When Román Baca was serving as a Marine in Iraq in 2005, he didn’t tell many people what kind of work he had done before the war. He had tried that in boot camp, and it hadn’t gone well. So when his best friend in the platoon asked him why he seemed so interested in local dance practices, he hesitated before admitting the truth: He was a ballet dancer.
Baca’s friend wasn’t bothered by the revelation. So Baca told him his crazy idea: to translate their wartime experiences into dance.
Eventually, that crazy idea became Baca’s life. With his wife, Lisa Fitzgerald, he founded Exit12 Dance Company, which makes and performs works about military experience. What started as a way for Baca to deal with his trauma has expanded into a mission to help other veterans deal with theirs — through dance.
In recent weeks, a group of veterans and family members of veterans, ranging in age and physical ability, has been gathering in the belly of the U.S.S. Intrepid, an aircraft carrier turned museum on the Hudson River. Using various improvisational exercises, they have been creating a dance work they will perform on May 30 on the ship (on the flight deck, weather permitting). More important than that performance, though, is the process.
Baca sees the workshops as a corrective for military training. “To make a person respond immediately to orders and commit acts of violence, military training changes your identity,” he said. “It removes everything that defines a person” — your clothing, your haircut — “and then it changes you through physical exercises, repetitive motion and powerful brain-body connections.”
Baca, who has been leading these workshops since 2011, recalled a moment from one: Everett Cox, a Vietnam War veteran who had kept away from everything military for decades, responded to a prompt of action verbs by expertly stabbing and slashing with an invisible bayonet. His long-unused training was intact in muscle memory.
Another time, Baca was choreographing a military exercise sequence and directed his dancers to yell “kill” with every motion. When Fitzgerald questioned if that creative decision might have been a bit much, Baca explained that he was only being accurate: Coupling all actions with the word “kill” was part of boot camp.
“That’s absolutely needed when you are in uniform,” he said. “But what do you do with that after you get home?”
The workshops use physical exercises to help restore what Baca, borrowing a term from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, called narrative identity. “You start to tell people who you are and parts of your story and then you listen to others do the same,” he said.
“A lot of trauma survivors will say that you never fully heal,” he added. But as evidence of how the process can work, he pointed to the experience of Cox, who returned from service in Vietnam feeling so guilty and ashamed that he did not consider himself a veteran. “I lost my mind in Vietnam” is how Cox put it to me.
For nearly 40 years, Cox, who took drugs and attempted suicide, tried to lock away what had happened. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic; one psychiatrist told him he was incurably insane. Then, in 2010, he attended a retreat for veterans at the Omega Institute, a holistic wellness center in the Hudson Valley. “It changed my life,” he said. For the first time, he began to talk about his wartime experiences, and to write about them, and to cry.
Soon after, in a writing workshop called Warrior Writers, Cox met Baca, who was looking for volunteers for a dance offshoot. Cox signed up. “I’m stiff and awkward,” he said, “but Román had a way of making us feel comfortable.” Cox went back for workshop after workshop with Baca.
“If you’re holding a war in, it takes a lot of energy,” he said. “And if you want to loosen that up, it also takes a lot of energy.”
During one session, Baca directed the participants to map out and physicalize part of their story. Cox took himself back to Vietnam, and the motions of his body stirred up buried memories. “I felt I was there,” he said. “I was screaming. I was losing my mind.”
“But it wasn’t 1969,” he added. “I was safe. There was no real danger. I could go home and sleep without nightmares.”
The workshops, Cox said, helped him separate himself from that experience. “I could look at it, and that was very helpful,” he said. He is not participating in this year’s workshop only because he is now living the good life with his romantic partner in Paris.
The experience of the workshops need not be so extreme, and most of the time, it isn’t. “Nobody’s just going to step into a space and be vulnerable,” Baca said. “The best way to build trust is through play, laughter and joy.”
Most of the exercises are variations of games you might encounter in an amateur theater class or corporate team-building retreat: make a little dance that goes with your first name, pretend to be an animal, guide other participants through part of your story follow-the-leader style.
