Filed under: art, culture | Tags: eileen galvin, erin mckenna, hold sway, james mcdevitt-stredney, leigh lotocki, mike: an exhibition featuring no place studios, no place studios, noble peach awards, noelle chun, peach district, peach district classic, sharon udo, the gallery at till dynamic fare, till dynamic fare, zachariah baird
Last night I had the opportunity to see a new exhibit at The Gallery at Till Dynamic Fare. I love this space. I’ve see exceptional performances in this space—such as Leigh Lotocki and Noelle Chun’s Hold Sway—and participated in community events hosted by Till—namely the ongoing activities of the Peach District, such as last June’s Peach District Classic, an all day party featuring a spectacular line-up of live performance where I performed in a dance worked conceived of by Zachariah Baird and Sharon Udo, and this year’s Noble Peach Awards, an award show honoring members of the Columbus community who might otherwise escape notice, where I had the honor of presenting Eileen Galvin with the award for Biggest Genderfuck. This space is already special to me, and “MIKE: an exhibition featuring No Place Studios” adds even more significance to this list.
“MIKE” is the first exhibition presenting the work of No Place Studios. These nine artists graduated from Columbus College of Art and Design in 2012, and established the studio based on friendship, rebellion, and a shared drive to create contemporary art in Columbus. This introductory exhibition of No Place Studios coincides with a kicking off of exhibitions and arts events this season at the re-instated gallery inside Till dynamic fare. This exhibit was organized by Leigh Lotocki, adding to the list great work that Leigh has done in this city.
I didn’t think I would have time to write about this show, but when I continue to be struck by work that I’ve seen a day later, I don’t know how to not respond to it in writing. There’s a lot of good work in this show, but there were several pieces that specifically captured my attention:
The first is entitled “We’re going on vacation” by Erin McKenna (2013).
Erin McKenna
we’re going on vacation
2013
altered pieces of hot tub, glitter, flocking, sculptamold, expanding foam, acrylic paint, enamel paint, vinyl, bowling ball
Erin McKenna
we’re going on vacation
2013
altered pieces of hot tub, glitter, flocking, sculptamold, expanding foam, acrylic paint, enamel paint, vinyl, bowling ball
Erin McKenna
we’re going on vacation
2013
detail
This work consists of five free standing sculptural pieces, each one a twisting topography of color, texture, scale, and luminosity, rough pinks and glittery silvers and shimmering blacks pushing against smooth, swirling teals and blues, resting on geometric puddles of highly reflective vinyl. I say resting, but these pieces don’t really rest; even stationary, they seem to turn, or rather they persistently insist that I move around them.
Constructed from altered pieces of a fiber glass hot tub, each form continually solicits my attention. As I approach it from one side, slivers and glimpses of another facet are reflected in the metallic vinyl. I am drawn around to another side by the hint and glint and glow of what I can see only partially, and once I come to this other side, the piece has changed. It is not the same shape from this side, and how its colors sit alongside one another has shifted. Here the black seems to leap out towards me between the pink and the silver. Here the beige of the fiberglass seems to wrap around and embrace the collision of pink and silver. Here the swirled acrylic blues and teals seem to wash up onto a hot glittering pink coast. Here the light is refracted differently, the shimmering glittery surfaces fragmenting the light from above into billions of twinkling points that are then caught and blurred and reflected by the metallic surface above which it sparkles. As I follow the play of light across these multiple twisting surfaces, I realize that I’m moving again, crouching to see how the piece seems to be glowing from underneath, leaning to see what else comes into view just around the curve of its side, stepping forward the see the full fragment framed by the glow from beneath. These objects are choreographing me, in a sense. It’s an indeterminate choreography, or maybe a joint improvisation, a score of movement given by the parameters of the piece. I keep moving in order to keep seeing what else this piece is showing me.
This is not the only way that I feel my body implicated into this piece: there is the unavoidable recognition of the curving ergonomic surfaces of the hot tub from which these objects have been cut. I feel how these sloping ledges and crevices might have curved against my body, supporting my reclining and sitting—not to mention the lifestyle that might afford such leisure. Or maybe this actually must be mentioned: maybe the destruction of the hot tub, the reorientation of its surfaces and supports cannot be considered apart from the lifestyles for which it was designed. The wealthy. The vacationers. The middle class who just want to treat themselves to something nice. However else these surface might have been, they can no longer support such bodies in those ways, and to the degree that the ergonomics of these surfaces were materialized through their orientation towards the surfaces of such leisurely bodies, to see them as they are now—dismembered, manipulated—I feel my own body differently as well. It’s subtle. I don’t feel myself going to pieces, but as I crouch and twist and lean and move along these surfaces with my sight, the body of mine that could press against these curves and slopes as they are now would not, could not, resemble the body for which they were initially designed.
I’m also interested in how the space gets drawn into the materials of the piece, not only in the play of light across the glitter and color and so on, but also how the room, the other art in the gallery, and the viewers get reflected in the sometimes hazy surface of the metallic vinyl. Each object seems to sit in the reflection of a distorted world, a world distorted in ways not dissimilar to the way that my body feels disrupted by the deconstruction of the shape(s) of the hot tub. I cannot tell you much about this world, except to say that it is made less familiar as it is brought into the looking-glass surfaces of McKenna’s work.
As each of these objects continues to disclose or offer more of itself to my attention, I am drawn in again and again by something like interest that bleeds into care. I am becoming invested in these objects, these materials, as they continue to unfold in my attention to them. I stay with them a little longer, and in doing so, I come to see more of them; in fact, my sense is that they come to show me more of themselves. There is something living, something almost ecological developing between us. Sustaining relations are in formation: the ongoing disclosure of the object sustains my attention. I cannot help but think that my attention, along with the attendance and attention of others gathered at this opening, sustains the circulation of these object, the production of such objects, the operation of this gallery space. Further, these relations between myself and these objects initiate and/or sustain other relations, such as social relations, the formation or sustainment of [this] community that has gathered in this space, in this neighborhood.
