For those looking to help US Americans resist, I wrote a piece on “meaningful participation”. It emerged because some have asked me what they can do. It’s based on my years working for America’s largest publishers, my life-long embodied research and my family’s generations of activism. I’ll be starting weekly or bi-weekly sessions on survival embodiment very soon, so if you’d like to join please sign up.
/p/what-you-can-do-to-help-right-now
Sometimes there just aren’t any words. In the Irish harping tradition however, there are laments. They have so often been written for the innocent and brave people we have lost in the long fight against colonialism, racism, slavery and other forms of tyranny. I dedicate this lament to the young mother shot today by ICE, the university students shot yesterday in the genocide in Palestine, the ongoing oppression of Indigenous and Black Americans, the victims of genocide in Sudan and Congo, my Roma and Sinti brothers and sisters lost in unrecognized, ongoing genocides and so many more good people who did not deserve what they are facing and standing up to. This is a space for grief.
Excited to say my chapter proposal on “Naming Betrayal: Romani Knowledge and the Making of American Bohemianism” is accepted for a book with Routledge on “Romani Realities in the Americas.” From “Romany Marie”’s founding of the Greenwich Village Bohemian movement at 20 Christopher to the folk movement there in the 50s and 60s to contemporary “Boho” styles, I’m excited to do something no one has done: tell this story from an American Romani perspective. Thank you to my kumpanija for making this possible! Piroska you are a true Roma and Sinti scholar and inspiration.
Until my landlord at 18 Gay Street (Greenwich Village NYC) died, she gave us gift bags every year for the holidays with Johnny Walker, Veuve Clicquot and luxury candy. She wasn’t a saint, but she did say I love you every time saw her. I miss her dearly. She was proof that you don’t have to be evil to give people a place to stay as a tenant.
For ten years, I imagined sharing good news here — that I completed my #phd, that my future looked bright, that the long years of work led somewhere stable.
Instead, I’m sharing this.
Since 2022, a #tenantsrights #housingcrisis at 18 Gay Street in Greenwich Village unraveled my life. I lost my home, my stability, and eventually my career. I’ve been in court for years. I still don’t know if — or when — I’ll regain my home. I’ve lived with ongoing fear and uncertainty about my safety.
I stayed quiet out of fear of retaliation. Over time, people suggested I was exaggerating or deserved what happened because I stood up for my housing rights. I’m sharing video documentation so you can see the facts for yourself.
I am Romani and Irish-American. Survival isn’t a metaphor for us. Despite everything, I completed my doctorate (accepted without corrections), kept making work, and built what I could as an artist, technologist, and researcher — largely without support.
This year, with no options left, I cashed in my pension and left the United States. I stayed briefly with friends in Ireland, but my post-PhD residency applications were rejected. I’m now seeking legal residency in Spain. There’s no guarantee it will be approved.
The person I love lives there. When my visitor visa ends in early January, I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
I want to be clear: I am safe and receiving care. What I’m carrying is exhaustion, grief, and the long toll of instability after doing everything I was told would lead to security.
I’m sharing this because carrying it alone became unbearable. I still believe in the work I do — and in the possibility of a life that is safe, creative, and shared.
At the darkest point of the year, I give my truth to the night and wait for a new day.
At the #solstice, I wanted to share a simple call and response song I wrote to help you practice one of the most powerful forms of #magic: memory. Please join me and asking each other who we are, and looking each other in the eyes and telling the truth. #spirituality #decolonize #harp
Thank you everyone for bearing with me while I find my voice online. Thank you for reading some pretty difficult stuff I wrote and sitting in it with me. But time moves in circles. It does fall and it can collapse, but it also rises. It plays. It loves. And it wins.
Here’s an old picture with me with the first harp I had. I’d like to share more of my world with you, but I am definitely nervous about it. This world terrifies me, but I don’t want to hide anymore as an artist.
Photography: Eimear Varian-Barry.
It took me 13 years to be able to write this. Dance history has a secret, and we’ve all been moving inside its shadow. I’m done pretending it’s not there. I’m done pretending it’s interesting or legitimate in any way.
So many people helped me see what I couldn’t see alone. I offer this piece in return as a gesture of solidarity, and as evidence of some surprising ways whiteness was built and is maintained through choreography, archive and power.
Part II is out now. /pub/timedancers/p/the-big-lie-in-dance-history?r=6fonbr&utm_medium=ios
Happy St Nicholas Day. I hope you may consider making a donation to a mother-child charity this year. They need your help.
/pub/timedancers/p/the-shoes-we-leave-outside?r=6fonbr&utm_medium=ios
They killed us with genocide.
They enslaved us.
They sterilized us.
They erased our languages.
They took our homes.
They took our culture.
They stole our trades.
They stole our identities.
They colonized our roads.
They measured our blood.
They wrote "gypsy laws" to control us.
They criminalized our embodied knowledge.
They projected all their thievery and exotic fantasies onto us.
And we are still here.
The last eight years of decolonizing my life as a Romani man have been so hard, but the gifts have been far beyond what I imagined.
Thank you to my hometown paper for such a good piece /2025/11/19/ihs-alum-finds-identity-through-dance/z
Please join me in giving a donation to the /donate in honor of @jackieaskew_painting birthday! Jackie thank you for being an angel in my life. You are a champion for community, the environment, art and the liberation of Palestinians from tyranny and genocide. You inspire me every day.
