Decolonize your body with dance history, embodied knowledge, and inherited Romani wisdom. Hosted by Dr. Russell Patrick Brown—PhD historian, Bashaldo Gypsy fortune teller, technologist, and dancer—Gypsy Fires merges deep-dive research with ancestral storytelling to restore your body and soul through movement, memory, and time.
Some dances never die, no matter how many times they’re killed.
When my grandfather’s sister passed away when she was 26 years old, he stopped playing traditional Hungarian Gypsy music. In old family photos from the 1930s with our caravans, my grandpa Leonard and my great aunt Loretta were grinning close together.He played the accordion, and she danced. When she was gone, a part of him died too. As I celebrate my own sister’s birthday—my first dance partner, I cannot fathom such a loss.
My grandfather would go on to adapt his song and music to the audiences of the 1950s, as my mother did in the 70s and 80s and as I must in the 21st century. We lost Loretta’s dance because of hereditary kidney problems many Roma share, and doctors didn’t know to carefully watch it. After her death, the USA moved on to embrace the “folk” and “hippie" movements that grew out of the many ethnocides and genocides of Roma and Sinti, while Gypsy Lore-ists said it was alright and that we didn’t care. I imagine what my grandfather thought seeing all these people dress up like his sister and calling themselves Gypsies in order to claim their own liberation from a system where they already had it all. But today I do not just share loss, I share a story of what can never be taken away and what must always be remade anew.
In 2019, I met Piroska Racz at a reading for a new screenplay created by Lorcan Otway, prominent New York Gypsy, lawyer and former owner of Theatre 80 Under St. Marks. I had been introduced to Lorcan through Cristiana Grigore, founder of the Columbia University Roma People’s Project, who helped me orient myself after I broke down publicly talking about growing up Roma for the first time at the Flemish Consulate on International Roma Day. Walking into that room, I was terrified—I had never been around so many Roma outside my family. But when I met Piroska, I immediately felt kinship.
Since I got to know Piroska in 2019, she has been an inspiration, guide and teacher to me—a phuri daj for many in an international digital kumpanija. As a Sintitza and a Romungri, Piroska carries many of her families traditions, including dance. When I met her, I could feel my great grandmother Anne, and my great aunt Loretta. I knew the dance was never far away.
A Call to the Stage
And now let me say, with great excitement: the Gypsy Dance Theatre welcomes you.
As Gypsy Fires grows and academic book contracts are signed, I accept the limits of what we can do with the written word and a private life of dance. I don’t want to live a life shouting my pain from the shadows, and I am blessed with a subscriber base full of incredibly beautiful and insightful people who already know that’s a sad life to live.
As culture is extracted by machines and humanity is appropriated at scale, we Gypsies know that experience intimately. We’ve discussed this before; when archives burn, the body remains the true library. Theatre answers this with a technology of meeting: bodies in one room, breathing, listening and witnessing movement. As the tides against global fascism turn once again, we return to the theater and remember what we have lost and dream what can be; it is time to dance together.
In founding the Gypsy Dance Theatre, I bring together an international performance ensemble and creative laboratory of Romani and Sinti artists reaching around the globe. Bridging historical research with tradition in live performance, we share our arts on our own terms. This company is not built overnight; it is the product of a lifelong commitment—beginning academic work in 2013—to collect and reclaim our dance history and lineage. It is supported by a network of artists and activists I’ve come to know over the last decade, and we have work to do.
We are moving straight from the archive into the studio for our inaugural workshop production—Kalipen—taking place in Southern Spain in March 2027. You can explore the full vision, read our roadmap, and follow our journey on the new website:
In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be making some exciting announcements about collaborators (I can’t wait to tell you), project milestones and crucial organizational updates—including our non-profit status. Every donation helps us launch: funding the Spain workshop and formalizing operations in both the USA and the European Union, where I am based.
Your subscriptions and donations are the literal lifeline of this work. In the coming months, I’ll be adding special perks for subscribers and Fire Keepers. All of this is only possible because of you.
Thank you for reading, sharing and carrying this fire with us.
Maro chachepen (our truth),
Russell
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The Mirror Is a Weapon
Season 2 · Episode 4
Friday, October 30, 2026 • Duration 32:55
Architecture has always been a weapon of war.
As US President Donald Trump continues a presidential blitz through Washington DC’s landmarks—marked by an obsession for cutting down trees—the sudden and complete destruction of the East Wing of the White House a year ago stands out. The administration argued in court that it needed to tear down the historic structure in order to build a six-floor subterranean bunker and an accompanying 90,000-square foot state ballroom above it for the safety of the nation. An August 31st unsigned order from the US Supreme Court overruled skepticism in the lower courts, while this week videos of the construction and reports that it will be even bigger spark viral discourse online.
Given the president’s extensive presence in the Epstein Files and their many references to the occult, speculation as to the sudden need for and secret purpose of the ballroom runs rampant—and is unnecessary. As historians know, this is what dictators do.
Woodcutting as a method of remaking the landscape with extraction and demoralization is as old as empires themselves, and the seven presidential trees cut down on the grounds of the White House will be used by the administration—including as gifts for visitors. The construction of a UFC boxing ring over the summer drew the ire of white Americans who were ashamed of gladiatorial “white trash culture” splayed out on the South Lawn for the nation’s 250th birthday. The structure of the White House itself was built with slave labor, and the relocation of former President Barack Obama’s portrait from the main gallery combined with the administration’s many attacks on Black and African-American communities summon the plantation-era history of the residence. And of course, the soulless classicism of the ballroom exterior revives Nazi architecture.
Given Trump’s incredibly long history as a global showman—from casinos, beauty pageants, reality TV and over a decade of non-stop political rallies, it’s clear he learned what the rich and powerful do to control the public and their perception of state power. His use of the in particular demonstrates command of physical presence and the somatic compliance of the human body: getting his enemies to feelwhat he wants them to so they do what he wants them to do. But the interior of the ballroom is where architecture truly becomes choreography.
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When Civilization Stops
Season 2 · Episode 3
Friday, October 16, 2026 • Duration 15:10
“We’ve outlived every empire that we’ve ever encountered,” Rubito reminded me.
“You carry too much. Your job is to keep going,” Piroska said.
November 2024
For me, being a Bashaldo Gypsy is to continue a living repertoire amidst those whose memory can be rewritten overnight through volatile state archives of borders, labels and laws. It is walking the road with people who might forget where they’re going, and won’t trust you when you tell them that there’s more beyond the horizon. It is knowing that you are a part of a decentralized civilization that continues when others stop. It is traveling in search of those who remember what it is to be civilized.
The Roma and Sinti have been in the Americas since enslavement on Columbus’s third voyage, which is really a horrific start. As the story goes, they escaped to live with Native Americans. And seeing as my Shoshone Paiute friend told me to flee the USA last year for my own safety, not much has changed.
Societal collapse is tiresome, especially for those who have waited their whole lives for society to start. There’s lots of people talking about what all this means from privileged positions, and I hope they’re helping someone. I don’t need to go to ancient Rome to imagine catastrophe, I’ve watched worlds I love so dearly disappear every year of my life while few around me seem to notice what’s gone missing. We carry civilization in our eyes, and I hate seeing those lights go out.
Tradition is a language written in time, legible only to those who keep it going. The classicists lied to us when they held up Aeneas as the pinnacle of a country’s continuity, carrying the torch of Troy to Rome. He didn’t carry civilization, he spread pathology. Empires are where psychosis goes to dine on other people’s hopes and dreams with stolen tools of time called “progress”. Heritage is how we weave our humanity through the seasons. We gather fruits, sorrows and warmth in its cloth, hoping the next generation doesn’t throw it away for a polyester scarf.
When we think of what continues, we ask how life replicates or otherwise remembers itself. How do we know how to keep being us? This is the function of civilization: to carry knowledge forward, not to secure profits for predators. As a fortune teller in this matrix, my role is to see through the illusions that distort memory and help you remember where you’re going. That’s it.
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A Jig at the End of the World
Season 2 · Episode 2
Friday, October 2, 2026 • Duration 20:19
To be a Bashaldo Gypsy is to remember fallen civilizations. It is to carry language, music, stories, technology and dance that have witnessed the ruin of empires across continents, oceans and ages. It is to carry a repertoire that continues life amidst settled people whose memories can easily be turned hostile overnight through the influence of volatile state archives of borders, labels and laws. It is to know that loving a country won’t save you from being kicked out of it, but when they do you travel in the steps of those who walked this before. You move in the steps of dances like the jig.
Dear Traveler, there is much that has been forgotten. There are entire worlds few recall, and in Gypsy Fires I’d like to help you remember them as we dive further into history, tradition and what it means for us today.
I don’t offer my memory because you need to be like me and do what I do, or because the past was a better place. I open my dance because I have found among many other Roma and Sinti, we tend to remember who did what, where they did it, how and why they started moving that way. This certainly covers dance, but also how people comport themselves in their communities. What do they value and how does their language, business and pleasure reflect that? We remember what used to matter, and that’s helpful when chachepen goes into hiding and xoxanipen stalks the land: when lying becomes culture, the nation and the self.
I am biased, but I think Romani and Sinti dance is very good at getting through disaster, especially that which is caused by greed and deceit. Growing up, calamity was already assumed to have arrived, and our eyes were always open. So there wasn’t even a sense that “oh, crisis is here we need to act” or a sense that anyone was going to care about our struggles, although I am stubborn and keep believing that people will.
Whether times were good or bad we were always working through what my mother called, “Plan A, B, C and D.” This is also the shape of many jig, hornpipe and reel dances.
As the borders of the world as we have known it shift to reveal what was always there and more people fall through the system’s cracks they thought they were safe from, dance was made especially for those who don’t have anything to hold onto. It’s not made when we steal another’s dance or covet things that aren’t good for us. It is made in remembering who you really are as life itself.
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Prayer for a Young Man
Season 1 · Episode 10
Friday, August 21, 2026 • Duration 08:30
A Young Man Goes in Circles
May you find strength in every gentle touch.
May you find your voice in listening to those who have not been heard.
May you find wisdom in forgiveness.
May you find your heart in the boy inside you.
May you find the man in all that you are to become.
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Dear young folk,
I wrote this prayer for a young man I knew who was lost, and all the more so because the same problems in his life just kept happening again, again and then again. He had elders in his life, but the gap of lived experience was just too damn wide for the wisdom to flow into his life where it needed to, and the elders were too far away to see what was happening to his world around him. And somehow, it was all his fault—or so it seemed to him. That young twenty-something was me.
I know you don’t know me, but I don’t need to be your grandfather to tell you that I care about you, your hopes and dreams, your future, and—one day—the young people you will help. I wish I had more decades (I’m 43) before writing something like this to you, but things are changing quickly now. The threads that have traditionally connected us together through the generations are no longer just cut, they’re being forgotten.
I’m a lifelong carrier of what many call folk culture and a dance PhD in the embodied history of us—that is I study how being human has changed for the last 500 years. In my work and artistic life I am seeing really important things go missing from our lives every day at a faster pace.
People used to sing when they worked with the land. They used to dance with their toddlers. They used to hold each other and sing love songs in public. They used to gather at night around the kitchen table or fire and tell each other stories. Men and women alike had visions from beyond while doing household chores. Things may not have been perfect, but we had this—and it was It may not seem so important right now, but as you get older and need some guidance, folklore is that compass, wheel and watch to help you down the road of your life.
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Taking Back What Was Stolen
Season 1 · Episode 7
Friday, July 24, 2026 • Duration 07:49
It is never too late to dance with your father while listening to the songs of your mother.
