What is up with dancers refusing to use capital letters? "Uh... I don't know. I guess we think it's humbling or something."

What have you got to be humble about? "I guess we all think that dance has a reputation for being pretentious and inaccessible, and we're always trying to combat that reputation."

But lower-case titles are widely perceived as more pretentious, not less. "Well, I guess it was the wrong choice. One can never tell what one should do to appeal to the masses, to constantly changing fashion. If we'd capitalized the title you would have said, 'What's up with that? Do you think you're tall? Big? Grown-up? You know what you're doing?' But if we'd used capitals and lowercase we would have been indecisive, unsure of ourselves."

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Is that what it feels like to be a dancer? "Pretty much. Kind of a no-win situation. It seems like people have two perspectives on dance: You're MTV or you're Martha Graham. Either highfalutin or commercial and stupid. So we walk around with our heads hung low and say, 'I'm sorry I'm a dancer! I'm sorry!' Trying to find meaning in a tendue is hard."

What's a tendue? "It's a pointing of the foot."

Sounds like a physical punctuation mark. "It sounds serious, huh? You'd better mean something if you're going to say that. Can't just be throwing those words around."

So, what does and... uh... mean? "Just what it is. It's just space between something else. Empty space that appears to be meaningless, but perhaps it's that which has meaning. Could I be more obtuse? And somehow we're going to address that by doing tendues."

It sounds very semiotic. "I don't even know what that words means. It sounds good--I hope I'm doing it. Maybe I can use that on my next grant application. I'll call it 'Athletic! Semiotic! Dance!'"