If you have ever googled what does it mean when a cute stranger accidentally winks at you while a seagull is shitting on your sand-caked foot at the beach; 

If you routinely reach your hand elbow-deep into the soft palate of your worst high thoughts; 

If you have ever strung your suspicions about yourself into a candy necklace you suck on till your jaw dissolves; 

If you feel like a puppet turning into a mud of thinking atoms, a stranger to the strings of your own searching, then you must watch Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters. 

When I was nineteen, taking Dance Composition II (the only dance class, or place, where I felt confident), my teacher asked each student to bring in a two-minute-long excerpt of a hero performance: something we wanted to emulate in our next assignment. I knew immediately which two minutes I would bring in, and that they wouldn’t be Odile’s 48 pirouettes from Swan Lake or an Instagram video of splits and spinal waves. My hero was less human.

Dark Matters contains virtuosic dancing that makes you ask which way gravity is acting at every given moment while dramatic lighting accompanies the scenes like music: it searches, shrouds, accuses; oscillating between supporting the choreography and being the main mover onstage.

The 120-minute performance is made up of two acts. The first is a theatrical scene in which a man creates a wooden, toddler-sized puppet (think IKEA) as he sits at a simple table center stage, a warm light hanging over him as he works. Across from him stand four dancers in dark costumes hidden in shadow, holding sturdy wires attached to the puppet’s joints, controlling its movements as it comes to life. Atonal violins and bows scraping over wood play throughout this scene, with big minor chords punctuating moments like the puppet’s first jump and its first attempt at an embrace with its maker. 

The puppet tests the limits of its body in space. It wreaks havoc on the house. It learns violence. The man waits for a moment alone to devise his plot: cut a hatchet from cardboard with scissors. But the puppet walks in at the perfectly worst moment. They scramble for the weapon. The puppet leaps and flies around the stage, shaking pathetically when caught beneath a chair (you just feel for the thing) until it escapes, picks up the scissors, and stabs the man to death. 

The light turns red, the man, betrayed, rests in a twisted shape on the floor, and for a moment you almost see regret and longing spark across the puppet’s blank, wooden face. Then, the puppet lies down next to its maker in a matching pose. The puppet controllers drag the two away, then knock down the set, moving separately and together, offering themselves as bottomless, light-swallowing vessels for metaphor. 

My own internal fights overlaid themselves onto this scene. One of which was between my dancer-self and choreographer-self. The choreographer-self was born much later, flying, whipping around my internal stage, controlled by things I didn't need to know too much about. The dancer-self was shy, steady, skirting the wings. 

I pit them against each other, not knowing why.

From Pite’s dance company, Kidd Pivot’s website: “Comprising roughly 96 percent of the observable universe, dark matter affects the speed, structure, and evolution of galaxies, yet its nature remains a mystery.” At nineteen, 96 would have been a bit too honest of a percentage of myself for me to admit that I didn’t know. But I knew I’d be playing the battle between the puppet and its maker on my laptop in class. “Only you would pick those two minutes of this dance,” my teacher told me, laughing. This comment made me feel unimaginably special. 

There was a classmate of mine who gave me a similar feeling. 

My classmate was all quick-nerved and bone. I thought I saw faint stars in their eyes. I thought we would open each other’s books of fate. A couple weeks prior to this assignment, my classmate told me that they loved everything I made. My queer roommates said this was flirting—thus began my first queer crush. Cue the sexuality crisis.

For my choreography assignment, I walked into the Starbucks on campus and walked out with a backpack full of hot cup sleeves, which I fashioned into retractable arms and legs for a shoebox-bodied puppet. The main critique of my movement study, levied by me and agreed upon by my teacher and classmates, was that I spent so much time theatrically creating this puppet only to do not that much with it before the song (actually, it was an audio clip from The Lobster followed by “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads) ended. My puppet was only a box so it couldn’t destroy me, and I didn’t want to destroy what I had spent hours taping together. But it was okay because I was learning how to use props, and my classmate thought it was funny. 