I have a similar experience with another work in the exhibit: James McDevitt-Stredney‘s “She was so cold to do so” (2013).
James McDevitt-Stredney
She was so cold to do so
2013
oil, graphite, enamel on panel
This painting does something similar and different with me. Like McKenna’s sculptures, this piece continually draws me into seeing more of itself, more texture, more color, more detail. Rather than moving my body around the space, it draws my eyes over and over and around its surfaces. But the effect is distinct. Here I am drawn into subtle gradients that realize the complexity of what seemed simple on first encounter. For instance, when I first came to this piece, it seemed quite simply “a white painting” with some Cy Twombly-esque graphite doodles that could, from certain angles, suggest a form, with some thick streaks of white paint, and a cluster of hot bright spray paint near the top and off of center. But as my eyes move over its surface(s), I begin to see that this white is actually many whites, many viscosities, many strokes and strata, the accumulation of many actions. Many of these whites are not “pure” white, but rather contain streaks and strains of other colors, other contaminates that are somehow subsumed into what passes as white, but that eventually disclose their presence. Although the bright spots of enamel near the top—pink and orange and yellow bursting into one another—are the most pronounced intrusions of color into what might otherwise seem simply white, they merely mark the most extreme or the most intense of such intrusions. Indeed, as the more subtle spectrums of the painting disclose themselves—the lighter whites, the whites that are more beige, the flat and grey and pink whites—the intensity or extremity of these bright spots seems relatively diminished. They aren’t the only colors on an otherwise white and graphite surface; they are colors among other colors, perhaps the most flamboyant, but deviant only amongst other deviations. Similarly, what seems like an otherwise smooth topographic plane streaked by a few thick marks of white paint in a few places reveals itself to be much more textured, the thick streaks marking the highest “elevations” on a map of other markings. This is central to how I come to experience this piece, the ongoing disclosure of differences and diversity that were not initially visible to me, the rendering of what seems like extremes—white and color, flat and raised—into a spectrum of possibilities. It becomes something about the distribution of contamination, the impossibility of purity or singularity or even duality, the realization of multiplicity.
If I follow the thought process that I started above regarding the solicitation of attention as the constitution of almost ecological sustaining relations, then “She was so cold to do so” emphasizes the further recognition of difference as part of the establishment of such relations. I could almost call this effect queer: if we understand part of the function of “queer” to be the marking of otherwise unmarked possibilities, making feasible what might otherwise be impossible, establishing a spectrum where there was initially a binary, then I might articulate my experience of these pieces alongside one another as facilitating an experience of queer [ecological] relations, in ways that move and reorient my body, in ways that make visible the initially invisible spectrum of marks and surfaces, in ways the inspire my interest, attention, and care.
Needless to say, if you’re in Columbus, I hope you have an opportunity to see this show.
It will be on view from May 10-June 9.
The Gallery at Till Dynamic Fare is located at 247 King Ave, Columbus, Ohio 43201.
There will also be a party there after Gallery Hop, with live music and more snacks in the gallery on Saturday, June 1 from 8–11pm.
I’ve started a new blog called ECOSEXUALITY: REORIENTATIONS/RETERRITORIALIZATIONS.
As I get deeper into my research project for my dissertation—writing about ecosexualities in performance—this blog will be a space in which I can collect various media and texts that I [want to] consider, and in which I can share resources that support my research.
I will continue to write here when I am writing about work that does not relate directly to my ecosexuality research, but as you can likely see over the last year’s posts, graduate school has left less and less time for this kind of writing. I still want to be able to write about live performances that I see here in Columbus, OH, when time permits, and this blog will continue to be the space in which I do so.
Thank you for reading!
Filed under: Dance | Tags: andrew graham, counterfeit madison, hold sway, leigh lotocki, noelle chun, sharon udoh, till dynamic fare
proximity
visibility
contact
they see one another
and they continue to see one another
even when their eyes are looking
elsewhere
toes seek the floor
like eyes opening out onto
hardwood vistas
and this is how each one’s mass
approaches
orbits
collapses into and pushes off of
the other’s
the excess of each exchange
is always retained
it goes somewhere
propels them into whatever comes next
with the meager force that is the
remainder
of weight and thrust and caress and push and pull
I see them seeing one another even when their eyes are looking elsewhere
seeing turns into feeling
as if it could have always been feeling all along
if only we could just get past all that distance.
this will not be a very refined piece of writing.
I’m recovering from a cold, I’m behind on grading papers…I’m behind on a lot of things.
this will be more like a response, a gesture following the gestures of HOLD SWAY, the duet choreographed and performed by Noelle Chun and Leigh Lotocki this evening at Till Dynamic Fare in Columbus, OH. there are two more performances, Saturday, November 3 at 7PM and 9PM (Neo V Gallery inside Till Dynamic Fare, 247 King Avenue).
this initial doodle of a poem (above) was how I dealt with the opening of the piece, a duet that followed text, text that suggested—among other things—that there was the possibility that there were already many duets happening, and that this duet would continue even after the performance was over. this duet is simultaneously so strong and so sensitive. both Chun and Lotocki demonstrate a such a heightened sense of where their bodies are in space, each joint and surface and ounce, how it shifts on and around its supports, and how it gives way to find support beyond itself, in the body of the other. their bodies yield forcefully—and sometimes not so forcefully—into one another, around one another, bounding and rebounding, springing into and out of one another and the floor as if all these elements were somehow caught in the gentle tug of one another’s gravity. I can’t stop watching their eyes. when they are looking at one another, they are seeing one another. there is nothing presentational about this seeing; it is not as if they are demonstrating to the audience, “we are seeing one another.” they are simply seeing. but what is exhilarating to witness is the way in which their bodies find one another, the ways their surfaces and weight meet, even when they are no longer looking at one another. even after doubtless countless rehearsals, there is a seeking out of one another as they move, a push and a fling and a soft throw out into space knowing [trusting] that they will meet one another in the air. as they make contact—shin to hip, palm to back of neck, waist thrown into arm, leg pushed into chest—I can watch as each one’s weight becomes their weight, however briefly, and together they redistribute that weight back into each body, back out into the space, down into the floor, only to follow that momentum, the remainder of their encounter, into another drop, another push, another fall or fling or spring. together, they are more, and that more carries over into their separateness, only to draw them back again into one another, together.
