Are You Looking Up?

Dance as an antidote to generational malaise.

By Caroline Nieto

Illustration by Em Bennet

I lived on West 113th and Broadway for all of last year. I can tell you where the grout between the pavement is the thickest and where cigarette butts are most likely to gather. I can tell you that rolling a suitcase down my dorm building ramp is louder than a construction site. But until the end of this past spring semester, I couldn’t tell you what the tops of the buildings looked like or, for that matter, the sky in between them. I didn’t consider what it might be like to look up, to experience the street I’ve walked down a million times from an angle that makes me so small.

I became aware of my perpetually downward gaze when I took a modern dance class last semester. My instructor, Caitlin Trainor, led my peers and I through choreography where our heels lifted off the ground and our arms stretched over our heads. Oftentimes, we were told to grab at something in the distance, forming a straight line from our fingers to our toes. All of our momentum faced upward, as if reaching further could make us fly. Integral to this movement was that we looked up, not only with our heads, but with our eyes. It seemed an obvious direction, but each time Trainor reminded the class to align our gaze, I found that my vision was misaligned with the movement of my body. I was quick to self-correct—without looking at that interminable something I was meant to be reaching for, the integrity of the movement fell hollow.

As the semester progressed, we were continually told to correct our eyeline during class. With every reminder, I found that my eyes were on autopilot, looking out to the room without any intention to process what I was seeing. Trainor had mentioned in passing that this was a generational quirk—that with each new batch of students, the sense to sync motion with eyesight became less instinctual. She wrote to me about this pattern, asserting that only fifteen years ago, “Students came into class utterly alive and almost feral in their movement patterns. I was greeted by a room full of hungry eyes, wide open and waiting.” I felt a pang of longing for that unselfconsciousness; I’ve seen how my generation’s base instincts have been tamed by the fear of perception. She continued, “This, of course, was before Covid, before anti-social media, before GPS maps dispossessed us of understanding space beyond ourselves, before kids stopped riding bikes, before arts and recreation withered at the feet of competition, and before collective anxiety and global turmoil overtook the rising generation.”

What she sees now is the physical result of this malaise. Students lag and buffer when pried from the smog of Gen Z aloofness. “Most of the students I encounter cast their eyes downward or inwards by default, leaving their eyes behind when reaching with their limbs,” says Trainor. “The natural coordination of vision and movement evades them. Bodies maneuver, but eyes—and seemingly imaginations—appear disjointed.” Correcting this proclivity is an exercise in repetition, where muscle memory must succumb to new habits. During one class warmup, Trainor told us to reach to the ceiling indefinitely, holding the position until we felt an internal lift, and until she could see that lift within each of us. With my gaze at the front of my mind, I focused with enough precision to pierce through the ceiling and let light crack into the room.

I could feel myself relaxing and recalibrating, shedding the ties of my life on the ground in favor of what might exist beyond me.

Trainor insists that a disconnect between physical expression and the cognition of movement changes the narrative of a sequence of choreography—“a joyful gathering the arms into the shape of a circle and tossed to the sky, as if to scatter stars, becomes a gesture of futility when performed with the eyes downcast.” She claims that facial expression doesn’t purely accessorize the choreography, but composes the essential output of a dancer’s belief in a story, “evidenced by centuries of diverse movement traditions involving codified storytelling through the eyes, such as Bharatanatyam or ballet.” When I dance now, I feel a tie to generations of storytellers, and I wonder if we’ve met in my mind’s eye.

You’re often told not to make eye contact in New York, as if looking at the world makes you vulnerable to it. But as a dancer, it is essential to resist internalizing curiosity. Dance is how we respond to the world when words aren’t enough, and that relationship is fostered when a dancer acknowledges the other interlocutor.

Breaking out of the adolescent haze means paying special attention to vision. Through her instruction, Trainor compels her students to see differently than they do in their day-to-day lives. It is certainly a process. Of her students, Trainor says, “Their eyes stutter at first, stay fixed or dart only briefly upwards, and eventually, finally, look up and out into the spacious world around them.” 

Outside of the rehearsal room, I now find that my eyes stutter too. I catch myself while walking to class or sitting on the train, aware that I have memorized the image of each scuff on my Doc Martens while the world has passed in my periphery. When I make my daily commute to class now, I’m confronted by the palimpsest of each day I’ve traveled. I remember the pair of sneakers dangling from a power line on 112th. I know which flowers in the Amsterdam community garden wilt in the winter and return in the spring. I know the faces of the people who rush off the train with me when I’m late to class on 129th. These patterns of familiarity don’t come without the practiced habit of allowing myself to see and be seen. 

Make uncomfortable eye contact with strangers, look out the window when the train runs above ground, count the stories of the doorman building across the street. Don’t lose the meaning of your movement, even when you aren’t granted choreography. Open your eyes, tilt your head back, and look up.