Three people came to the open studio.
That was better than none.
Worse than a crowd.
One was an old woman from the second floor who said she had followed the sound of feet and stayed because she liked the way I used silence. One was a graduate student who wrote down too much and asked whether the injury had changed my relationship to negative space. The third was a boy no older than sixteen who stood by the door for twenty minutes and left before I could ask his name.
No cameras.
No applause worth naming.
No system trying to turn three people into data.
I danced for forty minutes, stopped when the kitchen timer rang, and bowed because ritual did not need an audience of five hundred to remain useful.
The old woman clapped with her gloves on.
It made almost no sound.
I liked it.
A