in the second section part of the piece, entitled “duet #2: too much too little”—with live music provided by Andrew Graham and Sharon Udoh (Counterfeit Madison)—Chun and Lotocki dance behind a screen that is about the height of their shoulder lines. a light from behind projects their dancing shadows onto the screen. tiny little tops of bodies drifting above big shadow-bodies. the distortion of the scale, the slice of the screen that bifurcates their bodies, the blending of the shadows into one another, and those precious moments in which their top halves get away from their bottom halves, and we are left with four halves, seeming to dance independently of one another: in the encounter between dancing bodies and backlight and screen and space and viewer, we all become somehow more. what I am seeing is not simply what they are dancing. the dancing meets the light, and that meeting encounters the screen, and that encounter meets the space, across which it comes into contact with me, my eyes. they said from the beginning that there was the possibility that there were already many duets going on, and in this “duet #2,” I glimpse some of the many ways in which we and our world partner one another, each of us becoming more in and through the encounter. material intra-activities, intersubjective realities, each of us—and I do not only mean the people—become apparatuses through which we are all extended and reinvented, in ways both small and big. these are the manifold duets, and certainly they continue far beyond the performance.
hold close.
pull in tight.
look at me and see me
and see me as if
you can feel me
and feel me
even when you aren’t looking at me
and see how much more we can be
when we meet across
all that distance.
Filed under: Dance | Tags: a history, angie hauser, bebe miller, coco loupe, counterfeit madison, darrell jones, eve hermann, feverhead, FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHE, from one foot to the other, velvet hearts, wexner center for the arts, zachariah baird
The last two days have been completely saturated with performance. Last night I saw the premiere of FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER: what was once digital is dead & now lives on as a dance at FEVERHEAD, a new work by CoCo Loupe and They Might Be Dancers Too (Zachariah Baird, Counterfeit Madison, and Eve Hermann), with appearances by They Might Be Dancers (Noelle Chun, Nicole Garlando, Lindsay Caddle LaPointe, Noah Demland, Leigh Lotocki, CoCo Loupe) and Karen Mozingo, with original music by Counterfeit Madison and Noah Demland. Following the performance, I made my burlesque debut with the Velvet Hearts in the Red Light Girlie Lounge at Wall Street Night Club. This afternoon I saw Bebe Miller’s new work, A History, at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Each of these experience deserves to be written, to be told through writing, but I am particularly interested in trying to articulate the play between FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER and A History, how the two are operating as a diptych in my experiences of them within the last twenty-four hours, uncovering themes and concepts that are surfacing for me within the reverberation between these dances. In both works, my attention is directed towards the dance/dancing as a form of community, towards the ways in which dances and dancing both cohere and emerge from relationships, towards the choreographic strategies that come to operate as cultural values within the community of these dancing bodies (“these” being in one instance the bodies of They Might Be Dancers Too and They Might Be Dancers, in the other instance, the bodies of the Bebe Miller Company, specifically the dancers Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones), strategies such as mutual seeing and being seen, mimicry, audience interaction, partnering, and so on. In both instances, relationships become a kind of choreographic device, or at the very least, a material within the dance making. The relationships are not (merely) the conditions of the dance; they are formative. The work of making dances come together and comes out of the relationships between people, between bodies. The pieces also do something quite different: in A History, the attention of the choreographer/company is directed towards the archive of their work together, a history of dances and dance making, and the ways in which the memory of that history lives within their bodies. The work is a “remembering remembering,” creating something now from what was then, from how “then” lives within “now.” Dating back to a working/dancing relationship that began with Verge in 2001, through Landing/Place in 2005, and Necessary Beauty in 2008, A History (in 2012) builds itself from the re-membering of the memories of years of developing and rehearsing material, years of practicing and repeating, years of bodies coming into contact with Miller’s choreography, one another’s movement and flesh and personalities, and so on. This dance emerges from their history of dancing. In fact, their bodies themselves materialized through this history, a history with and through and alongside one another. In FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER, Loupe foregrounds the dancing bodies of three individuals—Baird, Hermann, and Madison—who have only just begun their dance training this year. My attention is directed towards a horizon of potential. These three bodies entered FEVERHEAD with a lifetime of experiences, lived embodiment, habits and patterns, preferences and predilections, and through their work with Loupe, those bodies of experience have become dancing, and then they became choreography, and then they became a dance. This dance/dancing is situated alongside seasoned dancers (They Might Be Dancers et al), in a move that creates a flattening/leveling of movement experiences, emphasizing the interest—the importance even—of bodies moving with one another. Foregrounding dancers who came to dance only this year makes the concept of “dancer” not about hierarchy—those with more experience are more important—but rather emphasizes that “dancer” is truly about a willingness/eagerness to dance, to be with one another dancing.
And:
I’m dancing through my own memories.
Modern dance class with CoCo at the Dancers’ Workshop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, circa-the-early-2000s. The class is fast and difficult, and I never feel strong enough, and I am becoming intensely aware of how difficult it will be to be a dancer. We’re listening to the soundtrack from Run Lola Run. We do “G.I. Jane’s,” a series of crunches and pushups that I can never quite finish. We “shnorkle.” We do “illusions” and lots of work upside down with our legs in the air.
I know I want to dance with CoCo, for CoCo. I’ve seen a video of a piece she made with Amiti Perry called Two Arms Full Circle, and it’s the most amazing dancing I’ve every seen. I know I want to be a dancer in part because of CoCo.
Years later, I am in my junior year of college, and I present a solo at ACDF at the Ohio State University. CoCo presents an excerpt from her MFA project, In the Clear, and I fall in love with CoCo’s work all over again.
