When I took my seat at The Joyce Theater earlier this afternoon for a performance of Ayodele Casel’s “The Remix,” something felt very familiar. It was my first time in that performance space, seeing a new-to-me artist, but I couldn’t shake an overwhelming feeling of familiarity. I searched my eyes along the stage, which was dotted with cozy arrangements of chairs and pillows, a clothing rack, an old black & white style box TV. In the background, a DJ was playing music that, while not recognizable as a specific song, again felt familiar. Not quite déjà vu, but close.

The show hadn’t started yet, but some of the dancers were mingling around, stretching, moving and testing out steps. Soon, Ayodele Casel came out on stage, and began to address the audience, talking about her life and memories as a “black and Puerto Rican kid born in the Bronx,” sharing a poem she wrote referencing days spent at Nuyorican Poet’s Café in her 20s, and expressing her deep-seated childhood desire to be a part of all this (spoken with arms spread out wide over the stage, the theater), I understood that what I’d been feeling was a sense of shared memory—shared desire. A recognition of knowledge existing under the surface of the performance, which was about to tell a story so similar to my own.