I was just thinking about the perfect strangeness of his performance, his separation from gravity and from what is temporal, his saturated colors, his plastic shape-shifting identity, and his insistence on and intentionality around theatricality. And his dances: the abstraction and the symbol. I have an enduring image in my mind from an early album of his fingers specifically molded in an asymmetric shape to express messages from somewhere we don't know, have never been. His last dance, a solo in the middle of Black Star , so eerie, so loose-limbed. I was thinking of his pure, pitch-perfect spectacle, and the embodiment of spectacle through elaborate makeup and costume, with a gender fluidity that freed us all.