In 2008, I move to Columbus, Ohio, to start my MFA at OSU, and finally, CoCo and I live in the same city again. In the months preceding my move, I’ve been actively engaged in conversations with CoCo and others on her blog, from one foot to the other. CoCo’s blog is a lifeline to critical dance making during the year after I finished my BFA, and it is emblematic of the kinds of dialogue I desire in grad school.
In grad school (I think in the spring of 2009?), I take modern dance with CoCo again, now at OSU. I am startled by how much is familiar, how much of how CoCo moves lives in my body and my movement, and how pronounced our differences still are. I still get tired. I still don’t feel strong enough. And yet the forcefulness, the relationship of distal actions to the core of my body, the evidence of attention is the body (even when my eyes glaze over) harken back to my first modern dance classes with CoCo in Baton Rouge. I do not dance like her, but she is in the dancing that I do.
In 2009, I dance in a new work by CoCo Loupe entitled click here for slideshow or 6-8 character limit, with Eric Falck and Jeff Fouch. We are goddesses and boys and pop stars, and I am finally dancing for/with CoCo Loupe.
For years, CoCo and I watch and respond to one another’s work. We improvise together. We sometimes perform together. We sometimes take class together.
In 2011, CoCo and They Might Be Dancers start FEVERHEAD, a creative dance/arts space. They have classes and performances and workshops and exhibitions, and FEVERHEAD becomes a home for dance artists in Columbus. FEVERHEAD also becomes a home for people who are not dance artists, but who want to dance.
Last night CoCo premiered FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER, working with people who are new to dancing, building material from ideas taken from her old blog, building a dance from the improvisatory movement of Zachariah Baird, Counterfeit Madison, and Eve Hermann, where their bodies, their histories of movement, interface with these old, digital ideas. Something new happens.
The piece begins with ten performers in a line holding hands, shifting their weight from their left foot to their right foot, back again, over and over. They look at us, the audience, and we look back at them. And I am already overwhelmed by the tenderness of soft and open faces, the interdependence of bodies articulated through interlocking hands, the shifting ankles and metatarsals on the floor as bodies maintain standing (together), from one foot to the other. Zachariah (my boyfriend) is directly in front of me, and I am undone by the vulnerability that is made visible just by standing on one foot, then the other foot, then the other, and then the other. We make eye contact briefly, and he exhales audibly, and I feel myself hope that I somehow remind him to breathe. I catch Eve’s glance, and we both smile broadly. I am warmed by the gentleness and kindness of Nicole’s eyes as she scans the audience, also smiling; she is beautiful and reassuring and exudes an energetic calm. I am drawn into Noah’s stance, noticing how very still he is, how steady he seems, and wondering how that steadiness extends inwards within his inner world and outward to those hands he is holding. I watch Counterfeit, and notice that something about the space between her neck and shoulders and how she holds her chest looks as if she is barely restraining the force of her excitement and anticipation. And so on. I am falling in love with each of them.
The dance that unfolds is complex and layered, a play of attention (lots of watching one another), imitation, repetition, and proximity. I watch them watching one another, watching me.
I can’t watch CoCo without feeling the swell of history, the “us” that is “me,” her dancing body in my dancing body; I never can. I can’t help but think that we are so much softer now than we were then, and how remarkable that is. And here she is surrounded by (other) dancing bodies that she has inspired, and that have inspired her.
This dance does critical work, flattening the plane in which movement is appreciated, playing with the roles of performers and spectators, experimenting with perception through the alignments of bodies, music, lights, and text.
But would it be too sentimental to say that it is more about love? That when I’m watching, all I care about is how much I appreciate each of these performers, the nuances and individualities that only find expression in the context of one another, in the repetition of phrases and the mimicry of movement, and the performances of “solos” alongside one another. That I feel a part of something so simple and profound just in watching someone else watching. That I am honored to see bodies excited to be dancing. That it’s all about relationships and what is produced in-between: how CoCo and I go back so far, how CoCo told Zachariah that he needed to meet me, how Leigh told Counterfeit and Zachariah about FEVERHEAD, how Eve found her way to FEVERHEAD, and how just by their persistence in taking class and their insistence to move—to dance—CoCo was inspired to make a dance, how the room was filled with people who know and love someone(s) in this piece, and how this dance is the site of so many relational articulations…
I apologize.
This dance deserves to be described. How they never stop watching one another, seeing one another, both while they are dancing , and while they are sitting on the sidelines. How I can watch as their attention—so evident in the directness of their foci—sinks into the action, into the others, in ways that are intense and serious, and in ways that sometimes erupt or dissolve into inexplicable laughter or a smile. How when they stand in line, their feet rock minutely, their toes lifting away from the floor, how their toes find the floor again and press into it, just as the performers find one another palm to palm and the tendons of their wrists flex as they press into one another. How the shove of Zachariah’s weight into a lunge tangibly softens into care as he approaches the floor, and how at other times he never quite settles into the ground, quick to push back out of it as soon as his weight shifts into it. How his fingers seem to direct his shoulders, lifting and falling and reaching together. How the precision and clarity of Eve’s lines exude incredible power, and how when she suddenly stops, alone in the middle of the space with her back to me as the others move to the sides, she seems small for the first time all evening. How Counterfeit seems so strong and steady, and how her limbs reach and fling and fly with such freedom, anchored to the strength of her core. How every joint in Leigh’s body seems to rotate around and orbit every other, as if her flesh is wrapped around a constellation that is constantly reconfiguring itself. How Noelle can stand on one leg and shift her weight dramatically in every which way, while still never losing track of where her support presses into the earth (and where it presses back into her). How Karen seems to be crafting, literally sculpting, a different world as she dances, tenderly opening and collapsing space around her, and how I feel as if I could spend the whole duration of the piece just watching her watching.