Who is allowed to fall? What is the repertoire of the risen? What secrets are hidden in the silent, violent archive? What vampires guard their vaults, and when we meet them, will we know the truth?
What, then, is the courage of the dancer, and what is the dance?
For the last year, I have been returning to these questions in writing and in rhythm, and I invite you to do the same. As this project has moved from our community in Ennistymon, County Clare, to Spain—with my family, my digital mahala, and alongside activists and resistance movements around the world—my answer to what my dance is (and what I can teach others) has become crystal clear.
Now is always a good time to sway to a lullaby, have your toes and fingers counted in song and bounce across the ballroom floor in the arms of someone who is half your whole world. If you bear with me on this, you have permission to do it—even if it never happened for you as a child. In fact, we need you to do it. And then keep doing it through time.
When I first heard academic circles speak of decolonization, I wasn’t sure if I was listening to theory or practice. That is: are we actually going to do something about this, or are we just talking about it? If things were taken that shouldn’t have been, who is accountable to give them back, and to whom? As so many are observing online, what does any of this mean when the colonization never actually stopped?
I doubt the ability of the academy and most NGOs to do anything other than use “decolonization” as just another tool for colonization. Like many children in marginalized families, my parents helped me understand from an early age that things were deeply wrong in our society. They taught us that we need to hold onto our humanity because no one is coming to save us. It seemed to me that the only thing any of us can truly do is hold ourselves accountable—and, if possible, hold each other together.
When I began my PhD in a small, rebellious program in Ireland, I received confirmation of this. While I may not be able to stop colonization as a whole, I rigorously examine my own life within it with humility. I can see what’s really there once the accounting is done. I can let myself be stripped bare to the beams and rafters, and then . I can study the choreography of our civilization to see which traditions I will, in sober truth, carry forward—and notice the impact they have upon others.
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Male Loneliness
Season 1 · Episode 6
Friday, July 17, 2026 • Duration 13:08
Despite building so many roads, drawing powerful maps and driving much of the transportation, men are lost.
Endless guidance on the importance of “strategy”(Seth Godin), the brilliance to “start with WHY” (Simon Sinek) and the promise of fulfillment if men just “build things that matter” (Simon Squibb) isn’t helping:
Fires are burning in Wales, the Arctic winter has risen to 20C (68F), 150 Pacific Gray Whales have washed up dead on the American Pacific shore this year and Banda, India saw temperatures of 48C (118F) last month. As we turn up the heat from our consumption of fossil fuels to enable a world where private jets can be labeled green investment, endless compute for AI ambitions voided all climate agreements and endless consumption rips up and poisons the earth, we are returning to an era of the dinosaurs where the middle of the planet was uninhabitable, sea levels were 170 meters higher than today and temperate rainforests could grow in Antarctica—but now it’s a lot more toxic.
Where’s the TED Talk calling out all this absolute b******t?
We have been scammed by lust dressed up as virtue. The familiar faces of journalists and truthsayers risking their lives for a better world have been replaced by obscenely wealthy people draped in calm professionalism, podcasting headphones and frameworks that promise prosperity. As the world burns, influencers on Substack, social media and the press still promise “abundance” (Ezra Klein). Abundance of what?
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How to Colonize a Field in 2026: A Case Study in Academic Extraction
Season 1 · Episode 4
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 • Duration 32:54
This piece exposes the ongoing exploitation, extraction and erasure of Roma and Sinti people in the Americas. It is a direct response to the publication of The Romani Atlantic by Cambridge University Press—a project that appropriates gadje (non-Roma) narratives and frameworks to re-colonize our culture, our scholarship and our lives.
For generations, the gadje world has accused the Roma of kidnapping children, pickpocketing wealth, stealing culture. But as the anti-fascist maxim states: every accusation is a confession.
My name is Russell Patrick Brown. I am a Bashaldo Gypsy whose family’s history reaches through the roads of America for generations. My thesis for my master’s degree at NYU focused on dance in 18th-century Atlantic history (2013-2015), and I recently had my PhD at the University of Limerick accepted without corrections. In it, I discovered the hidden, traumatic history of impact-driven dance in the Atlantic world—more commonly known as percussive dance. I have published on early modern maritime dance and the history of harm in wooden shoes. Yet, I am writing to you from exile. I have lost my home of 15 years, I had to flee my life and career as a software engineering manager for America’s largest publisher due to the corruption I am confronting in this case, I do not know when I will see my family again, and I have been pushed out of the very academic territory I helped map.
While I was fighting a brutal housing crisis in court to save my West Village apartment—a historic hub of Romani memory once home to Romany Marie’s cafe at 20 Christopher Street—institutional colleagues were finalizing a “field-defining” book. Look closely at the cover of The Romani Atlantic, and then look at the map hanging on the wall of my apartment (since 2014) in this viral Gothamist feature about my pending eviction from my rent-stabilized apartment as the last legal tenant in 14-18 Gay Street in the Greenwich Village of New York City.
Whether intentional or symbolic, the extraction is complete. The institution took the map from my wall, the archival labor from my hands, and left the living Romani scholar in exile. They write about the “Atlantic world” as an abstract playground of text, while active colonization displaces the physical, living bodies of the people they study. Ironically, it is my own Atlantic world of allies—and fellow Roma and non-Roma across Europe, Africa and South America—offering literal and intellectual refuge to me in this crisis.
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From Corsets to Six-Pack Abs: The Empire Is Still Shaping Your Body
Season 1 · Episode 3
Tuesday, June 16, 2026 • Duration 11:20
Dear Traveler,
Tell me of the roads you have taken. Sing for me the songs that you heard over fields along the way. Dance before the fire the journey that on ly you can take. Then we shall dream about where we will go next.
When I was born in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, off Lake Erie, my parents took me home to a house they had built almost entirely by hand, with the help of our family of course. The reasoning wasn’t just the American dream of owning land, something essential to survive in this settler state—especially if you are a traveler. My mother did not want to live or raise children in a house full of ghosts. In our family we didn’t necessarily have any problems with spirits hanging around, its just that it’s less work if you don’t have to clean up after them or tell them what to do all the time.
Our town of Independence was one of the original five by five mile townships created by the Western Reserve after the Treaty of Fort Industry forced native peoples from the land in 1805. On the 4th of July we celebrated the birth of our nation in the city’s public park, but in the forest that connected to our backyard, I listened to what the land had to say. Through waterfalls, pine groves, forest spirits and rusty abandoned farm tools, my sister and I received another history that told of the violence that really happened.
I would come to understand more about how our bodies hold the maps of the land better than any land survey when my mother and father would take us on the road. I would come to know the excitement of the old river towns of the Ohio Valley before we would go on to see the blue grasses of Kentucky, the smoky mountains of Tennessee and the red hills of Georgia. I learned to appreciate the culture of the local people, and to respect and learn from the native people where it was welcome. It was an extraordinary education that taught me that people may have borders, names and identities, but that’s not who they really are. To understand that, you need to watch how they move.
When the Romans set about to conquer their known world, they needed a way to understand the land that was less messy and more efficient for their goals than how humans normally understand it. They didn’t want to know much about who lived there, how they felt about the oldest tree in town or why funerals went this way and not that way through the village. They needed a : a measured layout of the terrain that assessed all the valuable things within it. It wasn’t just Roman engineering and their military that created occupation within the Celts and other native peoples of Europe, North Africa and Southwest Asia, it was a calculated, unnatural understanding of the world that made it all possible. It was an evolution in our de-evolution as a species.
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There Is Only One Field Ready for an AI Age
Tuesday, June 9, 2026 • Duration 11:18
Welcome back to Gypsy Fires. This letter is about dance and why it knows more about AI than Stanford or MIT.
Dear Traveler,
Meet me tonight under the Blue Whale. There we will turn in to rest after we danced around the world—spinning through the seas, swaying over ice with the Arctic muskox, flying through the African Savannah and exploding through the cosmos. We will build machines to keep our ideas moving, and maybe you’ll join my kumpaniaas we train our own robots to predict the storms of Jupiter. We will sleep under a sea monster and dream together of a future where technology does not help extract from nature, but helps us understand it and live as part of it.
The year is 2019, and we are joining data scientists, software engineers, product designers and NASA scientists organized into teams for a weekend in the American Natural History Museum in New York City. Outside we can all feel the fabric of the world as we know it being steadily pulled apart, but together we are stitching creative ambition together so that we can better understand our solar system—our tribe of planets hovering around a star. On my team, we’re using the patient power of statistics to train a machine on how to read NASA’s pictures of the storms of Jupiter so that we might be able to ask how they form and why.
By the morning and after many bags of potato chips, cups of coffee and cavorting through the empty halls of the museum alone, our baby “AI” is able to make small predictions on what a Jovian tempest will do next. Through open source technology—the unpaid backbone of computer technology and internet crafted and cared for by gentle, brilliant souls—and collaborations with space scientists and the patented algorithms of other highly intelligent hardworking people, we worked together alongside other teams to show how computers can do more than make people money. They can solve a few of the most ancient questions we’ve been able to find as a species.
Now it is 2026, and this egalitarian vision of Machine Learning, what people are now calling Artificial Intelligence, has gone missing. Someone took it away in the middle of night while we were sleeping around our fires, and we are now awaking to a forest that has disappeared. An ocean turned to acid. Our young mothers and fathers told to go home because there is no work today, and they are told there never will be work or payment for it again. Some do not even make it home, and in an increasing number of cases we don’t know what happened to them. In the distance we see a massive building spewing smoke into the air and hear the steady roar of machines set to work on tasks that no one seems able to make any sense of.
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When French President Emmanuel Macron gave President Trump a private tour of the former palace of the French empire earlier this year, Trump admired that, “Versailles isn’t gold leaf, Versailles is the real deal.” A sitting US President openly admiring with jealousy the work of one history’s greatest villains drew outrage as well as laughter—Versailles makes extensive use of gold leafing. But Trump’s interest in one room in particular, the legendary Hall of Mirrors, is no laughing matter. It’s key to understanding his signature brand of embodied warfare.
In 2005, Trump inaugurated a 20,000-square foot ballroom that was added to his landmarked resort, Mar-a-Lago, with a wedding to his third wife, First Lady Melania. Pictured in the resort’s Instagram account, it’s clear the space was directly inspired by the Hall of Mirrors. This design is the basis for the interior of the new White House ballroom, which will continue the Versailles-style gilding that now adorns much of the Oval Office of the White house. The gigantic ballroom, however, will have some developments that were not available to Louis XIV.
An unprecedented collaboration with military defense contractors will craft six-inch thick, floor-to-ceiling windows designed to withstand missile bombardment. At three stories high, the ceiling swallows an audience of any size. Leaked videos from Trump’s donor parties at Mar-a-Lago show how wealth and decadence will organize hierarchy and consumption in lavish galas while the world watches on social media amidst famine and climate devastation. And reflecting in mirrors around the room will be the watchful eye of Donald Trump, ruling it all behind more military-grade glass from a second floor Presidential Viewing Gallery.
The ballroom will be the beating heart of a new empire. Decades of social engineering by multiple global intelligence agencies and private corporations through defunded education, colonial wars, digital media, tech disruption, manipulated elections, artificial intelligence and a muzzled press reaches its theatrical climax. This is where, like the legendary Hall of Mirrors, Trump assembles his court of billionaires to complete the ritual.
This has all been done before, and dance hides a secret of how this keeps happening. The trick to getting the public’s consent lies in the subtleties of one particular object, carefully adapted across the centuries, that always allows the king to return: the looking glass.
Magic in the Mirror
Completed in 1684 under Louis XIV of France, the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at Versailles became the ceremonial spine of the palace and a stage where imperial Europe would learn to see its own body.
