Each of the 12 artists in PLATFORM 2015: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets received the following invitation from curator Claudia La Rocco to contribute a self portrait, of sorts, to the Platform 2015 publication. Here, Jodi Melnick shares her response.

I have danced the brain of many dance artists, including myself.

Many choreographers have written with my body, including myself.

It’s about waiting.

Waiting for the movement, even as you’re making it happen.

Within the waiting, there’s the working, always working.

Discipline.

I go into the studio and move           dance           begin           anew.

I do this almost everyday:

Always looking for the immediate gratification I get from the sensation of moving.

This part of the process I could not, would not, ever want to plan.

I look at the material over and over again, trying to recreate the steps.

I am fascinated, engaged, intrigued … and then caught, annoyed—frustrated by seeing movement as steps when I am really looking for the feeling I had when they first came from and through my body.

This stops me from seeing, from feeling.

I can no longer get inside the dance.

I look again and again until finally I stop seeing the steps as just arms/legs/hands/feet/head. I find again the feelings I associated with the movement, the landscapes I was transported to and how that was what determined my choices and made me able to make decisions while the movement was happening to me.

I want it to be the first time, the first time I am experiencing the movement, the first time the movement has ever made its trip though the body.

This is a beginning.