What If There’s Nothing to Get? A Guide to Watching Dance
The Station Workshop Performance, February 1, 2026
Created by Watching the Detectives (Philip Goodridge and Jaimie Tait), directed by Lynn Panting, Part of Untellable Movement Theatre’s Incubator Program.
Last evening, we held an invited viewing for the workshop production of The Station through Untellable Movement Theatre’s Incubator program. Before the performance began, I stood up to offer thanks and a bit of context for the evening.
A conversation about why dance, why now has been a through line of my work for many years, and it felt present in the room last night as well. The audience was a mix of people, some deeply familiar with dance, others not at all, spanning ages, disciplines, and lived experiences. I found myself wanting to offer something simple but important before we began: permission.
People often tell me they feel intimidated by dance. I hear versions of the same question again and again:
What if I don’t get it?
What if I miss the point?
What if I don’t understand what’s happening?
So instead of offering an explanation of the work, I offered this:
You get what you get from it.
Whatever you find is what is meant for you.
What feels magical to me about dance is that it is not prescriptive. Dance does not demand a single interpretation. It does not require you to follow a plot or decode a message in order to participate fully. Instead, it invites the audience into authorship.
In watching dance, you are not being tested, you are being invited.
You are allowed to feel before you understand. You are allowed to be confused, moved, bored, delighted, unsettled, or unexpectedly emotional. You are allowed to connect the work to your own memories, questions, or sensations, even if those connections were never consciously intended by the maker. That is not a failure of understanding; that is the exchange.
Dance asks something different of us than many other forms. It asks us to listen with the body. It asks us to sit with ambiguity and trust that meaning can be felt, even when it can’t be easily articulated.
Last night, I wanted the audience to know that there was no wrong way to watch The Station. There was no singular takeaway they were meant to leave with. The work would meet each person where they were, and each experience would be valid.