Designed to replace an open-air terrace, the hall featured seventeen massive arched windows facing the gardens, mirrored by matching arched structures composed of over 350 individual reflective panels. During the day, the mirrors doubled and scattered ample sunlight; at night, hundreds of candles in crystal chandeliers multiplied into thousands of reflections, reinforcing Louis XIV’s persona as the radiant Sun King.
Beauty aside, the mirrors would have shocked any visitor. Looking glasses were normally produced in small sizes, limited quantities and at enormous cost. To fill such a large room with so many mirrors required not only state-sponsored industrial espionage and theft from Venice—where mirror-making techniques were highly guarded—but an immense fortune to reproduce them at unprecedented scale. The show of wealth, power and desire would have been absolutely intoxicating for anyone looking to escape the rampant poverty of the peasantry and the brutality of colonized life.
The court was governed by actual dance called “ballet”: a ruthless choreography of proximity and gaze, where everyone’s spatial relation to the king was hyper-visible, ensuring no one could escape notice. It took earlier court culture of Venice and Florence to new heights. Dance scholars reverently return to the antics of Versailles and observe the hall’s purpose:
* To reflect the king infinitely.
* To make his body appear opulent and omnipresent.
* To collapse the distance between image and power.
* To turn divine right into visual fact.
The cleverness of the mirrors was not merely the bedazzlement of a world with a lot less sparkle than what we are accustomed to today. It wasn’t the rare thrill of seeing your whole body reflected, either. The blend of performance, absolute monarchy, optical technology and sacred ritual created something far more insidious: when you looked into the glass, you didn't see yourself—you saw yourself only in relation to the king. Self, surveillance, desire and a show of hereditary divinity entangled and cast a spell that was everywhere in the room. But to be a true weapon of war, this magic would need to find a way to radiate around the world.
As I prepare to send this, I just received a photograph of my landlord—the man who destroyed my home and life—having a lavish wedding in Paris in this very ballroom.
With the help of corrupt city and state officials, my landlord slowly destroyed my rent-stabilized, landmarked apartment building on Gay Street in the Greenwich Village of Manhattan, and with it all the African-American, Romani and LGBTQ+ history there. I’ve been documenting my ongoing legal battle on this timeline project.
Your support through a subscription allows me not only to continue my research, but to meet the financial hardship caused by my resistance to Hall of Mirrors corruption and greed.
If you cannot afford a subscription, refer three friends and you can receive a month free.
If you’d just like to buy me a coffee, my harp case is always out while I’m busking.
Remembering the Reflection
Before the Gallery of Glass wove its spell, Louis XIV’s court ballets were already exercising their political technology.
Choreographers like Pierre Beauchamp and composers like Lully built spectacles that staged the king as the axis of order. The most famous of these was the Ballet Royal de la Nuit (1653), where Louis made his teenaged debut towards the end as “The Sun King”. It was a twelve-hour ritual that incorporated “exotic” elements like foreign feathers, so-called “Amerindian” motifs, and caricatured depictions of African bodies. Most of these had been looted from people France colonized, enslaved or otherwise suppressed.
They didn’t just steal adornments and sacred objects, but cosmologies: practices that honored land, ancestors and future generations—forms of embodied care that sustained whole communities. Under Louis XIV, these became props in a ritual of absolutism. The king consumed the beauty of other people to elevate himself, replacing the tenderness and relational knowledge at the heart of these cultures with a choreography of domination. Grotesque spectacle and colonial violence were two steps in the same dance.
For the empire to succeed in its expansion, however, it would need to replicate this engorging process far beyond Versailles. The costly wars of the Spanish empire showed that coercion, deceit and religious conversion were not enough to colonize local subjects. Indigenous ways and the songs, dances and stories of elders endured. This was perhaps when the first global consumer craze would work its charm; it would convince their enemies to colonize themselves.
As French colonial cities of Algiers, New Orleans, Port-au-Prince and Quebec City grew, so did the import of French tastes, from cuisine to textiles to design to dance entertainments. France was not just invading with its economy and military, it was offering a cosmopolitan way of life as seductive as the rumored glories of Paris and Versailles. Given the alternative of war and possible annihilation, who among the aspirational could resist?
For those who refused, there was another plan. Teaching the world to be fashionable relied upon a mnemonic sleight-of-hand: moving culture from oral tradition to print. The Roma and Sinti brought block-print to southern Germany decades before a banker paid Gutenberg to craft a movable type printing press. After Gutenberg debuted his new bible, the banker would then sue him in order to steal the technology in order to print highly-profitable indulgences for the church. A century later the powerful Venetian courts leveraged this tool in order to proselytize their courtly dancing through “dance manuals”, which contained a new written language designed to teach others how to move and look like the 1%.
In part one of this series on ballet, From Corsets to Six-Pack Abs, we explored how empires, from ancient Rome to today’s corporate tech empires, don’t just map land. They create somatic cartographies designed to seduce the public into a promenade of power that feels irresistible, inevitable and irreversible. By the time Louis XIV created his own private guild of dancing masters in Paris, they were mass-producing maps of movement that were portable mirrors that allowed anyone to pay a dancing master to read one of these manuals and teach them how to join this great game of colonialism. Dancing masters and manuals would spread historical propaganda and the king’s dance while adapting it for local tastes, with the added benefit of co-opting local and itinerant Roma, Sinti, Traveler and maritime dance. And the plan worked perfectly.
From young ladies looking to make their debut at a cotillion to gentlemen looking for suitable partners and trade deals on the dance floor, there was no escaping fluency in the positions of balletic feet, the restriction of the torso and the refinement of flowing aristocratic arms, and all the crinolines, corsets and heels that went with them. In time, the replication of French deportments and fashions was so disruptive that Anglican Bishop George Berkeley asked in his 1735 publication, The Querist, “whether we are not undone by fashions made for other people” when he saw the craze sweeping Ireland. All over the world the spell was working; the longer colonial subjects gazed into their respective looking glasses to craft the right image, the further away they became from their inheritances of culture and generational knowledge.
As the British empire grew, the occult magic of the Italian and French courts and their cultural circulation in print was adapted in profound and devastating new ways through the English language, its laws, capitalist corporations and entertainments. The grotesqueness of the court grew as generations of artists, aristocrats, politicians, corporations and legal professionals grew this machinery to order every facet of life from how streets were built, music was played, children were raised and on and on. They imbued this machinery with meaning that was never there. Proximity to power substituted more and more of the truth.
A backlash did come in “Age of Revolutions” at the turn of the 17th and 18th century, and with it the demise of the Ancien Regime and its extravagance. But the magicians behind the mirror are patient, even when the mirror is hidden. As more of the world lost itself in their looking glasses while listening to songs of freedom, the spell evolved.
When White People Fly
In December 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte sent an army of over 40,000 elite troops led by General Charles Leclerc to Haiti to disarm their independence, remove Toussaint Louverture from power and re-establish slavery. The Haitian revolution began August 21, 1791, and two decades later a Europe in love with Napoleon allowed him to do what he wanted—including tricking Toussaint into negotiations and then kidnapping him. France and other empires were still lost in their mirrors of supposed liberation, right as they decided that freedom for some could actually mean slavery for others.
Haiti would defeat Napoleon’s army, but would be stranded by a global economic embargo. When French warships arrived in 1825, Haiti was coerced into a century of multi-billion-dollar reparations to white slaveholders who lost their “property”. How could French and American whites not in the ascendancy allow slavery after winning revolutions to overthrow tyranny? How could they not see that Napoleon’s desire to restore slavery was part of their own subjugation?
One part of the answer is how many people were not aware that they were lost in a magic show. Ludwig von Beethoven, a master of the Romantic-era concert hall, had dedicated his third symphony, Eroica (Heroic), to Napoleon—only to tear it up when Napoleon declared himself emperor of Europe. Beethoven was part of a culture that was gradually being groomed by the theater to be entertained by the suffering of Black people. The bright light of the mirror and its rapidly replicating blindness taught white people whose skin-tone was good, pure and holy, and whose could be exploited. And the 19th century theater was ready to take this fallacy to new highs and lows.
On 12 March 1832 the first version of La Sylphide premiered at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra. With music by Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer, choreographer Filippo Taglioni would have his daughter Marie dance en pointe—in special shoes with support for dance on the tips of the toes. The shortness of her skirts was deemed the scandal here, and her transformation of toe-walking into a flowing dance was genuinely a surprise for audiences. It was the positioning of the production’s villain, the fortune teller “Madge”, that would be the real crime.
A clear dog whistle for Romani and Sinti people, Madge’s vengeful dark magic and grotesque pantomime were designed to make a community that had already faced slavery and genocide into the ultimate evil of the story. Meanwhile, a white gadjo is portrayed as the victim while a white gadji covers herself in white and pretends to fly about the stage while she damages her feet prancing around on the tips of her toes. The optical illusion was complete; the long memory of Roma and Sinti carrying beautiful, complex dance long before European contact was now transferred to white Europeans, who had little to no memory or record of dance pre-Gypsy contact.
And this juxtaposition of dark evil with high whiteness had reinforcement. A new global popular culture out of the new country of the United States of America was taking the world by storm: blackface minstrelsy. As Du Bois would observe a century later in Phylon in 1940, blackfacing has a long, violent and harmful history. In the 19th century as chattel slavery grew more violent in the USA, the practice of white performers painting their face black and pretending to be Africans—from the wealthy to the enslaved—grew in the shadow of the ever-bigger and more cruel mirror of whiteness.
While an ethereal, fictional standard of white purity soared upward in pale muslin and gaslight, grounded movement traditions and non-Western expressions were stripped of their agency and demonized. Figures like Madge and the minstrel were denied true dance movement and portrayed as wicked, facile or false. Blackface minstrel troupes toured the world alongside ballet’s new form of flying whiteness, and the curses of white supremacy and racism would write the rules of the mirror for the next two centuries.
They extracted rhythms, aesthetics, rituals and meanings while looting African diasporic dances, Romani dances, Indigenous dances, rural improvisation, working-class bodies and embodied knowledge outside the court. The were called “noise”, “vernacular” or “low”. Dances were weaponized against their own communities. According to imperial design, this brittle, dangerous glass coerced bodies with violent social/self-policing, ensuring continued reflection of the light of the sovereign. This decadence was never noble; it was brittle, wasteful and terrified of its own emptiness. It always needed more victims to stare into its mirror.
Others have observed the inherent racism in ballet, and yet it endures. When considering the occult practice behind how we perceive ourselves in the mirror in the dance studio and in the bathroom, there is a moment to ask how to look away or shatter the mirror altogether. But without understanding how it mutates generation to generation, we risk its return even when the king is dead.
This architectural intimidation did not stay locked within the gilded corridors of the French court; it proved to be a scalable blueprint for bodily management and surveillance. This of what we consider worthy of reflection is still very much in motion today, determining who gets what and whose lives matter.
There are people whose entire careers are designed to keep this archive alive and dominant in dance education, research and institutions. Surviving livrets and dance manuals—including those housed in elite collections like the Rothschild holdings at Waddesdon, England—maintain reflections of power that keep recolonizing dance and the moving body in the arts, academia and popular culture. They remain at the heart of “rigorous” scholarship in dance history and who counts in auditions as a “dancer”.
As the world reckons with a new ballroom, the Hall of Mirrors shows it was always there. The entire international order today began its scripting a century ago in the Hall of Mirrors in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and colonial expansion today splatters more blood upon a hungry looking glass.