Soon after, my classmate and I had a pre-date-non-date-hangout-movie-thing. Nothing bad happened in my realm of understanding (though I later had self-blaming, weed-induced theories, like I was being a hardboiled egg and they were trying to remove my shell in one piece—I should have been more raw!), but when we saw each other again in the dance building, it was different. Their face which had recently contained compliments and warm lighting was now blank, unpainted wood. They wouldn’t talk to or look at me. I took this like a choreographer, confused and hurt, yes, but thinking that this was just the next part of the piece: two dancers, one on either side of the stage, both looking to the left. Maybe their eyes would meet again and they’d ballet-walk towards each other. Maybe a third dancer would glide in. Maybe a swarm. 

The second act of Dark Matters is less dance theater and more contemporary ballet. The set is spare, prop-less. The puppet is gone. The dancing is so beautiful it used to make me mad when I identified inextricably with the dancer label. Five dancers, with the occasional addition of a black-attired, puppet-less controller, move together as one frantic thought, overlapping in space like the wires behind the puppet from the first act.

Towards the end, in the penultimate scene, a recording of an excerpt from Voltaire’s 1756 “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” loops as a soloist dances virtuosically, almost as if he’s pulled from omnidirectional wires, his limbs like keys opening giant floating locks. He sets himself out like dominoes, knocks them down, sets them back up, and knocks them down again while a dark-matter-dancer stands silhouetted in the back of the stage, watching. 

This frail construction of quick nerves and bones

Cannot sustain the shock of elements;

This temporary blend of blood and dust

Was put together only to dissolve;

What is the verdict of the vastest mind?

Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.

Man is a stranger to his own research;

He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.

Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,

Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.

But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,

Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,

Our being mingles with the infinite;

Ourselves we never see, or come to know.

This world, this theatre of pride and wrong…

The poem loops for several minutes, no clear end or beginning. The choreography’s blend of muscle and gravity dissolves into the performance-world like warm breath into cold air. Each rest the dancer takes, each pause between the poem’s lines, feels expansive, like looking at the book of fate leaning against a high shelf and not reaching for it.

I related my fraught queer awakening to the puppet coming to life in the beginning of the performance. I felt like there were mysterious actors making some new things known to me, and other new things unknown, like some kind of strange research. I wondered where those classmate feelings came from, if I gave them to myself, how many light-absorbing metaphor vessels were moving between us, and who they belonged to. 

Not that this choreographic contemplation resulted in anything happening between us on a real or metaphorical stage. (Long story short, I hated them a little bit until they graduated.) 

I had thought of my sexuality as a dark force, wooden hands strangling my throat, unwanted, invading, making me desire people who would hurt me, forming itself into questions like: what else didn't I know about myself? Would someone come along and try to rearrange me? Would I have to guess the moves they’d want me to make?

I learned and am still learning to live with, if not trust, the dark matter—not try to run from the murder puppet, but accept that maybe it already got me. Maybe I’ve already had my red-lit scene and now I’m dancing in the ghost light, finding new puppets in the wreckage of the set. 

The choreography and roles of the puppet and puppeteer are performed by different dancers throughout Dark Matters, adding new dimension to the interaction each time. In the first act, the puppet learns to walk by stepping on the puppeteer; in the second act, this movement is translated to a dancer walking across the floor on the hands of the former puppeteer, tracing the scars of the previous duet. It is a slow traveling, full of fear and wonder. 

I never learned how to fix my choreography assignment or what exactly happened with my classmate. But I needed to watch those two minutes, over and over again, if only to see a conflict bubble over into a pair’s symmetrical demise. Within myself, I wanted winners, clarity, to live my life correctly. Silly choreographer (writer), striving for a perfect composition.

All the Dark Matters minutes I didn’t show my class taught me to control my limbs sometimes, try to locate the strings other times, give in to the stranger of my periphery, know the dark matter as a friend-shaped mystery, dance with the light-resisting forces that exist somewhere in the gravity around me, close my eyes and feel them on my skin, see them flash behind my eyelids, let my battles shadow themselves through the art I consume and create.