And see, there I go again, swept down these tangents of what I feel while watching…
At the end of the piece, the giant loading dock door is raised, and the dancers run out into the parking lot. The audience turns in their seats to look through this “reverse proscenium arch” to offer their applause. It is as if in here, inside FEVERHEAD, is the “real world,” and out their, in the streets beneath the stars, out their in the world, is where they/we have been training all this time to finally perform, to finally witness one another. It is significant that this piece features three dancers who are newcomers to dance training, but their dancing does not come only from their training in the last six-to-eight months. Their recent training and the creation of this piece has simply given them skills and opportunities to dance what they had been learning and practicing all along.
We are each and all a history.
When we dance, we dance those histories. When I watch, it is my history watching.
It is a perspective of the past looking out onto a horizon of what is coming into being, where history unfolds into potential. It is a perspective that is not singular; it is defined by those standing behind and standing on either side, hand in hand. And it is not an empty horizon that is faced; it is a horizon populated by the (dancing) bodies of those with whom we are becoming.
Whether it is the dancing of bodies looking back through now to then, or whether it is the dancing of bodies only beginning to form such a history, oriented towards what might be, what could become possible, the potential of bodies dancing, for both A History and FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER, what becomes most prominent is that the dancing is dancing with. The body is always more: it is a history of dancing, it is a horizon of potential, it is the coalescence of relations and attention and awareness and contact and surface and inner worlds and outer worlds and and and and and. And with.
performance photo from FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHERphoto by Michal Mitchenson
rehearsal photo from FROM ONE FOOT TO THE OTHER; Zachariah Baird, Leigh Lotocki, Eve Hermann, and Counterfeit Madison
photo by CoCo Loupe
Bebe Miller, A History; Darrell Jones and Angie Hauser
Filed under: culture, Ontology, research | Tags: 14 years of living art, annie sprinkle, ecosex symposium II, ecosexuality, elizabeth stephens, Kim TallBear, linda montano, love art lab
I was so thrilled when Kim TallBear posted her piece of writing, “What’s in Ecosexuality for an Indigenous Scholar of ‘Nature’?” on 29 June 2012. I am so excited to see other academic scholars taking an interest in what I consider to be a significant opportunity for generating new ways of thinking and making our world, bringing ecosexuality into contact with a range of disciplinary perspectives, and allowing for what Donna Haraway and Karen Barad might call “diffractive” readings between them. TallBear does an excellent job in opening up this topic of conversation, and I hope you take a moment to read what she’s written, as well her addendum, and the comment thread that is developing.
This afternoon, I finally took a few minutes to make my own meager contribution to this discussion, which I am posting below. Besides my scattered musings on ecosexuality on this blog, a few conference presentations, a few papers, and a chapter for an anthology that is currently in the editing process, I haven’t had very much opportunity to share my work on ecosexuality with a broader audience. Eventually, ecosexuality in performance will be the project of my disseration, which I’ll start sometime in the spring. Until then, here are some glimpses of what I’ve been thinking:
I want to first say THANK YOU to Kim for authoring what I think is one of the most sophisticated academic accounts of ecosexuality that I’ve yet encountered. I had the honor of presenting my research alongside Praba Pilar, Jennifer Reed, and Sha LaBare on the “Theories of Ecosex” panel at the EcoSex Symposium II in June 2011, and I was excited by the ways in which each of their work rigorously considered the social, political, and personal implications of ecosexuality. The movement around ecosexuality includes a broad spectrum of voices, perspectives, practices, and personal histories. I’ve met artists, activists, academics, and allies, each with subtle and dramatically different inflections in their articulation of what ecosexuality can be, and I think it is great that this movement holds a space for so much difference. At the same time, I have felt discontent at times—a discontentment tempered with an excitement towards the work to be done—with the lack of critical rigor within these discussions, at the symposium, at the weddings (I performed in the Purple Wedding to the Appalachian Mountains and the White Wedding to the Sun), and on the Ecosex, Sexecology, and Sustainable Love facebook group. Far too often, I’ve felt that unquestioned assumptions are being reinscribed and invested with cultural currency through the use of terms like “nature,” “sex,” gender categories, specific (or ambiguous) spiritual traditions, and so on. To be clear, I’m not opposed to these terms themselves; rather, I’ve been resistant to some of the uncritical patterns of their use in discussions around ecosexuality. In this piece of writing, Kim has opened up many of these terms and invited critical attention to both how they are operating within ecosexuality, as well as the potential within ecosexuality to significantly reconfigure how we understand the world in and through such terms.
I also sympathized a lot with Kim’s statement, “…encounters with ecosexuality this past year, it turns out, constitute a pivotal intellectual moment of growth for me.” I remember when I first encountered ecosexuality in Beth and Annie’s work in SF in 2009, interviewing them at their Sexecology exhibit at Femina Potens. I had been awarded a grant to see their work and to interview them about more general themes relating to the intersection of life and art practices. However, when I arrived at the gallery, when I encountered their work—the ephemera from the 2008 Green Wedding and the 2009 Blue Weddings, as well as new ecosexual collages and photographs and videos—and listened to them speak, something began to shift. I could sense that there was something important about this term/idea/identity/practice of “ecosexuality.” And I’ve spent the last three years continuing to articulate that importance to myself and to others in various writings, conferences presentations, performances, and formal and informal discussions.
While reading Kim’s piece, I felt a response to the suggestion that, “On the other hand, some of my UC Berkeley students probably do get turned on by trees if they open up their minds to think about it that way.” This “opening up their minds” is something I address more below, but here is raises the questions: What constitutes getting turned on? Where and how are we drawing the lines between various forms of contact and encounter, states of excitation and attraction? If the parameters of what counts as sex and sexuality blossom out into new variations and possibilities for contact between bodies, flows, and all sorts of material-semiotic actants that participate in the proliferation of life and livability within our world, how might we find ourselves reoriented towards that world—bees and trees and seas and flowers and rocks and all sorts of animals and so on and so on and so on—in ways that generate new possibilities for action? I feel that Beth and Annie’s work, among others, is explicitly reconfiguring the potential for what sex and sexuality can be within a whole spectrum of encounters between bodies (see their ecosexual herstories, among other work).
