Tere has shared that he made his solo by inhabiting each of his siblings, by living in their movement through the magic of gay mockery. no. gay mime, gay mimesis. He looks at their particularities in a way a sibling can, and looks at their movement in a way a dancer can, and he facetiously performs the power of the straight world in a way a gay person can. Tere often talks about the inspiration of watching people walk around New York. Of the choreography of the everyday. Of seeing so many people do so much particular movement, carrying so much history and desire, and secrecy. Of having so much to watch and wash over him and try on.

And I am able to try it on too even while in the corn fields. how? Not by embodying my siblings, but by training an algorithm to treat me as if I am a completely different person. By feeding me the 2025 equivalent of a New York City cafe people watching session. Hello? I am Gen Z after all. I do have to figure out how to make this tech actually work for me.

And so I start a new account, I want the algorithm to work as if I'm a 16 year old interested in makeup videos and The Summer I Turned Pretty memes. I contiously linger on Sally Rooney quotes, and figure skating videos, and I don't know maybe add some CharCharms to my shopping cart. Okay but then I'm a 56 year old getting into k-dramas with a left leaning political stance, a love for snoopy and three sons. Then I'm a 14 year old Fortnite savvy content consumer who spends hours watching twitch, trolling Roblox, and watching Pokemon TCG lives.

And it's kinda so easy with instagram. I think? Maybe this will get me banned.

In making a new account and accessing a new ad group instantly, I see a lot of different content. And so I do this, I try to, and then I dance with the stimulant coursing through my brain, Is it so different from dancing high? From dancing drunk? I allow the little videos to fester inside the movement, powering me through a half hour of video that I stitch together later.

(This is fictitious, I didn't actually make the dance this way, but thought about it when reflecting on Tere's process. I do think if I said this in the audition it would have been a stronger idea than the dance I did show though. Like maybe it actually brings the importance of dancemaking center stage a bit more. I think I relied too much on sounding fancy and confusing and as if I have an understanding of algorithmic dependency and a solution through dance and performance, Which I don't. I mean not really.)

1. the thesis work

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A post shared by Gabriel (@goob.online)

The thesis was something I was proud of, and it was indulgent. I used a lot of dancers, a lot of props, I did a lot of rule breaking: I relied on tech, on screens, and I didn't dance. I wasn't completely focused on meticulously planning movement of the body but movement of the screen. I neglected honing in one specific movement and meaning to instead include big gestural group movements and pedestrian, coordinated, and functional dancing.

Maybe I should have shown earlier videos. Or ones just from the screen with a clear frame and no jumping cameras, and a bit of chaos but in a more explainable way.

To sit in a room with these Icons of dance and discuss my work I just wanted to be able to discuss the biggest, boldest version possible. The whole picture. I wanted them to understand I can make a big dance, I can make a production, and that I was a risk who could also deliver

I fear I presented myself as someone who just wandered into new york that day to 'make it as a dancer'.

okayyy my bad?

like i love to wear my heart on my sleeve and show off my friends!

like i was so fired up about the idea of being able to bring them to new york and give them their first opportunity to perform at NYLA!

like I was so excited about the idea of arriving at Beloit for my guest artist residency and being like

yeahhh so like im in the cohort of fresh tracks artists

and its pretty cool

and you too could be like me

if you follow these few!

simple!

steps!

And i didn't run the application by anyone before submitting it because I felt guilty and unworthy of the glass elevator opportunity of it all, of Tere putting my name into NYLA's lap, and going right to the semifinals in Las Vegas. I got a golden buzzer, Grace Vanderwaall opportunity and it made me feel like a phoney!

sorry guys

really, sorry, I feel like I blew it. It would have been great, really I really would have made the most of it I know I would have, which is the most frustraing part for me right now.

Like ... girl it would have been fierce, and now... I will wait and apply again in two years. And there will probably be some other fierce ass twink from UIUC that Tere will be able to advocate for. Who will strut right on in, woo the panel and land on the cover of dance magazine. !!!What a world!!!!

I hope I don't sound bitter, really, I am completely in awe that this is even a situation I'm dealing with. Like. Insane first month and a half T>B>H> and I haven't even told you about rehearsing, haven't even told you about the cool fucking dance I've been seeing, about the good shit I've been eating, about my apartment, and daily commute, and volunteering at Bushwig, and SFPC, and ACRE, and graduation, and I do think. There will be more to come.

but for now.

Just thought i'd write it all down while it was fresh, and I wasn't too nervous to share it.

With love and love and LOVE!

Gabriel

I'll write soon, but if not it's because your letter is in the mail.