Sarah Cecilia Bukowski reflects on the premiere of Stacy Matthew Spence’s With in, Around, With out... me, presented as a part of Platform 2026: Secret Gardens. Bukowski places this performance and her experience of it within the larger context of early springtime and its emergence, evidenced by the changing  trees of the St. Mark's Church yard. Prompted by Stacy's performance that calls for deep listening, Sarah asks the trees of the secrets that they hold.

Read Bukowski's essay or listen to her reading of it below. 

The spirit of renewal in early springtime brings about a particular sense of beauty. There is a delicate resilience in the speckled green poking through cold soil, damp with snowmelt. This budding emergence gives way to a burgeoning fullness as the trees shake out their new leaves, perfectly shaped in the crennellated geometries of their points and curves and folds, aglow with that fresh and vibrant chlorophyll that seems to brighten on an overcast day. Today is such a day—a warm windswept afternoon with a sky cast in light tones of grayscale, passing glimpses of filtered blue. I sit in the churchyard, grateful to find this moment of pause to contemplate the green leaves and pink buds, the quality of the air is fresh and warm on my bare skin—a rare and tenuous pleasure for this volatile April. I tune my sensory awareness to this moment, allowing myself to listen from the outside inward—to what my body receives from the world—and from the inside outward—to what I might offer in turn.

In the clearing of dusty earth below the trees whisper softly, high above me, and I think about how my mother could name all these trees by the shape of their leaves, the color of their buds, the lay of the bark on their trunks and branches. I wonder why it’s never occurred to me to question where she gained this knowledge, that she seemingly has always carried with her. An attentive flash and familiar comfort of recognition—I wonder what this knowledge allows her to see and feel? I want to know these trees by name too, not only by their genus and origin—their family name—but perhaps something more intimate. Admiring a tree, rising in the far corner of the yard, surrounded by a circle of stones, I ask, how long has it lived here? What has it borne witness to? What storms has it weathered? Who has it given shelter and protection to? Who planted this tree here? Was it placed here for its beauty or its shade, or planted as a fond remembrance to watch over a loved one’s rest? This tree stands, not mute nor impassive, with its twisting branches of murmuring leaves, never withholding of its beauty nor its shade, full in the presence of the secrets that it holds.

I hold the tree in my mind as I stride across to the church’s portico and into the sanctuary. I hold the tree in my mind as the pre-show chatter subsides and the lights dim and warm. I hold the tree in my mind in the gathering pause as artist Stacy Matthew Spence enters the space— a gentle yet powerful presence. He holds light handfuls of dark slender sticks that he crouches to scatter along the floor in a wide circle. The music of their soft landing is a dry clatter tinkling electric as Spence hums a soft meandering melody. Stepping inside the circle of sticks, his dance ripples from center to periphery in waves, loops, and pendular swings—small gestures tossing out and gathering back in turn. Dodging syncopations swerve a line into a scoop, momentum stops short in a quietly percussive scoot or sudden drop; urgency gathers in the small vocalizations, symmetric clearings, and odd asymmetries of shifting physicalized emotions held and tended, subsumed or released. His rising breath etches time signatures in the silence, the efforts and surrenders of his body picking out a queer tune all its own.

His introspections accumulate until he is called to exit the circle, drawn to a basket that he shoulders to scatter brightly colored flowers in another circle, larger and nearer to us, tracing its circumference with patiently buoyant steps. The muted rustling of falling flowers harmonizes with the emergent presence of four musicians who rise from planted positions in the audience to gather at the corners of the space to summon breath into their instruments: Charlotte Jacobs’s chameleonic voice, Nora Stanley’s birdlike clarinet, Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson’s golden-toned trombone, Raf Vertessen’s panoply of percussion. Within this circle of flowers, tuned to these witnesses and interlocutors, Spence’s kinetic explorations amplify to keel and tumble on long, gravity-bound vectors. He follows and redirects momentum with every part of his lithe, swooping form that finds stillness only in suspension; his eyes cast outward now, so far beyond himself that he is pulled outside this circle, beyond the edge of the stage, through the sanctuary’s threshold and out the front doors.

We rise to follow him outside to the shelter of the stone portico. He trails a smooth chalk line from a long slim stick and settles within a small circle he’s drawn around his wide, sure stance. Here, framed by stone columns and backed by the rustling trees of the churchyard and the bustle of the street just beyond the gate, he anchors an inward energy to build ever outward. With careful attention he traces the world around him, constructing its forms and his place within them through the very acts of seeing and moving. I find myself drawn to observe his movements as much as to follow the trajectories of his gaze. In this brief yet extended moment, he offers us a world to experience alongside him. The musicians gather in the doorway—Stanley now bearing her exuberant saxophone—to open tonal and melodic dialogues across distance: responding to and urging on Spence’s fleet and textured movements in tandem with the chorus of street sounds around us. This vibrant, polyvocal cascade of whispers and wails in bobbing rhythms and slippery tunes shakes alive a shared groove: people, architecture, nature, and city raised in song.

This dance and the song of its gathering have brought me full circle, back into the churchyard, drawn back under the beauty and shade of its trees and their secrets. Spence’s generous articulation of the circle as a space of self is noted in the work’s title—With in, Around, With out… me—opening us to cycles of introspection, observation, and connection that invite the care of close attention. As I leave to wander westward, I carry with me this invitation to listen in as I listen out to the secrets of the worlds with in, around, and with out me. I listen to the trees, the people, and the places that I might come to know as they call to be known, and as only I might know them in the quiet confluences of our secrets.

Sarah Cecilia Bukowski is a New York-based dancer, writer, and labor organizer. Her writing on dance has appeared in Dance Magazine, The Dance Enthusiast, The Brooklyn Rail, Fjord Review, Time Out New York, Danspace Journal, Pepatián’s Write Your Future, AGMAzine, and in collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Trust. Her performing career spans over two decades in ballet, contemporary, modern, and experimental dance projects in the New York and San Francisco Bay Area dance communities. Sarah currently performs with the Metropolitan Opera and serves as a Governor of the Board of the American Guild of Musical Artists.