Most of all, I appreciate Kim’s direction of attention towards “pervasive boundaries and hardened [binary] categories that structure our minds … and our world today.” In my ongoing exploration of what ecosexuality is and can be, where it occurs, and what it accomplishes in through its enactment, I come again and again to the ways in which it restructures the very grounds from which we think and (reiteratively) produce our world. In addition to the structural boundaries between nature/culture, animal/human, female/male, queer/straight, nonwhite/white, and so on, I am aware of the ways in which these categories get deployed towards social/political ends. For instance, the complex alignments of “nature” or “the natural” with purity and “the unnatural” with contamination and/or “culture,” in tension perhaps with alignments of the animal with the savage, the unevolved, or hedonistic, and the human with the rational pinnacle of evolution and culture. Or the centrality of sex and sexuality with psychoanalytic accounts of the formation of the subject, or within legal discourses around rights and representations as they relate to identity. Or even the model within discourses like environmental management that figures the human as somehow outside of environmental conditions which then must be controlled and/or engineered, as if from the outside. The point I am trying to make is that what I find exciting about ecosexuality, specifically Beth and Annie’s performances of ecosexuality, but others as well, is that it does not/cannot operate within these pervasive normative categories that structure who we are, how we think, and what actions are available to us from such perspectival positions. I believe that ecosexuality—or, as I’ve come to prefer in my own work, ecosexualities—operate from new ontological grounds, new ways of conceptualizing the living material world, new forms of sex and sexuality that have profound implications for the understanding of “the human subject”—implications that might even include abandoning this model for articulating life and activity—and thus new routes along which to consider life, livability, and ethical responsibility as a participant in the production of the world.
Regarding the issue of “new age” in ecosexuality: In my own writing and presentations about ecosexuality, one place that I’ve encountered accusations or observations of what has been called “new age” in the Love Art Lab work specifically is in the projects’ use of the chakra system (which stems from various branches of yogic/tantric philosophy and practice) as its organizational logic. This format was in homage to Linda Montano’s 14 Years of Living Art, which has itself been called new age. I have little interest in determining whether something “is” or “is not” “new age”; that term is slippery. Rather, I think there could be value in interrogating the effects of that term in relation to this work, or to ecosexuality more generally. What does it DO to call this work new age? What does it DO to deny that category? Where is appropriation at play, and what are the effects of those appropriation? What discursive traditions are being invoked/incorporated into the work through such appropriations/citations/iterations/etc.? And so on. Certainly whenever appropriation comes up, there is the potential for ethical dilemma or even injury. Yet appropriation itself cannot become demonized; it is a well-worn practice in the development of innumerable species of human and nonhuman naturecultures. I appreciate Kim’s advocacy for “caution” around appropriation in her original post. I think caution and care are more productive modes of approach than moralizing accusations of right and wrong. I think a productive orientation towards the places at which ecosexuality and ecosexual practices incorporates disciplinary/cultural traditions is to ask, “What are the effects of such incorporations, and what are our responsibilities towards those effects and those affected by them?”
Lastly, I wanted to mention a few authors/texts that have profoundly influenced my thinking on ecosexuality, just to invoke them in the dialogic developing here:
-Donna J. Haraway (almost all of her work)
-Elizabeth Grosz (specifically her books Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art; and Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth)
-Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
-Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
-David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous
-Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others
-Judith Butler’s “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street”
Kim, thank you again for such a thoughtful piece of writing and for opening up this conversation in such critical ways, and thank you Beth and Annie for pioneering this road down which each of us have turned.
Be well.
Filed under: culture | Tags: abigail zbikowski, billy castro, billy castro does the mission, courtney trouble, Dance, david thill, jiz lee, pink and white productions, porn, queer porn, queerpornTV, quinn valentine, shine louise houston, sophia st. james, syd blakovich, the crash pad, zachariah baird
FRIDAY June 1 at 7:00pm
Pomerene Hall, Room 316 OSU Campus
We invite you to come experience three new works-in-progress by choreographers Abigail Zbikowski, Michael J. Morris with Zachariah Baird, and David Thill with Anna House.
This event if FREE and open to the public. We hope to see you there.
Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/332498653485167/
I will be presenting a new piece tentatively entitled “horizontal materiality: butler’s lesbian phallus, haraway’s cyborg, and preciado’s dildonics.” I’m honored to be performing this piece with my lovefriend Zachariah Baird, and to be sharing a showing with such talented choreographers as Abby and David. If you’re in the Columbus area, I hope you can make it!
PRIDE, PORN, PLEASURE: a QUEER PORN SCREENING and G-SPOT WORKSHOP at FEVERHEAD
Sunday, June 3, 2012
5:00pm-7:30pm
18+ age limit
suggested donation $2-5
Location: FEVERHEAD, 1199 Goodale Blvd, Columbus, OH
Join us for a queer porn screening presenting work by directors Shine Louise Houston and Courtney Trouble, curated and facilitated by Michael J. Morris, followed by a g-spot workshop with porn performer Nikki Hearts.
ABOUT THE SCREENING:
If we consider pornography to be an archive of human sexual behavior, queer porn makes important social contributions by giving representation to bodies, sexualities, and sex that go otherwise unacknowledged and often disavowed within our society’s mainstream cultural productions. In a society in which bodies/people are identified by markers such as gender, sex, and sexuality; in which rights and value are mediated on the bases of these identifications; and in which media—including pornography—plays significant roles in shaping our perceptions of both ourselves and of others: the production and screening of this material takes on substantial social and political dimensions. We invite you to come enjoy a sampling of sexy scenes by award-winning filmmakers and performers, to take part in dialogue about the social and cultural relevance of this work, and to consider pornography as a productive site of knowledge in addition to its erotic functions.
We will be screening scenes from Courtney Trouble/Tina Horn’s QueerPornTV.com with Sophia St. James and Quinn Valentine, Courtney Trouble’s Billy Castro Does the Mission with Billy Castro, and Shine Louise Houston’s The Crash Pad with Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich.