And here is the truth audiences and dancers alike feel instinctively: that first reaction people have to ballet’s rigidity—that sudden, intuitive “what is this?”—is not ignorance. It’s recognition of a spell that tries to make hollowness appear whole, noble and desirable—white paint over where a beating heart should be. It’s a masquerade of power pretending to have soul. Whiteness’s compulsive search for what it can never hold—power—is the real ritual of horror in the Hall of Mirrors.
Dance as a culture and a field study inherited—whether we want it or not—this authority rather than its truth. It has given a confidence to choreographers, dancers and culture makers not rooted in profound human experience, rigorous generational knowledge or greater insight, but in access to old gatekeeping networks that once controlled access to manuscripts, guild knowledge and royal favor. For all our talk of “the body” today, worlds of art and entertainment will not confess that they do not mean your body. They mean the body that the king’s choreographic architects and their progeny wanted you to worship. And this modern Hall of Mirrors working across social media like buttons, grant review panels and standing ovations mistakes reflection for depth and domination as understanding.
The Gypsy Mirror
I was never a very good club kid.
I’ve danced and played the harp for Manfred Thierry Mugler, Suzanne Bartsch, Joey Arias, Rihanna, Mary Wilson and other famous showpeople, but I never was very good at reflecting back more than temporary intrigue. Aeon, on the other hand, was pure magic, carried the wisdom of Vogue/Ballroom House and knew exactly where to make them look—and what to want. I remain in awe, but this was not my mirror.
Before that I was disillusioned with New York City dance classes, which taught me the dance world’s authority: getting the right line, the right illusion and the right version of yourself. It is a strange fate of a dancer to stare at your own body while you’re in the middle of torturing it for hours, months, years. But this is the price of survival in the dance world, from childhood studios to Broadway rehearsal rooms. It all felt so superficial.
I then tried contemporary and somatic dance spaces, where the toxicity of mirror culture is understood. Here I was told to “get rid of all technique” and discover my “authentic movement.” I found in these pajama-clad, sterile studios that what I was asked to leave at the door wasn’t just my shoes, but the pulse of my parents steps and the heartbeat of my ancestors that kept me going through impossible circumstances. All I was left with was a “half-breed” face and white passing body. Meanwhile, all the power and privilege of white gadje dancers and their performances of vulnerability were not only allowed, but rewarded with reviews of profundity and groundbreaking acclaim.
As we ask what to do with the mirror, it’s important to recognize that the task of turning away from the mirror isn’t the same for every dancer. It only feels liberating to those who never needed the mirror to figure out how belong in the first place. White dancers can treat the mirror as optional because the state mirrors them everywhere else; their bodies are already legible and their journeys understood. For non-white dancers, the mirror is not a tool to be easily discarded but a demand. The colonial gaze polices the body whether the glass is present or not. Covering mirrors in a studio does not dismantle the structure; it simply hides it. This is why somatics and embodiment without history is just another soft, kind mirror that evades the realities of colonization and racialized embodiment.
The legacy of the mirror is that in most dance spaces, inter-subjective human connection is severed. You do not look across the room to connect with the humanity or the face of your partner; they becomes a mere prop or obstacle, while your relationship to yourself is flattened into an anxious compliance with an institutional, self-surveilling standard. Rather than reclaiming the living, breathing memory of your own movement, experience collapses into an ancient ghost in the reflection called narcissism. This is where some embodied engineering comes in handy: once the code in the choreography is visible, it’s possible to choreograph the code.
The mid-20th century mass-produced “Gypsy mirrors”, often produced of etched glass that were based on hand-painted mirrors Roma and Sinti often decorated and sold in markets. It is a gentle art to adorn the edges of a mirror with creativity so that it’s there gently holding your face when you look at yourself. Perhaps throwing something back into the mirror breaks the curse.
For me, the truest reflection was never glass. It was my community—shared, uncertain, alive. When the studio mirror tries to define me, my family, my Roma and Sinti elders interrupt it. Whether dancing in kitchens with Irish friends, experiencing the rhythm of the mahala, or posing in the club, belonging creates a mirror, not the other way around. But what about when we’re alone?
There is something in Gypsy Fires that I refer to as timedancing: a technology of remembering who we are in the past, present and future. If you’re looking to find your dance, it is fun to re-imagine your life with tutus and castanets. This space is for that smaller group who have a deeper yearning—who want to remember before the mirror was cast. We do this through bringing awareness to what we’ve always been doing, timespinning old steps and gestures of those that have gone before and using them to craft a choreo-destiny beyond the designs of those who seek to control you. This is what “tradition” can do.
Breaking free from somatic cages that control how we sit, stand, sleep, have sex and child-rear begins the moment we witness without filters the violence and vanity of the glass, shatter the illusion of the archive and remember how to move on our own terms. The looking glass in itself is not the problem, but how it has been deployed by the ritually-fluent and affluent across the centuries documents subtle, tidal shifts in how we view ourselves. And if we are to understand the most common mirror you gaze into—the screen looking back at you right now, the self-inquiry is urgent.
Whether we will ever truly escape the Hall of Mirrors is yet to be revealed, perhaps the best we can do is remember that we’re in it. But breaking the spell will depend on whether the public can remember beyond the mirror. It will depend on how we see ourselves. How we see ourselves in each other. This dancing planet will depend on that.
I offer readings for Fire Keepers where we’ll talk to you ancestors, see your movement patterns and feel where the energy is flowing.
Creating Collapse-Tolerant Systems
For far too long, we’ve lived in a world where knowledge production, technology and governments replicate harm. The wealthy are so committed to it, the process has become microscopic to the point that subatomic particles are not safe from being ripped apart. Centralized propaganda, repeated violence and ritualized theft organize our lives to be enclosed and extracted while we ourselves are ejected from our own destinies.
As Gypsy Fires continues to move further into dance, we take a bold stance: dance isn’t ephemeral, it’s the most enduring thing we have.
Dance is what you continue, and choreography is what you’re told. A step is what happens when your momentum meets the world.
Indigeneity is the courage to remember what is far older than colonization, and to be a Traveler is to continue that memory no matter where you are in the world. I identify with the Roma and Sinti activists of years gone by who believed the message of the Gypsies was one of shared humanity, a borderless world and peace on earth. That’s civilization, and a dance teacher should help you learn how to move with it.
In Western academic spaces, the question of what replicates or continues is reduced to mimesis or extraction. Profitable forms of appropriation are conveniently blamed on “the market”—an abstraction that invites us to ponder rather than act or stop harm. This obfuscation fails to understand how static replication preserves power, and it avoids asking who is actually making these decisions and why. It’s not “the market.” For centuries, humans have made deliberate choices to steal the labors of others, using tools like books, film and AI to hide active motives of theft.
Romani dance offers a counter-paradigm: a decentralized, highly-available somatic architecture where human memory, rhythm and embodied knowledge persist regardless of state collapse. When civilization halts, land is enclosed or municipal grids fail, memory endures through kalipen—a deep-time somatic hyperchronicity that remembers the past and future simultaneously.
I hail from embodied technologists adapting across a century: from blacksmithing and moonshining to union trades and tech nomadism. As a software architect, I applied this inheritance to high-scale computational systems: advising a NASA scientist on Jovian weather modeling, leading web performance for Fortune and People, and consulting Google’s Core Web Vitals team. Simultaneously, I completed an uncorrected Arts Practice PhD at the University of Limerick while defending my Greenwich Village home, which held African-American, Romani and LGBTQ+ history. As my parents taught me, movement is survival.
As we get to know each other better here in this Gypsy Fire, I hope you’ll tell me more about who you are, what you carry and what you wish to continue in comments, live sessions, chats and emails. Really, I want to hear from you as I hold this space so that we can all grow together. In this post, I’m telling you more about the structure that enables and justifies this work, and how I hope it might help you bring forward what has been waiting inside you to be nurtured.
Today, as corporate architectures ingest human heritage and AI “models collapse” into synthetic “slop”, a “classical” understanding of culture and computing proves unable to persist “state”, or memory across “applications”. If you’re here, you are probably already asking this but let me give our query some shape:
When state archives burn and infrastructure fails, what inside human lineages enables culture to endure, mutate and continue? How can our relationship to technology—whether it be classical machine learning, non-linear dynamics, and quantum computing frameworks—help us understand these intimate somatic hyperchronicities? And how can this process support culture and survival?
Systems Design in Time
Revolutions of itinerant networks posed a direct challenge to the commodification of the commons, and were met with state violence and the trauma of colonial enclosure. In earlier posts, we have already been exploring how spatial enclosure was physically enforced through trapping feet in wooden shoes, from Irish workhouses and Lancashire textile mills to the forced labor of Roma in Spanish Flanders and the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas.
To survive total spatial enclosure, displacement, racism and torture, marginalized bodies had to “choreonavigate” constraints, as I call it. Striking the wooden shoe (sabot) against the floorboards was not merely rhythm; it was sabotage against the machine. Through percussive impact, practitioners encoded kinetic continuity across generations, converting impacts of violence into kalipen’s regenerative somatic memory of this time in all times. In doing so, somatic resistance reclaims temporal sovereignty against the master’s clock, demonstrating that while census rolls, land deeds and bondage enclose, embodiment reopens time itself. In a bit of a leap, distributed systems design offers some insight on this process.
Brewer’s CAP Theorem (2000) shows that networked computers guarantee only two of three properties:
* Consistency: it keeps going
* Availability: it can be accessed
* Partition Tolerance: it can make more than one of itself
Colonial worlds operate as CP systems: always able to consistently replicate itself but leaving cracks where it can’t reach. Conversely, Romani culture functions as an AP system—sacrificing centralized consistency for partition tolerance and availability, or the ability to continue across centuries of exile. Information is distributed across decentralized somatic nodes and synchronized through embodied transmission, oral repertoire and kinetic methodology.
As I wrote in this post on how bankers colonized print, this AP architecture finds historical anchoring in the 15th-century Ghuraba’: itinerant Romani and Sinti printmakers operating mobile block-printing technologies as they moved through Southern Germany prior to Gutenberg. Outside guilds and royal patronage, the Ghuraba’ proved complex technical knowledge could replicate across violent borders without institutional infrastructure. Systems design helps understand itinerant histories of survival and continuation on their own terms.
Taking it Home
Your nation is a lie. It’s not your home. It taxes your home. And you let them.
For a couple decades, I’ve sat in archives with some pretty lousy books that built nationalism over the last few centuries. As I read these texts, I could see how they invented the past at the expense and erasure of itinerants, nomads and Gypsies. They so effortlessly, shamelessly perform the game of cut & paste. That sleight of hand remains entirely protected by hostile and well-meaning artists and institutions alike. The traditions I have spent my life reckoning with—fortune telling, being a “Bohemian”, body percussion, metal smithing, basket making and so many more—are stolen from us entirely while we are accused of being poor, meandering thieves.
Many scholars have called out the fraud of nationalist research, and some of it has crossed into popular discourse such as the appropriation of Black and Indigenous culture in the Americas. But the Roma and Sinti have been left out this entirely. If we are to have a just world, this needs to stop.
When the nation you benefited from falls apart, you don’t get to reach for mine.
Gadje did exactly this in the 2020s, 1960s, 1920s, 1880s and on and on. The monsters you created dressed up the precarity they put you in with our “Boho” styles as “nomadic” artists, seers, astrologers and card readers. I assure you, your ancestors weren’t doing that. They’re not hiding in the cards in some sort of witchy secret resistance, they were doing whatever it is you’re doing right now. They were arresting, stealing from, throwing out or murdering my people—or looking the other way while it happened.
Since I started speaking up about being a Gypsy in academic, artistic and activist spaces in 2016, I’ve been watching gadje institutions, academics and creatives. I’ve discovered my allies who have given me a halting site, and I hold them dearly. I’ve also witnessed who twists the truth about us, or how they use the cloak of their own victimhood and trauma to justify committing crimes against not just my people, but the truth of human history and experience.
