The Field Is Underground

Moving to the Midwest was deeply challenging for me.

I grew up in the West—on the edge of the continent. In Port Angeles, Washington, we had the Olympic Mountains to the south and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north. The city felt like it was cupped in a hand, cradled between mountain and ocean. Even in college, in Salt Lake City, I was surrounded by terrain—the Wasatch Range to the east, the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. My body grew up knowing how to orient itself by peaks and slopes. Everything was shaped by elevation—the way clouds moved, the kind of air in the morning, the tilt of your own head as you looked toward the horizon.

So when I moved to Chicago, I was disoriented. I kept saying to people—I feel lost... I don’t know which way is north. And Chicagoans (bless them) would respond cheerfully, “Easy! Just remember the lake is east!” And I would laugh because... it’s still flat. You can’t see the lake. You definitely can’t feel it from the corner of Western and Foster (at least I couldn’t at that time). There are no mountains to orient by, no terrain rising to meet you. Just blocks and blocks and blocks and a stretch of sky that seems to go on forever. It felt like too much space and nowhere to land.

But during graduate school, I spent time in a prairie wetland preserve with Jennifer Monson. She was guiding a research process rooted in her iLAND practice—an interdisciplinary investigation into systems of movement, ecology, and place. We studied the prairie not by looking at it, but by being in it—moving with it, tracking it with our bodies and attention. One day, in the middle of talking about plant life, someone mentioned that prairie grasses—big bluestem, switchgrass, Indian grass—have roots that can grow as deep as 16 feet into the earth.

That changed everything for me.

I started to understand that this landscape does have depth. It’s just not above—it’s below. The movement is downward. The intelligence is underground. A prairie sustains itself in the dark, where the root systems are more complex and expansive than the grasses they feed. You can’t see it, but it’s what keeps everything alive.

This whole part of the country started to reframe itself for me: buildings with basements stacked deep into the soil, storm cellars, root vegetables, aquifers. And my family members—all of them—buried here in the Midwest. These are the mountains of this place, and they move into the ground.

So whenever I’m called to talk about the “field” of dance—whenever someone uses that word, the field—I think of the prairie.

This is my field.

above image taken by Shannon Stewart

And it strikes me, because in nearly every other arena of my life, the internal landscape I move through is the Pacific Northwest—wet, forested, and rugged. But when it comes to the field of dance, I think of prairie. I think of its cycles—the burning season, the dormant season, the slow reawakening underground, and the brief but powerful surge of new green. The way something old is allowed to be cleared to make room for what’s next.

The prairie taught me that growth doesn’t always rise. It burrows. It sustains itself in the dark. And the field of dance is like that—rooted, knotted, woven with the residues of what came before and the stirrings of what’s still to come. It moves sideways and downward, and then, sometimes, in an unexpected moment, it breaks through the surface again.