For more information about the screening, contact Michael at morris.787@osu.edu
Michael J. Morris is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Associate in the Department of Dance at the Ohio State University, doing research in the areas of performance, sexuality, and queer theories of the body.
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP:
Staying with the theme of taking pride and finding pleasure in bodies, Nikki Hearts will be leading a g-spot workshop. In the workshop, we’ll cover everything from how to find your and/or your partner’s g-spot, to the best positions and products to stimulate it, focusing on the range of pleasures you can achieve.
For more information about the workshop, contact Nikki at NikkiHeartsxxx@gmail.com
Nikki Hearts is an androgynous porn star and midwest native, currently traveling between the West Coast and NYC making films with the best of the queer porn genre.
This event is made possible because of the generous permissions of Shine Louise Houston and Pink and White Productions, and Courtney Trouble and Queer Porn TV, and the support of Queer Behavior.
Trailers/More Info:
QueerPornTV.com with Sophia St. James and Quinn Valentine: http://queerporn.tv/wp/sophia-st-james-and-quinn-valentine-part-two
Courtney Trouble’s Billy Castro Does the Mission: http://courtneytrouble.com/store/index.php?route=product%2Fproduct&product_id=72
Shine Louise Houston’s The Crash Pad: http://pinkwhite.biz/PWWP/reviews/the-crash-pad/
Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/184441321678164/
Filed under: Dance | Tags: Synchronous Objects, William Forsythe, Norah Zuniga-Shaw, gilles deleuze, deterritorialization, wexner center for the arts, john jasperse, canyon, elizabeth grosz, Chaos Territory Art: deleuze and the framing of the earth, lindsay clark, kennis hawkins, burr johnson, john sorenson jolink, hahn rowe, tony orrico, james clotfelter
Photo by Tony Orrico
My experience of John Jasperse‘s Canyon, performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts on 28 April 2012, is a play of territories at the precipice of chaos, a shifting superimposition of structures and organizations—of bodies, of time, of space—that enact opportunities for disruption, deterritorialization, and disorganization, and a gesturing towards a fullness of that provides the very grounds from which organizations like “bodies,” “time,” and “space” emerge. My vocabulary here is particular, and it is worth clarifying at the front end. In watching Canyon, I am immediately struck by the multiple dimensions that are at play within the work, not simply “space,” “time,” “bodies,” etc.—fundamental elements of dance/choreography—but the particular structures through which these elements take on definition. I think of these structures as territories, following Deleuze and Guattari. Elizabeth Grosz, discussing Deleuze, writes, “… the constitution of territory is the fabrication of the space in which sensations may emerge, from which a rhythm, a tone, coloring, weight, texture may be extracted and moved elsewhere, may function for its own sake, may resonate for the sake of intensity alone. And, equally, insofar as its primordial impulse is the creation of territory in both the natural and human worlds, art is also capable of that destruction and deformation that destroys territories and enables them to revert to the chaos from which they were temporarily wrenched. Framing and deframing become art’s modes of territorialization and deterritorialization through sensation; framing becomes the means by which the plane of composition composes, deframing its modes of upheaval and transformation” (Grosz 12-13). Sitting in the audience in the Wexner Performance Space, I am met with a collection of such framings, mappings, and organizations: a white Marley floor set askew (not parallel to the walls); a line of bright orange flags—themselves reminiscent of staking claim to land as a new “territory”—dividing the floor into two halves; structuring of the space accomplished through lighting (lighting design by James Clotfelter), inscribing blurry delineations of brightness and shadow; and perhaps most overtly of all, sprawling linear compositions in fluorescent tape traversing the walls and floor (visual design by Tony Orrico). Each of these materials suggests a mode in which the space has been organized or territorialized, a system through which structures have framed (and in doing so, produced) “space.” These various territories do not describe the same space; rather, they function as divergent structures superimposed on one another offering multiple accounts of space, each organization a route for disorganization when considered through a different logic. The lights do not territorialize spaces that reside within the bounds of the lines of tape; the lines of tape do not align with the rectangular Marley floor nor the rectangular architecture of the space; the line of flags cuts through these various other territories; and so on. In this sense, the superimposition of territories effects a series of deterritorializations, each structure producing a rupture in the others, each exceeding the logic of the others. This dense layering of territories/organizations/structures produces the opportunities for their own undoing. Grosz goes on to write, “… art is not only the movement of territorialization … it is also the converse movement, that of deterritorialization, of cutting through territories, breaking up systems of enclosure and performance, traversing territory in order to retouch chaos, enabling something mad, asystematic, something of the chaotic outside to reassert and restore itself in and through the body, through works and events that impact the body” (Grosz 18). At these sites of rupture, where these various territories cut through one another, I am brought close to something, what Grosz calls “chaos”: it is that full potential that provides the very conditions for extracting experiences and concepts such as “space.” It is at the collision between these territories where I glimpse their undoing, where I brush up against chaos and “the beyond.”
And the performance has not even started yet.
As the sound score begins, dancers come running through the audience into the space. The dancing feels familiar. It is exquisitely precise; it springs lightly and circles and swings, almost entirely vertical, and always with a particularity that feels both powerful and measured. At first I think that the familiarity of these vocabularies feels generic, then something happens: I notice the spatial pathways of these dancers, juxtaposed over and against the lines drawn on the floor and walls. They move with precision, yet it is precisely not the paths traced out along these lines. Between the “territory” of these highly organized bodies—organized both in the clarity of the choreography, but also in the evident regulation of their training—and the tape, the lights, the demarcation of the Marley floor space, the architecture, I falter. These frameworks or systems of organization (or, again, territories) each provide a way to see and structure the space, and they do not align. They do not operate through the same logic, and thus they continually cleave through one another. Bodies fall into temporary lines with one another, but they are lines that intersect and extend through other lines (light, tape, Marley, cement, flags) in the space. In this sense, what seems familiar or even generic takes on new, unexpected properties. The movement—however familiar it might feel—enacts an unfamiliar operation in the disruption/deterritorialization of other versions of the space, and in doing so, makes the movement itself no longer what it might have seemed to be.