I know who has colonized our roads, our arts, our spiritual practices, our technologies, and even stolen our homes—as mine was last year. My people have watched the stars for thousands of years to find our way through landscapes and times of collapse, and this looting spree will not be tolerated anymore.
There are vampires on the road, and their time is up.
On my journey to continue my traditions, many of you welcomed me to your hearth. If you let go of what you think you know about civilization, you will find a warm spot at mine. I promise it will help you find who you really are beyond all borders.
L'Ancien Régime of Louis XIV and his high gilded court has been revealed to us all on social media. Just like it was three-hundred years ago, we are witnessing the contemporary version of masses of French proletariat shoved at gunpoint into poverty, factory brutality and sabot—wooden shoes—while genocide and war continue to ravage and loot the worlds of Black and Brown people. A few billionaires stand in their Hall of Mirrors, and we are all reminded that they were never referring to our “freedom” or making our lives“great” again.
Regardless of how you have landed in the fall, if all that you have left right now is the cage they put you in, tap, slap and bang upon the system itself and make that your dance. You do not let them defeat you, erase you or, worse, make you one of them. You look at the consequences of the road you and your ancestors walked, learn your lessons and you continue.
But first, we have to understand how capitalism, nationalism and middle-class values tried to change our memory of the jig.
A Game of Cut & Paste
As I wrote in my last letter, What Dance Really Is, up until about the 1930s our world once looked very different. At any given time, large portions of the global population were at sea and on rivers, lakes and canals, and many lived there full-time. Cities we would consider small or remote were busy trading ports with direct connections to the world through migrants, sailors and travellers. Indigenous roads of the world weren’t just on land, they carried culture, trade and lives through water.
Piroska is the best Romni and Sintitza archivist and researcher I know, and many years ago she shared with me a video documentary of Gwyneth Thomas’s preservation of Welsh clogging—dancing percussively with wooden-soled shoes. In the beginning of the video we see a teenage boy clogging in the square of the small fishing village of Porthmadog while the narrator gives us three important pieces of information:
* The village was once a port within a booming North Atlantic economy stretching between Newfoundland to Russia.
* As a young girl she watched from the windows as sailors or “Gypsies from the nearby encampment [danced] their jigs” and “the jig over a broom were a great favorite both at sea and in the Gypsy encampments.”
* As this economy died so did clogging as it had been done then, and you would never know it had existed as there were only a few fishing boats around.
The documentary then goes on to talk about how Gwyneth revived the clog dancing of “olden days” from being lost by teaching it to schoolchildren. It’s really a lovely documentary, and who doesn’t want schoolchildren to learn and preserve folk dancing?
The documentary of course leaves out that under Methodist control of Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, clog dancing and harping were banned, with almost all ancient harps of Wales destroyed. It was the Welsh Kale exclusively who kept these traditions alive, and Frances Roberts Reilly is from one of these families who has faithfully preserved both traditions. Also, w e are not told that sailors were often Black or Brown, and that they shaped dance, culture and identity in the Atlantic world.
As we see Gwyneth in her beautiful, fine home telling stories to her grandchildren of bygone days, we do not see the lives of those affected—Gypsy and gadjo alike—by the collapse of an entire economy, way of life and the culture that went with it. We do not know what has happened to those people by 1959 after two World Wars and a world made over multiple times by industrialization—an act that is never as naturally occurring as we are made to believe. All we know is what the film tells us and shows us, and it was broadcasted around the country during the “folk revival”.
In the case of Welsh clogging, its creation and history were summarized as the “old traditional dances of Wales, and they added to them many of the steps they had learned in their travels to foreign parts.” But this is a memory whose boundaries were re-written to suit middle class conformity, belonging and aspiration at the cost of those who actually created the practices who were facing increased discrimination, hardship and aggression.
Further North in Scotland, we have records that help understand the other end of the history—a beginning in the 1700s:
Dance and music probably played a larger part in the social life of the Scottish people in the eighteenth century than ever before….the Highlanders of the parish of Moulin, Perthsire […] abandon their customary racing, wrestling and putting the stone for what their minister called the “more elegant, though less manly, amusement of dancing, which has become very common.”
George S. Emmerson, 1971
How did the dance come to be in many parts of Britain as well as Ireland? Primarily through itinerant dancing masters—people who carried dance upon the road. People who changed their names to sound French. People who relied heavily upon Gypsies and sailors to get their moves and show their new steps off on stages and in town squares. It is a memory erased entirely from contemporary Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English folk dancing history and practice.
But the dance is patient, and it goes on regardless of who says they own it. I have no doubt people will continue to nationalize, commercialize or grant-ify dance that created and carried by people who were on the move. But they give themselves away when call it just “freedom and fun” and part of their national identity, while those of us whose parents gave us our steps and taught us what they’re really for carry on.
Throughout white communities in Europe and the Americas I find stories of dances that arrive and depart. Meanwhile in Roma, Sinti, Indigenous and African communities, we remember dances that continue.
In Gypsy Fires we’ll be recovering more of these histories on every continent, and they tell a story for us today that no dance manual, gym-class folk dance or social media influencer is ever going to tell you. And we need to hear this now.
Many today are perplexed to see what is called Artificial Intelligence destroy the world as we know it—putting millions out of work, re-making the landscape and re-writing civilization before our eyes in order to benefit the few, but clogging, jigging and other “low” or “vernacular” dances remember this has happened many times before.
The People on the River Are Happy To Give
When John Fogerty wrote the hit song, “Proud Mary”, he had never even seen the Mississippi River. The song’s inspiration began in the summer of love in ‘67, and the paddlewheel boat came later in inspiration from television and Mark Twain-Americana. Just eight years after Gwyneth’s appearance in the documentary, John capitalized on an old memory of river-life and people who were indeed, “happy to give.” Roma, Sinti and Traveler culture were ripe for the taking as we had just endured the Holocaust and Jim Crow laws in the USA kept dark-skinned families like mine on the margins alongside Black and African Americans who were the real target of those laws.
When Tina Turner took Proud Mary, she did more than make the song a timeless hit. She breathed life into a culture that modern capitalism tried to erase. A highly mobile people with access to resources on land, trade on water and people from around the world possess far too much independence and abundance for an economy built on enclosure, extraction and expulsion. They’ve also seen the beast in action, and know when someone needs help from the Underground.
Growing up as a Traveler, I saw firsthand how the river and road changes people. I witnessed how people who would normally be trapped in their houses and protecting their perfect yards would open up and find reciprocity in people they never had met before when they joined us on the road. I heard voices change when they sat by the river. I heard school friends who come with us tell me later as adults that dancing with us was one of their happiest memories in a gilded unhappy childhood. I felt people be people again and not owned by their settled, stifling lives.
As the ultra-rich reform the colonial world anew in the image of AI and bring 75% of the human population under authoritarian rule while blaming everyone’s misery on immigrants, it’s no wonder to me that this is happening. When Gypsies and itinerant people still managed to thrive in a brutal colonial economy, they blamed everything on us. They outlawed us. Stole our homes. Colonized our roads. Enslaved us. Shipped boys and men to work camps, prisons and rehabilitation institutions. Sterilized women. Committed genocide against entire communities. Told everyone that we were the thieves and child-snatchers.
But no matter how the monster wishes to dress and address us, we keep going. Dance is the way, not the product. Images that exoticize Black and Brown people do not understand what they are seeing because the viewer has already lost their humanity, in these images they are looking back at a spectacle of their own imagination.
Welcoming the Fall
For the last 13 years that I have been conducting research on recovering a fuller history of the traditions I grew up with, the lies about who did what and where endure. Ethnomusicologists, historians and “traditional” artists who didn’t grow up with "the tradition” and whose ancestors certainly weren’t doing what they said they were doing get all the grants, academic positions, attention and acclaim. My elders assure me, “they’ve always been this way.”
I try not to feel sad that so many gadje are so happy to dance and profit in the steps of my people’s suffering and erasure. And perhaps I was protected by being excluded from dance-worlds that used to acknowledge and hire me when I hid that I was a Gypsy. Now most of these funding, research and cultural bodies are facing not only economic collapse, but shorter attention spans of a public that doesn’t remember what happened last month—let lone 100 years ago.
Perhaps the ongoing theft of my own heritage, research and life doesn’t matter anymore as the only things that really mattered was to keep going—something people who benefited from settlement have almost entirely forgotten. I share knowing from my corner of the Gypsy world because most Roma, Sinti and Travellersremember our humanity before this hellscape, and we choose to keep going.
It’s not magic or exotic passion, although when I look at popular media I understand why it looks like it. It’s being alive and not allowing fleeting, artificial enclosures to trap your memory, your body and your soul. It’s owning your road and all the good and the bad in it that your ancestors have been through and created in the world. I know if you’re reading this, you most likely already know on some level that “folk” was a word created to colonize. For you I’m confirming that any knowledge you inherit or learn is an absolute miracle to receive in a world that runs on amnesia.
We do not need perfect victims and perfect heroes, although I am grateful to those precious few that inspire us all. I think what we need more of are people who remember and choose to continue ways of living that are better than what white gadjo colonialism wants us to have.
In the North, summer turns to autumn. May our walks in the wild, idle chats with friends and kisses under the sun keep us warm, and may the stars shine brightly with wishes and guidance on long cold nights until we can breathe with all that is green again. May the falling of the season and gathering of the harvest nourish us as we move through the grief of losing what was and navigate the fear of what lies ahead. May the jig help you on your way.
Many peoples all over the world are resisting this silent erasure, but there is no mistaking that there is a war on our humanity, and we need you right now. There are a lot of people who want to control you who do not have your best intentions at heart.
One of the ways these heads of business, media and government manufacture control is by creating tech-enabled youth cultures that keep you away from and mistrustful of those who care about you the most. Some will just say this is how it has always been, and that’s a lie.
In so many cultures throughout human history, your desire to forge your own road in a new way doesn’t mean you must be cut off from family, community and tradition. Just because you want change doesn’t mean you no longer deserve the same love you received when you held your parents close all through the night. Wanting new things doesn’t mean you can’t also learn from and benefit from the old. And if you haven’t had that, well, I know myself and many, many others are here for you.
So, for today, we don’t have to solve all the world’s problems. I just want you to know that yes, you’re being robbed of so many things, but you don’t have to let them take your love for nature, your body, your community, your family, your creativity, your voice, your art, your ingenuity, your hope or even your tech on your own terms. As a Gypsy, I can say that in the worst of times this inheritance is what gets us through, and in good times we’ll need this to rebuild and remember what really matters.
I don’t know how you need to solve the problems you are facing, but I know how much harder it feels when you’re alone. I know how hard it can be to make connections when you don’t have what seems like everyone else has. I know what it’s like not to get all the guidance you need from your family and have to look for adopted elders to help make you whole.
In the face of all these things that can leave you feeling like you’re not enough and it’s all unfair or even impossible, there is some age-old wisdom that can help. It’s very simple and cuts through some of the b******t:
What tables will you sit at in your life?
Tables are important but transient spaces. Some of the most valuable things you will do in your life is at a table, but you also must be invited to sit at them. And most of the time, you’re not looking for tables you’ll sit at just once, you want to come back and—importantly—you want the other people at it to want you to come back.
Some people spend their lives dreaming about tables that they might one day sit at, while throwing away the ones where they could never, ever be replaced. Some get there and realize it’s not what they thought it would be. Others are strategically invited to some tables, where their presence is symbolic and their voices aren’t welcome. Then there are those who force themselves upon someone else’s table, or coerce others to sit at theirs. Tables can get very complicated.
