Love in the Time of Chaos

On embodied memory, the Kennedy Center, and the things that outlast

My friend’s daughter, Catherine Hurlin

Much of what we recognize as familiar is not simply memory. It is embodied experience. There are places I have grown up with that still live in my body.

I remember being a young girl in Washington, D.C., when my mother served on the board of the Modern Dance Council. We would go to the Kennedy Center, and after performances I would leap down its great, hallowed halls, across the red carpets — my very small body filled with very big aspirations. I was certain I was destined for a life in dance. We saw every company that came through Washington. There was a distinct hometown pride in each performance: Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey, Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp. To witness them there felt like belonging to something larger than yourself. Art and dance were not distant or rarefied. They were alive, shared, and accessible — among the most democratic forms of expression I had ever known.

Hannah Marshall

A place holds itself in time with its own authority. Renaming a cherished building does not alter its essence. The original remains. And loving it as it once lived allows us to be carried into the artistic reverie of remembrance. We recognize something sacred in the familiar. It strikes us with a kind of cellular memory. Real places, like real people, hold their shape. They outlast the chaos of noise. They do not contort themselves to accommodate shifting postures of power, nor to those who only momentarily lead.

And yet, here I am — at war with myself, feeling almost traitorous to my own beliefs — and still I choose to go to the Kennedy Center to watch my friends’ daughters dance. In deference to my loyalty to these young dancers, I choose love over resistance. I choose them over this moment in time. I choose to love them more than I resist what this moment represents.

Perhaps that, too, is a form of faith.

Because in the end, the building is still the building, the art is still the art, and the dancers are still worthy of devotion. Power may rename a place, but it cannot rename what it has meant to us. Some things live deeper than language. Some things remain in the body.