Space is not the only element that is produced through these various forms of organization: these bodies, as bodies do, are moving in/through time. Their movements repeat, and the rhythms of their repetitions segment time, as does the music, and the time produced through the movement of bodies and the repetition of those movements is not always the same as the time that is produced through the complex rhythmic structures of the sound score (composed by Hahn Rowe). These temporal territories deterritorialize one another (or, at the very least, suggest routes—”lines of flight”—along which deterritorialization might be accomplished), and in doing so, I brush up once again with that from which time becomes.
Somewhere between time and space, I encounter the alignments of bodies: dancers coming into synch with one another, sometimes in brief or extended unison, sometime in shared timing of different gestures, sometimes in shared or similar vocabulary that is not in synch with one another. [William Forsythe and Norah Zuniga Shaw define “alignments” usefully in their introduction to the Synchronous Objects project: “Alignments are short instances of synchronization between dancers in which their actions share some, but not necessarily all, attributes. Manifested as analogous shapes, related timings, or corresponding directional flows, alignments occur in every moment of the dance and are constantly shifting throughout the group.”] In these moments of alignment between bodies, fleeting territories emerge, briefly establishing logics capable of holding these dancing bodies together, traversing other configurations of time and space, while also interrupting the clear/stable individuation of bodies on stage.
At a pivotal moment in the piece, the performers distribute themselves across the stage, pulling up the fluorescent orange tape that has traversed the white Marley throughout the performance. This is the first time that these bodies have moved along these lines, taking on the organization of these marks, but they do so only within the very moment that they become unmarked. This is breathtaking, the mundane task of pulling up tape demonstrating something of becoming unmarked/disorganized/smooth in the very moment of reiterating/retracing the given marks. I think of Judith Butler’s suggestion that the opportunity for the subversion of performative regimes is in the repetition of those very performatives. The repetition is the site of agency, the point at which the doing can become undone. The strips of tape peel and snap off the floor, into the air, and are rolled into great balls. So much happens in these moments: following these lines, the lines become undone; the two-dimensional moves suddenly through the air, three-dimensionally, and coheres as haphazard clumps. The linear formations are made to break with their own logic, rapidly transitioning into new states, themselves becoming the tools for their own deterritorialization. Something similar happens with the standing flags throughout the piece: at various points, dancers reconfigure these flags, and in doing so, simultaneously produce new [organizations of] spaces while undoing the spaces that had been described by the flags only moments earlier.
These are the mechanisms of the piece, these various structures intersecting and undoing one another and themselves. But throughout it all, there is the suggestion of something more, something beyond, what Grosz calls “chaos”: “Chaos is not the absence of order but rather the fullness or plethora that, depending on its uneven speed, force, and intensity, is the condition both for any model or activity and for the undoing and transformation of such models or activities. This concept of chaos is also known or invoked through the concepts of: the outside, the real, the virtual, the world, materiality, nature, totality, the cosmos, each of which is a narrowing and specification of chaos from a particular point of view. Chaos cannot be identified with any one of these terms, but is the very condition under which such terms are capable of being confused, the point of their overlap and intensification” (Grosz 26-27). In Canyon, this chaos is most articulate to me in that which is beyond, that which is out of bounds, out of reach, out of sight, off balance, just beyond what is accounted for within the available logics of time and space and bodies, just beyond what is demarcated by the choreography, the lights, the floor, the visual designs, etc. The beyond/chaos operates constantly at the edges of the territories, and I catch glimpses of it in their mutual disruption, but it is perhaps physicalized most overtly in the ridge on the floor at the edge of the performance space: the Marley floor takes on a kind of topographical elevation, inclining upward into a short roll near the far “upstage” edge (see photos). Throughout the performance, dancers and objects move over this ridge to disappear behind it. Quite literally, we were shown where visibility ends and unseeable/unforeseeable possibilities exceed both the visible as well as the floor space. Similarly, dancers frequently enter and exit the space through the audience seating, simultaneously extending the “performance space” and—depending on where one was sitting—crossing out of sight. In these moments, I became keenly aware of what was beyond this organization—“the performance”—and the liminal space at the margins of what is included within the time/space of the performance. This was for me the ongoing brush with chaos between and beyond the intense proliferation of organization(s) within the work.
Photo by Tony Orrico
Finally, this sense of “the beyond” is articulated throughout the dancing bodies of the work. Time and again, dancers (Lindsay Clark, Kennis Hawkins, John Jasperse, Burr Johnson, and John Sorenson Jolink) perform at the edges of their balance (there is a lot of stumbling in this piece), at the edges of unison, at the edges of alignment, at the edges of clear geometric spatial formations, at the edges of stability; frequently, they fall or spill or are thrown or slide into this “beyond,” into excess, off balance, no longer fully in control, not quite in unison, no longer in a straight line. I love the moments of the dance in which the dancers seem to to drift and wander, with drifting foci and limp bodies, somewhere between intoxication and a dream stake, a kind of a wandering about wonder that does not clearly define its trajectory, that does not rigidly contain these bodies. The limits of clear organizations/structures/territories—again, of balance, of unison, of alignment, of spatial formations, of stability, etc.—are explicated through these excesses. This is what lingers with me as the night wears on: the sense of what exists just beyond how this moment is structured, the specter of chaos as the rich, full ground from which territories—those various ways in which my body, this space, this time, my sense of self, my geographical situation, etc. etc. etc.—take on precarious constitution. This is not to disparage organization or structure or territory; these are the strategies through which we navigate our experience and our worlds; these are the strategies with which dances—all art, in fact—are made. Rather, there is a quiet hopefulness in the lingering effect of Canyon, an awareness of the conditionality, contingency, and precarity of such structures, a persistent sense of what exceeds these frames, of hovering at the edge of what else (and how else) might be possible, between and beyond.
Cited: Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York: Columbia U P, 2008.
