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exploring movement through contact improvisation and brazilian jiu jitsu.

Tau Stinger
portrait by Anna Powell Denton

My movement is shaped by contact improvisation, ballet, pop music, jiu jitsu, stuff floating in the bog of my unconscious, and hypermobility. In 2016, I earned a BA from Bennington College in Dance as Spirituality where I focused on dance and architecture with an emphasis on dance as a site for convening with the divine. I have performed in the works of Sam Wentz, David Brick, and Chris Aiken among others, and presented my own choreography in Vermont and Philadelphia.

Tau Stinger
Photo by Lynda Allen
Fractured Cherry (excerpt), 2015

Dance history

I was captain of my high school varsity dance team in the late aughts, choreographing halftime routines for football and basketball games. I made mixes of pop songs burned onto CDs from LimeWire and recorded them onto cassette tapes with my translucent lavender Sony boombox. Finding contact improvisation after high school was a revelation—the glitter and devotion I poured into making dances alone in the basement exercise room felt accessible in partnering, and I was stained with awe at the power of improvisation to open a portal to something deep and mysterious. Studying dance with architecture in college felt intuitive; both architects and choreographers build structures that guide bodies through patterns in space and time.

In my 20s, I danced professionally and in my friends’ pieces. My movement work explored my relationship with femininity and the internet. In 2016, I printed a copy of Throwing Like a Girl and carried it around in my backpack for six years. I’ve watched excerpts from Tere O’Connor’s Baby on YouTube more than a hundred times, and once I had a conversation with Steve Paxton about how it seems like dance isn’t really about physical movement. In my late twenties, I engaged with dance mostly through writing, publishing essays variously.

Tau Stinger

Science as dance

The chemistry I'm learning now is a response to the dances I made a decade ago. In my dances, I traced the looping architecture of a femininity that confined my sense of self and my place in the world—narrative structures etched in my nervous system, inscribed in space in my day-to-day life, reinforced by my life online. Chemistry offers a framework for dismantling those structures. I use stillness as leverage, breathing into constraints, allowing the subtle body of my imagination to engage deeply while my physical body remains still while solving problems. Wresting clarity from the froth of disorientation, scientific thinking and problem-solving hones my focus like sunbeams through a lens. Through this, I grind away the blocks crowding my inner space, clearing a pathway for the fullness of my heart to shine unobstructed.

Tau Stinger
Portrait by Lynda Allen

Hypermobility

Living with a hypermobility spectrum disorder has taught me to move at the speed of my awareness, and I do my best to extend that sensitivity to my partners in dancing and bjj as well. My practice is supported by Corrective Exercise and the Egoscue Method, saline infusions, manual soft tissue work, and craniosacral therapy. If you're a contact dancer or BJJ athlete with hypermobility, please feel free to reach out to trade information.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. -Heisenberg
the clattering mayhem of morning sun on dew-pricked spiderwebs
thoughts and feelings on movement, making & science

Your body is an accelerometer, not a speedometer.

January 18. 2025

One the second day of the Salt Spring Island winter retreat we practiced moving through space at a constant velocity, following the natural unfolding of movement. No slowing down, no speeding up, no backtracking. I noticed while dancing that I tend to subtly reset my movement sequences every 45 seconds or so. When I resist the urge to restart, I feel a response—fear—and an urge to contract. I’m sneaky about suspending the direction of my movement. I find subtle ways to shift paths and avoid staying fully committed to one trajectory over long periods of time. I tend to accelerate slightly every so often, like placing a marble at the top of a winding track and letting it fall before placing it at the top again. We revisited the exercise today and a quote from my physics textbook occurred to me, “your body is an accelerometer, not a speedometer.” In acceleration, I feel my cells slosh, tension, the awareness of change. But moving at a constant speed is like stillness—a natural state of being uninterrupted by impulse or decision. A sustained, intentional flow of motion. I think my resistance to moving at a constant speed is actually a resistance to stillness. I have fear about not knowing where the movement will carry me, where I’ll end up. If I let myself unfold in stillness without getting involved, I’m going to lose control. Dissolve into something expanded, wild, borderless. I was talking with a friend today about geopolitics and he said there isn’t much joyful wonder in borders. That sentiment resonates with both physical landmasses and the states of being, especially when those borders contain something that no longer needs guarding. There was a kind of magic in noticing the lines and contours where my system feels safe containing my being. And power in realizing those lines are porous, flexible—drawn long ago when it was important to stay within a defined area, but now, they no longer serve me. Or maybe there are ways they do. As I close, I guess in a sense, our bodies are neither accelerometers nor speedometers because there is no absolute reference frame. I haven’t learned that physics yet so for now I’m pocketing it for later.