I love it when dancers don’t dance. I love it when they spend more time on stage talking (at one point Maja says, “I realized I spend more time typing than dancing), or singing, or lying on the ground, or bleating into the microphone, because when they do move – when they resort to dancing – it feels charged and critical. When Maja dances, the way she moves underlines her vulnerability and at the same time her way of moving insists: I am capable. I am strong. I can do this. I have done this. When Maja confesses that her first choreography was not a solo presented some years ago in this same festival, but a dance to a Donna Summer’s song she choreographed on a group of friends on the last day of school when she was a teenager, her demonstration of the dance is suitably dated, and in spite of the fact that it is delivered through her 44-year old, practiced and accomplished body, it soars, and it’s a bit heart breaking. It starts off as the feel-good moment of the piece, but ends manically, her back to the audience, screaming at her invisible troupe of dancers. Encouragement has turned into aggressive cheerleading, an outer display of her inner monologue, and we are propelled back into the world of grown-up frustrations. As dancers know all too well, the body remembers everything. At the end of What If? I feel this is both a blessing and a curse.
— 09.10.2013, Blog City of Women, Shannon Cochrane, On What If by Maja Delak