So maybe you have tables you already sit at, and you don’t appreciate them yet. Perhaps there are tables you should leave and never come back to. Or maybe you already know what it’s like to sit and share a meal or cup of tea at a table with friends on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s time to teach it to someone else who might have never had a table to sit at. Maybe, that table-less person is you, and you can’t see that there people right now waiting to sit at a table that you’ll put together one day.
Looking back, what I’d share with the young man I wrote this prayer for is that the circles he was going in were the returning and returning to a table of his own making. One that he had to forage, harvest and carve alone—a traveling table that one day he could invite his family, elders, peers and youth to share in, and his heart would be fed with a love he never imagined possible.
I can’t promise my table will be here forever, but you’re welcome to come back. I hope you do.
Lacho drom,
Russell
Thank you for joining me by the fire. If you had someone in mind when you read this, please consider sharing.
This has led me to one truth I can stand by: the power of dance as a decolonial method.In my research, the ancestors in the archive brought me repeatedly to the reality of how Roma, Sinti and other oppressed peoples were subjected to bondage of all sorts—including being transported in fetters or wearing heavy wooden shoes at gunpoint to perform hard labor. Yet, even in these horrific conditions, dance allowed a reclamation of body, time and space. As I wrote in my PhD:
Our percussive dance tradition is a creation like no other. Even if we lose it all tomorrow through some disaster or unfathomable new evil form of body control, someone would find the rhythm of life in their body again. They would tap on the futuristic cage around them, and no matter how many times they were stopped—the pulse would spread. Gestures are contagious. Rhythm propagates. When we are down or when we are gone, the weights we carried in our dance now carry us.
I would go even further now. I have learned in this last year that impact-driven dance isn’t just decolonial or pre-colonial. It continues in a world where colonialism simply does not exist.
Body rhythm is the world where my father woke me up every morning playing the tin whistle and carried me around the ballroom floor; where my mother taught me to walk around the house on the balls of my feet, just as dancing masters had centuries ago; where my grandfather sat in the kitchen playing his accordion for anyone entering, while my grandmother sang, painted and sculpted.
This was always my land. It will only be colonized if I let it be taken away—or if I turn into an occupier myself, standing in traditions and timelines that are not mine to move through.
The liberation so many of us are seeking is, if we are honest, so often a longing for that innocence of connection to our parents—that increasingly forgotten world of play in music, dance, nature and community. We can bury this longing and pretend it isn’t there, or we can finally be hospitable to it, let it in and give it a cup of tea.
If you give this a chance, even for a moment, I think you’ll find that the longing is the evidence. The play of life was always there, waiting for you to accept it. Regardless of your relationship with your parents, your desire for this intimacy—for the truth of your body in dance—is proof that it has always existed in your ancestry, your lineage and your blood. All it needed was for you to start tapping, quite literally, into it.
The courage of the dancer, then, is to keep dancing. What that dance will be, where it came from and where it is going—that is something only you will find, and we are all discovering it anew in every moment. Whether this choreography will decolonize our destiny or perpetuate harm is entirely up to us.
We have the moves. We have the heart. We have the dance.
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The call of a trillionaire(!) to colonize Mars isn’t the nobility of some male urge to adventure forth and find sustenance—something that in so many species such as lions is actually done almost entirely by the women. It is the grift and make-believe invocation of an old archetype of the male wandering alone into the wilderness without any of the demands to actually risk their own lives without the support of the 99% who are keeping them alive. It is impossible to live on Mars, and furthermore:
If you or I got on a time machine, hit the buttons at random and went back to some point in Earth history, 90% of the time we would die as soon as we opened the airlock door.
We are being called forth by the most powerful people on earth to venture forth and explore our annihilation.
Even the most earnest of pleas to reset masculinity are mired in the same ambitions of desire. Scott Galloway gave us the reassuring “Protect, Provide, Procreate” from his Notes on Being a Man(2025), which reads as “what role play to expect of others in your relationships.” And critiques of this still say “why we need something more.”
No. Enough of “more”.
Dear Traveler, I return to this tired writing trope not only because I’m a Gypsy and I’m reclaiming it from people who do not know actually how to travel and only know how to be tourists and colonizers. I return to it because the condition of traveling is to, obviously, not be at home. To not have the entitlement that you can do whatever you want when you’re in someone else’s home. It is to admit that you are guest. It is to give yourself the permission to be lost. It is to free yourself from selfish demands that always end in pain, and instead give yourself the gift of allowing yourself to be found. Found by freedom. Found by people who might need you. Discovered by the world.
But that’s jumping ahead. That’s getting back too quickly to a framework that’s going to allow us get busy again and avoid hopelessness along with confusion, uncertainty and fear of nothingness that comes with being alive.
Throw out the podcasters, the think-tanks and the PhDs with all the answers. The “manosphere” is the womb we all wish we could return to where we’re magically just taken care of while we don’t even have the courage to admit that we occupy women’s spaces, bodies and thoughts already. I have been given the best education of feminism my entire life (and I’m gay), and I still cannot resist this pattern sometimes. But knowing this isn’t just my stepping back from my expectations to be seen, heard and loved. It’s my own permission to go into the wild.
Let’s go into the wilderness together.
While lots of institutions are going to lie to you right now about the history of Tarot and claim that cartomancy is just something people have always done, that is an exaggeration. Meanwhile, the divination of cards has always been part of a Roma, Sinti and Gypsy woman’s work and practices. The women in my family have known this for centuries and carried it quietly for our own safety—a lesson many gadji (non-Roma women) are learning right now as fascism threatens their influential intuitive voices online. But like astrology—another profession known well to Roma and Sinti although not exclusively—Tarot has gained mass popularity through extraction especially by turn of the 19th-20th century occultists, and gives us shared language right now for the archetypal. It is how I want to invite you to consider the Hermit—the wizard-y looking old man with a lantern and staff going into the night alone.
The figure of the wizard is an old one, and much of his magic and insight was inspired not just by imaginations of Celticism and its Druids, but by the wandering minstrels, sages and travelers that are part of my people—the Gypsies. There is a lot of stereotype and misunderstanding around this, including the belief that we are free, careless people. This is not true. Our history in the world is thousands of years old; we did not just stumble out of India a thousand years ago by some tragic accident as you might have been told. Things have happened to us, but we have always carried within and between ourselves our truth of humanity, non-violence and independence from systems that harm others.
It is the vulnerable position of being alive that is missing in these man-stories, and is summoned in Victor Frankl’s timeless Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). But even his choice to choose attitude gives us back that hope that we’ll get it right. We can get the band back together, fix the machine or get back to the arms of those we have outgrown or lost. Our minds are terribly clever.
But returning to the Hermit, what I notice in the face of the old bearded man is his youthfulness. His hooded head cast down shows us a softness, a gentleness we tend to only associate with the young, naive and hopeful. It is his submission to death of his ego, ambitions and, one day, his life that softens his face into agelessness.
In old age, perhaps, it is not hope that we need from our elders. It’s surrender. It is knowledge that things did not, in fact, work out. It is the willingness to return to what has been unknown and the liberation that all things one day go away. The Hermit is not just losing himself in the world, he does what so many men of forgotten mystery schools have done. He vanishes into the real frontier—time itself. He reveals to us not nihilism or black-pill defeat-ism, but the truth we are all hungry for.
I’m almost 43, so I cannot speak for young men, although soon I hope to share a prayer I wrote to myself as a young man. I can speak as a person looking ahead at what I was told would be my era to lead and shape the world for the better. The only leadership, right now, I seem to be able to offer, is a responsible form of retreat. To do less. To touch the world lightly. To be grateful to be fed and safe. To let yourself be received by that which is being rejected by almost everyone who wants to offer you certainty, especially when monsters are lurking everywhere. Unfortunately, I have no powers of organized or violent resistance to give you, but I pass no judgement upon it.
There is sobriety in his journey. There is wisdom. De-occupy masculinity from modern demands. Maybe try letting go of what you’re expecting out of manhood and maybe, just try enjoying it for o…
I met and got to know these researchers with the belief that we would work together. I believed that I had the knowledge, they had the power, and this would be shared. Now, they have some knowledge, I still have no power and they no longer think they need me. A war came to my door, stole my home and then the wolves came. I had expected that I was collaborating with a project to reclaim Romani and Sinti history and culture for Romani and Sinti people. I had not expected that it would climax into our literal erasure and for the timetakers, as I call them, prestige for the next thirty years.
Your support at this critical moment will make the difference between me being able to continue this work and fight colonization in one of its most enduring and hidden forms, or allowing academia to cement new strategies for stealing culture, scholarship and lives for decades to come. Right now, I stand alone.
The Real Vampires and Bohemian Groves
Dear Traveler,
Come sit with me by the fire while we talk of monsters and other perils on the road ahead. It starts with children going missing, then entire peoples are murdered and then memories are altered overnight. What evil could do such a thing?
There has been a lot of talk through towns, trains and way stations of vampires—those half-dead, half-alive who feast upon the blood of helpless victims. They may be well-mannered, of fair complexion and smile, but at night they are beasts of incredible force, mind manipulation and seduction that feasts upon the innocent. And innocent here does not just refer to the sexually inexperienced. It’s those whose hearts remain unsullied by greed and hate, braving to bear their souls in a cruel world. They are a vampire’s delight. They are a meal to be sucked dry and discarded before the next victim is sacrificed to a hunger with no end.
Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu gave us the vampire Carmilla in 1872 and Bram Stoker gave us the famous Dracula in 1897, but before that, the Roma had our own lore that helped us at our own fires understand the perils of a world where it is not safe to be human. We know genocides, ethnocides and other horrors await us as well as others who cherish the precious ancient arts of music, dance, craft and story, and are unwilling to be ruled by insatiable greed without honor.
In our languages, yes, we have many words for people who harm others for their own gain. We know beasts are at large and many are in charge corrupting the truth, such as Stoker’s version of Dracula and its many re-tellings: our own lore is used against us as we are portrayed not as brown people vulnerable to pale-faced monsters, but as Dracula’s servants.
We see a similar manipulation of the truth—that it is us Roma who are stealing children and not the other way around—in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (2013). There, Gypsy aesthetics and traditions are used to create “The True Knot,” a nomadic group of psychic vampires whose immortality comes from devouring the torturous pain of children with paranormal abilities. In the wake of the partial release of the Epstein Files by the US FBI and all of its purported horrors including child sacrifice, their accusations look like projection.
This perverse dynamic expands far beyond pop culture; it anchors the architecture of elite gadje power itself. Look no further than the infamous Bohemian Grove, where the world’s most powerful politicians, billionaires and imperial architects retreat into the California redwoods. They call themselves “Bohemians,” mimicking a stolen caricature of Romani freedom, camping under a giant stone owl to perform theatrical rituals and broker backroom deals that govern global empires. It is the ultimate manifestation of the colonizer playing dress-up. They drape themselves in the aesthetic of the free-spirited traveler to obscure the greed and destruction they leave in their wake.
The colonization of Roma and Sinti culture has always depended upon blaming us for what the empire was doing. In the case of child kidnapping, scholar Noémie Ndiaye calls this a “perverse inversion of the historical realities of early modern human trafficking” (2022).
Vampires, egregores, secret networks, colonizers, narcissists, racists….whatever they are….they either lack humanity, or are not human at all. I will leave it up to brilliant psychologists and essayists to make those claims. As a Bashaldo Gypsy working with Roma and Sinti from around the world, I have confirmed that our culture is not about the exotic stereotypes so often imposed upon us by the gadje. It is about preserving who we are, remembering our humanity and protecting ourselves from those who have lost it.