Still, the workshops have emerged from a deeply transformative experience: Baca’s. He started dancing at 17, when a crush on a girl led him to an Albuquerque dance studio that offered scholarships to boys. He studied hip-hop, jazz and ballet, performed in musicals and got another scholarship — to the Nutmeg Ballet Conservatory in Connecticut.
After he graduated, he performed with several small ballet troupes. But he felt called to the service. His grandfather was a veteran. So were uncles and his soccer coach. In 2000, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Another reason: “I thought it would change the negative perceptions others had of me as a male dancer.”
Boot camp was tough, Baca said, but “I had some Russian ballet teachers who yelled more, hit me more and asked for more physically.”
He joined the Reserves, which gave him time to continue dancing. His unit was almost deployed to Afghanistan in 2001, then in 2005 it was deployed to Iraq: more precisely, to Falluja, then one of the deadliest zones of the conflict.
The strangest part of war, he said, was the feeling of being in it and not being in it. At the base, “inside the wire,” Baca called it, a surreal normality: steak and ice cream and laundry service. Outside, chaos and terror: improvised explosive devices, split-second decisions whether to pull the trigger, buddies getting blown up.
“One Iraqi interpreter brought me videos of Iraqi dance,” he said. “And another was a break dancer. That’s funny and cool, and yet it was war. I still struggle to make sense of that experience, how to be a Marine in a war zone and still be a human being.”
After he returned to Connecticut, Baca thought he was done with dance. He got a day job, bought a condo and told Fitzgerald, a girlfriend he had met at the conservatory before he deployed, that he wanted to get serious. “I was trying to be responsible, and I thought I was killing it,” he said.
Fitzgerald saw something else. “The man who came home was a different person,” she said. He was depressed, angry, emotionally closed off.
“She was seeing the things I had learned in the Marine Corps,” Baca said. “It was coming out reactively. It was how I felt I needed to behave to stay safe.”
Desperate to help, Fitzgerald asked Baca what he would do if he could do anything. His answer: start a dance company.
That’s what they did, gathering a group of dancers and trying out choreography.
“It was Roman’s way back to himself,” Fitzgerald said.
The workshops came into the picture in 2011, after a Marine from Baca’s platoon killed himself. “There’s got to be more that I can do to help,” he recalled thinking. He applied for a fellowship with the goal of learning about arts outreach. The Battery Dance Company sent him on a State Department-sponsored trip to conduct dance workshops with youth in Iraq.
“We used improvisational tools to turn the movements the students already knew into a dance piece about them and their stories,” he said. “And I thought, ‘If this can happen here, we can do it at home with veterans.’”
He started by attending writing workshops, first bringing in dancers to set the veterans’ words to movement, then asking the veterans to suggest movement and move themselves. Exit12 performed on the Intrepid as early as 2012, and held its first workshop there in 2023, after both organizations were awarded a Creative Forces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Now that the N.E.A. has come under attack, Baca said he is worried about the viability of future workshops.)
Many participants find out about the Exit12 sessions through other programs for veterans. But dancing has distinct effects, they said.
“I did talk therapy for so long that I felt, ‘Clearly, talking isn’t going to do it,’” said Shadequa Hampton, who served as a Marine from 2009 to 2015, partly in Afghanistan. “Dancing is scary, since I never know what my body is going to do, but it allows you to step outside of yourself.”
Monique Arrucci, whose eight years in the Army included wartime service in Iraq (2004-5), is back this year for her third workshop. During the first, she said, “I was a real hot mess,” suffering from anxiety, depression, migraines. “My movements were so sharp, because I was like, ‘This is my pain. And this is my pain again.’”
Those exercises were releasing trauma, Arrucci said, as well as building confidence: “You don’t have to know how to dance. You just move however you feel and let something out that’s inside you.”
“You know you’re among veterans, and that they’ll understand you,” she added. “Putting the dance together is like completing a mission together, and performing it is like sharing our stories with the world.”
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