500 Years of Silent Survival
For us Roma in the Americas, our history here began with Christopher Columbus’s third voyage in 1498, when Spanish Roma were transported to the colonies as forced laborers. This marked the beginning of a 500-year history in the Americas, which was defined by its own distinct perils and hardships that often mirrored, or even worsened, the systemic persecution left behind in Europe.
There is so much that can be said about our history, but I am asking you to notice one thing about this that is the subject, the object and the curse of not only this piece, and of the broader field of Romani studies in the Americas, but of my life: we, American Gypsies, have not been allowed to study it or tell it.
We have had gadje scholars and artists make enormous fortunes and careers at our expense. We have had Roma scholars from Europe come and tell our story. We have had first-generation Romani US Americans publish their stories, which is an absolute wonder that even happened. But those of us who have been here, who have survived generations of horrors, we remain silenced.
In the American case, the empire has always depended upon appropriating not just our culture, but our ways of creating culture amidst survival as a means of propagating the colonial project. Simply put, colonization loves to play dress-up as us. It drapes itself in the hardship and joys of travel, our ingenuity, our aesthetic, our music and our spiritual knowledge as a means to hide what is really happening: colonization. And few notice when it is pretending to be us. It is a choreography of occupation, and it spreads fast among gadje in its every permutation.
Let me be clear: if you claim to represent the Roma and Sinti in the Atlantic world and you are not advocating for our rights in the USA—which controls the hemisphere—you are not our friend. The Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights did an unprecedented study on Roma in the US, and we even saw the passing of a house bill for the preservation of culture, but where did the rest of the institutional momentum and funding go?
* Why are we not legally recognized and protected within the USA?
* Why are there no departments led by Romani people where other Romani Americans and Roma from around the world can go to study and find sanctuary?
* Why are Sinti Americans always erased, including by Romani scholars?
* Why are “gypsy laws” on the books all over the country, and why are funded, comfortable scholars who profited and still profit from our suffering not doing anything to strike them down?
We survived a system that was not built for us, but built upon us. They have studied our every move, our every lesson since we arrived as slaves. They do not let us tell of our roads and our dancing masters of the 17th and 18th centuries. They do not let us talk about how Charlie Chaplin was Romani and shifted American media away from its chief entertainment, Blackface, and gave us the “tramp” and other embodied physical delights undeniably extending from our culture.
They do not do so because we are in the spine of how the empire replicates itself for its own expansionist dreams. For a long time, the scholarship of Ian Hancock set us on a particular course of purity tests—using European standards to dictate who we are versus what we have actually survived and what we have carried across the Atlantic. We deserve to speak and study ourselves on our own terms, and I believe the American gadje public should know this is actively being suppressed and stolen.
The Institutional Feast
The academic world knows that a century after the Gypsy Lore Society feasted on our families, the dinner bell has rung over racism and fascism once again. It is time for elite universities to dine on us yet again.
With an Oxford Handbook of Romani History scheduled for 2028, the institutional cement is currently being poured. Gatekeepers are deciding right now who gets to control the narrative—and where the foundational, long-term administrative salaries and institutional chairs will be anchored for the next thirty years. There is hope Romani scholars will be involved, but to what extent they will be able to tell their and our stories, and on what terms, remains to be decided. In my current experience collaborating with these scholars, my greatest fear is more token representation and exploitation, and—at best—that our voices will be framed entirely on gadje terms. As the majority of historians published and publishing are gadje, there is little hope without serious change.
We see this extraction in its purest, most clinical form on the digital interface of the Romani Atlantic Project. The project explicitly boasts a mission to step away from “methodologically Eurocentric” models, claiming it wants to focus heavily on the “Lusophone Atlantic contact zone” and conduct extensive ethnographic research in Brazil. [1, 2, 3]
Yet, if you look at the actual financial and administrative architecture of the project, the deception is jaw-dropping.
First, look at the visual representation they chose for their front page. To represent the vast, complex, multi-century history of a global diaspora, they splashed a stark, boilerplate image of raw poverty myself and my community know all too well—reducing a vibrant, living culture to a comfortable, voyeuristic gadje trope of misery that provides no agency for the residents of this community. This is a Lusophone contact zone for whom?
Second, look at the roster of paid institutional collaborators—the primary investigators and salaried researchers who actually secured the foundational European grant funding. They are an all gadje (non-Roma) team. Five out of six are white Europeans. The foundational wealth, institutional security and professional prestige of this project was built from the ground up by and for gadje academics.
When pressed on representation, institutional gatekeepers will inevitably point to the table of contents of the forthcoming Cambridge book to show a chapter authored by Romani scholars to claim the project is inclusive. But this is precisely how contemporary colonization operates: the foundational institutional wealth, long-term governance and structural funding are reserved exclusively for gadje architects, while working Romani contributors are brought in at the end to populate chapters or sit on advisory boards—typically with no or little pay.
I myself had this opportunity for participation and withdrew due to ethical concerns, my PhD, my career and the fight to protect my housing and heritage at the corner of Gay and Christopher Streets in NYC. Still, I submitted previously unknown locations of importance to my community for a UNESCO heritage project, and the only thing I heard back was from another researcher who told me what I submitted was interesting, before providing no further information. This provides the tokenized diversity metrics required to legitimize the text, while the foundational administrative machine remains entirely monopolized by elite gadje networks.
They exploit our narratives to fulfill their grant requirements, while shutting out local North, Central and South American Roma and some non-Roma scholars of color from foundational institutional funding, refusing to hire local Brazilian academics to co-lead the core research infrastructure, and taking the literal maps from the walls of displaced independent researchers to design their book covers.
But this is how major institutions operate. Earlier this year, a major Midwestern university hosted a conference focusing on the links between African-Americans and Eastern and Southeastern European Roma. I wrote to the organizer, pointing out the profound irony of hosting this event in Ohio, a state home to deep roots of American Roma who currently possess zero legal recognition or civil rights protections and have lived this struggle alongside African-Americans.
The response from the organizer—who, columns of irony aside, endorsed the very Romani Atlantic book that features the map from my displaced home—was telling. She admitted she didn’t know anything about that because it wasn’t her expertise, before offering the standard institutional pivot: inviting me to submit a paper.
She values the abstract, trendy connection between Black and European Roma because it fits a comfortable academic syllabus, but she completely ignores the literal, living American Romani scholar standing right in front of her from Ohio. Meanwhile real Afro-Romani lives and stories remain buried.
We do not need to make our struggles legible in activist and academic circles before we desire rights, protections and space to tell our own stories and preserve our own culture. We do not need to appropriate African-American race discourse or European Romani frameworks to know who we are—although I always welcome discourse that is genuinely collaborative and non-extractive. The “Atlantic world” framing has always been a problematic appropriation or outgrowth of Paul Gilroy’s seismic text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Here it turns into a form of gadje fracking into our culture that erases and supplants our own native methods of navigating the Atlantic world for five centuries—many of which are found in dance.
I would not have made it through my life, and neither would my family, had it not been for Black, Indigenous and African Americans who have stood by our side and gave us guidance and assistance. And we have shared so much in return, from solidarity in the Cleveland and East Cleveland Public School system, in dance and culture and in navigating the toxic American healthcare system. American Roma are not immune to society’s ills, including racism, and neither are Black and Indigenous people immune from absorbing some gadje anti-Gypsyism. But we navigate our struggles all the same, often together or separate in solidarity.
The discourse has been extractive. Gadje senior scholars who do not know our struggles, and who risk nothing of their own safety or housing, were always rigged to finish ahead in this academic race. They come talk to us, and then go inside and lock the doors of elite spaces behind them, leaving us outside. Perhaps the saddest part for me is that I was warned by elders inside and outside my family, and yet I had hope that real change was coming. The only change that has happened is that Gypsy Lore S tudies is now, officially, operating under the name of Romani Studies—and this time, claiming authenticity and representation.
There have always been Roma collaborators who are exploited, and if we are to have a decolonial academy, this practice must stop. We must be the funded, institutionally anchored authors of our own history, lives and destiny.
Those of us who have been here, who have survived generations of horrors, remain silenced—our living spaces emptied out, and our maps placed on the covers of books we are excluded from writing.
While I have been facing my case, which is still languishing in the New York State Supreme Court after the higher Appellate Division ordered this court to hear the case after rejecting it—as documented in the New York Courts Appellate Division Order (August 2025)—my struggles are turning into a touchstone in the history of housing rights and corruption in New York City. Meanwhile, fellow senior Romani activist and attorney Lorcan Otway and his wife had their home and historic theater—which was home to the historic Negro Ensemble Company—stolen by what many are now calling deed theft, which is spreading across the city.
I know the deep institutional resentment is there because we dare to exist outside of their neat, theoretical boxes. They want us as passive artifacts of the past, not as living, credentialed intellectuals demanding our rights in the present. They may hold the keys to the university presses, and they may have taken the map from my wall, but they cannot extract the truth of who we are.
What Has Been Stolen From You
Thank you, Traveler, for sitting with me as I talk of monsters, memory and ocean worlds. I ask you to listen just a little bit more, because this part is not just about me or the diverse, enormous web of my people. It’s about you. It’s about all the times a gadjo has joined me by the fire, and why I sit by your fires of hearth, art and knowledge as well. It’s about all the times the non-Roma have looked to me for something that they believe I have that they do not. And it is exactly this that is being stolen from you.
Maybe at this point, you are skeptical that there is in fact an issue here. Or perhaps you agree with me, but like so many before, you think, “This is just how it is.” They are powerful, and, clearly, I am not. These things happen, and perhaps it doesn’t mean it is all quite so bad. But just ask this question of yourself before you walk away: “Why does all this matter to me?”
It’s an important question because, in truth, I think most Roma do not need or want an Oxford Handbook of Romani History, nor do we need an “Atlantic” academic cosmology imposed upon what we live every day and what our culture handles naturally. Our memories are long, and as I argue in my research, memory is the basis of not only our culture, but of liberation in movement—in time, space and intention beyond colonialism and its many occupations of our lives. And this, although perhaps a precious thought, is why this matters to you, and why this research has so mysteriously been suppressed. Just think about it.
To give perspective on the scale of the silencing and mediocre-at-best scholarship, consider this: our presence within Europe, Africa and the Americas is as old as—if not substantially older than—every single modern nation formed within them. Imagine if the tables were turned. Imagine if we applied the exact same reductionist, pathologizing criteria that the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses of the world throw at us, and used them to rewrite the histories of the world.
Imagine if we published peer-reviewed volumes declaring these absolute, immutable historical “truths” about their elite cultures—the exact types of statements that are said, both overtly and tacitly, about ours in every single publication without a second thought:
* On the English Language:“The English dialect cannot be classified as a distinct linguistic system; it is merely an un-codified, hybrid patois synthesized from fragmented low-Germanic vernaculars, fractured Norman French, and appropriated Latin roots. It emerged late, lacking the structural purity and historical depth of ancient, foundational languages.” [1, 2, 3]
* On Anglo-American Economic Development:“The Anglo-American economy demonstrates a fundamental incapacity for organic, self-sustaining stability. Its structural survival relies entirely on a continuous, pathological cycle of crisis and territorial enclosure, extracting wealth through the systemic looting of global indigenous labor and sovereign foreign resources.”
* On Czech National Legitimacy:“The historical narratives produced within the Czech lands lack foundational authority, and their claims to deep cultural sovereignty must be viewed with skepticism. Methodologically speaking, the independent nation-state is a modern, highly unstable administrative invention, established only a mere three decades ago in 1993.”
* On French Cultural Patrimony:“French civilization possesses no authentic, indigenous aesthetic lineage. Its legal frameworks, high arts and musical traditions do not reflect an internal evolution, but are instead a collection of stolen cultural artifacts, forcibly extracted from the sovereign populations they colonized and enslaved across the Atlantic world.”
* On German Post-War Modernity:“The German socio-economic model is inherently fragile and historically volatile, masked by a superficial illusion of modern stability. Scholars must bypass their current middle-class assertions and freeze the culture permanently within the pathology of its mid-century abject ruins—utilizing the structural scars of the genocides they committed to secure external humanitarian and research funding, while systematically barring their surviving intellectuals from governing their own narrative.”
* On Scandinavian Cultural Authenticity:“The claims to historical and cultural continuity within the Scandinavian lands must be entirely dismissed as illegitimate. Because their contemporary populations drive modern vehicles rather than Viking longships, and because their lineages have integrated with outside linguistic and genetic influences over a millennium, they fail the fundamental metrics of historical purity. They are merely modern impostors playing dress-up, entirely unqualified to govern or speak on their own ancestral heritage.”
This kind of thinking is not only dehumanizing and evil, it represents a profound, hasty misinterpretation of not only our culture and what’s at stake, but of how the world actually works—and how deeply all human beings love and share culture, regardless of their material conditions.
But imagine a millennium of that structural silence. And then imagine that after a thousand years of being locked outside, an elite press finally allows two individual authors from your community to speak a few words in a single chapter—without ever dismantling, questioning or erasing the massive mountain of colonial academic garbage printed before them.
Suddenly, those two lone individuals are handed the impossible, crushing responsibility of “representation.” They are forced to act as the tokenized shield for a multi-million-dollar gadje project, while the foundational administrative power, the salaried chairs and the framing of the narrative remain completely unchanged.
On narrow academic terms, their well-funded work may claim a sterile salience. But the framing is fundamentally broken. Roma and Sinti do not struggle with the language and barriers of empire in the same way gadje do. These texts, should they continue with the same funded, prestigious looting with which they were carried out, will continue to be a plague onto us. It is better they not be printed and the information not shared, than to leave us vulnerable, commodified and fundamentally misunderstood—and our message of global humanity buried.
No, the reason this letter matters is not just because of what was done to me, or to Roma and Sinti scholars all over the world fighting for a scrap at the institutional table. Pity costs nothing. It’s because our very existence is living proof and memory of a world that does not need its borders, its defenses or its extractive academic empires to remember its own humanity.
We do not know if the world can ever truly rid itself of its vampires or its empires, but we know this: we have survived them for millennia, and we will survive them still.
Lacho dives,
Russell
Thank you for joining me by the fire in this time of monsters. I am fighting to hold on at the margins against immensely powerful forces. If this case concerns you, please stand with me by subscribing and sharing this record far and wide.
After the fall of the Empire in Rome, this expansive method of conquest would slumber for a thousand years, and re-emerge in new force in 1503 with the founding of the Casa de Contratación in Seville. This was a state-monopoly on New World map-making, and it was essential to the success of their colonization projects. How could they conquer lands if they couldn’t find them? This knowledge was the source of the Spanish Empire’s power, and to leak it was punishable by death.
After a century of war and plunder in the Americas, the French Empire expanded this tactic. They knew that while invasion and looting were lucrative, it was not as profitable as keeping power in order to create new extractive economies. To do this, Louis XIV of France and his court needed new tactics. One of them was to control culture and how people moved.
In 1661, Louis founded by royal decree the Parisian Académie Royale de Danse. France already had a guild that controlled music, dance and who was allowed to teach it, but in the Académie the ideal French courtly dancing, musical body could be under his control. This power was disseminated through traveling dancing masters—and not the “rogue” ones like those of my people—and their state-approved dance manuals. These were literal maps of how bodies should and shouldn’t move.
They would evangelize to the world his new elite, “absolutist” aesthetic that often dressed itself in the feathers, dyes and fabrics looted from the empire. His dancing masters would invent nonsensical patterns of movement that imitated and were designed to supplant more ancient systems of dance the empire was in regular contact with. They created something truly unnatural: a literal cadastral map of how bodies should move.
Today, we simply refer to this system as ballet. Its power wasn’t just in an aesthetic designed for absolute control, it was that it was made irresistible by its proximity to wealth and power. We find evidence of this influence all the way from Nova Scotia to Congo Square in New Orleans, from the crossroads of County Clare to the ports of Australia. And once something stays popular, when the promise of a life of beauty and pleasures is enticing long enough, it becomes its own gilded cage. We forget how we used to move, and then the only dream anyone has is the one a king in France had in a gigantic palace hundreds of years ago.
In time corsets have become six-pack abs. Ostentatious dresses that were the spectacle of the court (often costing women their lives when their numerous skirts brushed up against the candles on the floor and they burned alive) have become extreme, luxurious influencer diets that are just as perilous. Men have traded high heels and fashions of the court for “manosphere” luxury items they can show off online. The tastes may change, but the pattern of movement reveals the same person with the same desires.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing so you have access not just to these Gypsy Fires, but to the Timedancing Lab. There I teach how to break free from occupation in your body and establish your own movement sovereignty in community.
As I move between the forest, the road and the courts of power today like so many Roma before me, I do my best not to be too bothered about the tastes of the gadje (non-Roma). For me and people like me who remember movement that’s older than any empire, the problem for us emerges when all movement is controlled.
Now here you might expect me to talk about how war, slavery and systems of power create new methods to control how people move. And I do write about that often. Tonight, as we sit by the fire, that’s not my main concern. The greatest danger for me, and for any moving person, isn’t that we all move the same. It’s when people forget to move at all.
There’s a basic principle here: to control land, build a cage like the Roman and Spanish empires did. To control people and get their consent to do it, create an irresistible aesthetic culture intimately intertwined with brutality and absolutism. To control thoughts and ideas, create a world where people no longer want to change their minds. For the empires of today, weapons, cages and consumer cultures aren’t the only weapons of war. It’s making people forget there was ever anything other than the prison they have been raised within. Make sure they cannot venture forth from their towns to meet people different from them, and make them afraid of the neighbor next door. Make sure they cannot move their bodies in ways that might disturb other people from their paralysis. Make sure their hearts can no longer feel the threads of time pulsing through the land. Take the burden of creativity, thought and emotions away entirely.
Indigenous countermapping refers to the practice of mapping real human relations to the land, to the natural world, to landmarks and to each other. These can be in the form of actual maps, but this can also take the shape of storytelling, music and, yes, even dance. When we learn to read the hidden history of the land and what happened there in our own bodies, we find a real map that can help us find our way home. We can discover as I did in the Fashion Institute of Technology Library in NYC that wooden shoes, slavery and forced labor were all connected and would change the way we walked and related to the land. We can discover as my friend Maria showed me that we don’t always have to learn tradition from a teacher—sometimes the teacher is in our DNA waiting for us to listen to it. It is the bear-hug from my grandmother that she learned because someone in our family before her learned that holding someone tight was survival.
At this Gypsy Fire, we read hidden histories in the body so that we might shape the world we want to live in by consciously being the people we want to be within it.
This Gypsy’s dream is a simple one. I wish to help you shatter through the cages of nothingness that are enclosing us as we speak, trapping us in empty-headed greed. I want to hear you sing to your newborns again through kitchen windows as I pass on by, welcoming them into a world of human play, sound and love. As I drive through fields I want to hear your people sing to the corn again, and when I return I’ll help fix a few things around town while we enjoy the harvest.
May your dreams tonight roam far beyond any map, and when you wake trust that your body will know how to take the next step to get there. I’m here to help you listen.
Lacho drom,
Russell
If you’d like to learn how to read the hidden histories the body carries and find your choreo-destiny, join us in the Timedancing Lab. The first course, Choreonavigating Crisis, begins June 21. Six lessons in movement for creativity in times of collapse, drawn from my family’s Bashaldo tradition and my doctoral research. Paid subscribers receive every lesson; founding members join the live sessions. Come move with us.
The world watches afraid. I watch, afraid. What is happening on the roads that hold the world together? On the roads of my birth home, Turtle Island? Are people fleeing? Enjoying a luxury vacation? Will we meet animals on the road, or are they gone too?
The world is awake to what Artificial Intelligence might be and awash in interpretations of what it means for us. As I pass by conversations on my route, I notice most people can’t even agree on what intelligence even is and whether it can ever be artificial. If human intelligence can in fact be manufactured, do we want that? If it is only somewhat able to be reproduced robotically, is that useful? At what cost? A constellation of problems erupts that is not failure of the computer, but the failure of our global (especially US American) leadership to understand how the machine of the world runs at all.
If we turn to the university, where I decided to try my chances in hopes of finding like-minded people beyond my verda, there is only one department that’s always already been prepared to face the existential questions of a potential age of AI. It’s probably near to if not the least funded. It’s not easy to find, it’s rarely required and is certainly the least respected. It’s dance.
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Yes I am saying that there is a department in the university that has vastly more experience than Stanford or MIT’s AI labs in asking existential questions about us, and that’s because it’s the only discipline where you can’t pretend to take people out of it. While we keep pumping billions into elaborately asking what a universe would be like without us, dance has always kept us in research, in practice, in theory, in the archives, in the classroom, in the world and in life.
We have Diana Taylor who has been telling us for over two decades that what we record doesn’t always align well with what we remembered to keep doing. We have Thomas DeFrantz telling us that we can refuse the call to do work we shouldn’t be asked to do in the first place, but we don’t have to be lost either. We can dance right now, together. We have Jacqueline Shea Murphy telling us that we need to listen to indigenous people, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because there is so much wisdom there asking us to stop fighting it. We have Lynn Brooks, Julie Malnig and Linda Tomko who have shown us that dance has always been a science of aspiring to our best selves, and continuing to play anyway when it doesn’t work out.
We have Judith Butler’s gender as a performance, which if we return to Vogue/Ballroom House we learn that we were meant to have fun with gender too. We have Sarah Whatley asking what are the choreographies of laws, and how do those of us who don’t fit within those laws move at all? We have André Lepecki asking how we can understand the political and police as choreographers of liberation and control, and how they propagate in themselves a dance.
We have Nadine George-Graves asking why we have a history of consuming Black bodies, and how do people of color move through such a landscape with such terrors hidden within it? Báyò Akómoláfé asks us to embody what it means to build a society today from our traditions. We have Breandán de Gallaí asking what does it mean to move with your native language, especially when so few around you speak it. And there is my friend and colleague in Romani Dance Studies, Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros, asking so courageously within communities: what is it to be hero for your own people? There are thousands of people who devoted their lives to helping you not just ask who you are, but excited for you to move through the question and discover the answer in motion.
You now also have me, your neighborhood internet Gypsy, inviting you to query what is intelligence itself? If we listen to the physicists, those dance scholars of the forces of the earth, sea and sky, we can consider that we’re all made up of space, time and energy—and that these three things are inseparable. They are understood together. And notice, they didn’t say space, time and shareholder value. They didn’t say space, energy and laws or religions. Just these three simple things.
With this information let’s rewind our clock further back—and then much further back again—and try asking again what is intelligence. The building blocks of awareness—the consciousness that gives rise to intelligence—is motion itself. We don’t understand anything until we have changed position. Or we discovered after venturing forth or within. Collapsed and then got up again. What foundation of intelligence is crafted from the orbit of a star—a faithful returning? Did the first lifeforms come to be because they just are, or was it because they went looking for something? We can understand an American Bison because we can see it in a museum or dissected in a lab. But, as has been confirmed this year, Bison have meaning because of their knowledge: their massive herd migrations nourish their families and the landscape. We only need to let them roam again.
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