Filed under: culture, Dance | Tags: abigail zbikowski, baker & tarpaga dance project, beautiful struggle, d. sabela grimes, dante brown, esther baker-tarpaga, gender, king arts complex, nick fanscher, olivier tarpaga, peggy phelan, race, siobhan b. somerville
Danté Brown, Esther Baker-Tarpaga, and Abigail Zbikowski
photo by Nick Fanscher
The Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project’s Beautiful Struggle premiered at the King Arts Complex Pythian Theatre on 13 April 2012. While my interest is to write about the piece itself—choreographed/directed by Esther Baker-Tarpaga in collaboration with performers Abigail Zbikowski, Danté Brown, Olivier Tarpaga, and D. Sabela Grimes—I feel I must first address the title and framing of the piece. Beautiful Struggle is said (by way of promotional materials and the program) to ask “audiences to think about the visibility and invisibility of race and privilege and how violence and love live on in the body’s memories.” It is important to me that when directed towards such complex issues as race, privilege, love, violence, visibility and invisibility, the ideas of “beauty” and “struggle” are not reduced to an antonymic binary. Beauty is not the opposite of struggle, but rather, struggle conditions a very particular kind of beauty. It is a beauty that does not come easily, and it is a beauty that is never entirely accomplished, victorious, at rest. It is a beauty that is necessarily vigorous, necessarily in tension, most likely in conflict. These conditions must not compromise the possibility of beauty; rather, I would suggest that in titling this work Beautiful Struggle, we are being asked to reconsider what is capable of being found beautiful—recognizing that “beauty” itself is never a neutral aesthetic assessment, but that aesthetics are intrinsically entangled with values, with an appreciation of a particular kind of world, and that those values take on social, political, and ethical valences. I do not feel that the title asks the viewer to be on the look out for how struggle obstructs or gives way to beauty, but rather asks us to consider the ways in which ongoing, unresolved conflict and struggle can, perhaps must, be found beautiful. This is the disposition with which I approached this work.
The piece opens with a figure crouched on table in dim light, facing away, tied to the table with ropes. Gradually the figure begins to move, and rises. The figure tied to the table (Baker-Tarpaga) struggles, but not with full force: a light trashing, a trashing that seems self conscious of is own futility. The trashing blends into undulations, swinging arms, stomping and stepping, and I begin to catch glimpses of what can be identified as citations of African dance forms. I am faced with a body—a body that seems visually legible as white and female, a body which is described to us (via spoken text in the soundscore) as a mother, as white, a body produced for us as white and female—being performed or coded with African movements, African culture. The transnationality of this body begins to appear across the surface of this body’s movements, and while nationality itself does not dislodge race—or gender for that matter—this kinetic appearance begins to gesture towards a history of formation that is not immediately legible on the surface of the skin.
The ropes constrain the movement; the body’s action is bounded from the beginning, and as the movements grow, they take on more impact. I see when they strike the limits of their range, with the ropes allowing each gesture to proceed no farther. Certainly there are complex semiotics being introduced in this image—the restraints and the table call up associations with auction blocks, execution scaffolds, go-go boxes at nightclubs, and museum pedestals; the ropes call up centuries of heretics and slaves and the bodies that were taken materially captive under such signifiers—and imagery and visual semiotics are an important aspect of this production. On first encounter, the piece seems in places more concerned with images and the visual that with movement itself. The citation and circulation of recognizable visual markers for race and gender—and in places, sexuality—provide points of departure throughout the piece; however, if the familiarity of these images holds my attention, it is because of how the choreography abandons these images for the less familiar and the less recognizable moving surfaces of the bodies on display.
The piece is predominantly bodies dancing in solo choreography, often in the company of other dancers. This brings attention to the individuation of these bodies, and perhaps, by extension, the formative histories of these bodies. Despite whatever superficial visual identifications I may make—white women, black men, for example—the solos function as a reminder that the stability and consistency of these categories depend on the reduction of bodies to one or two surface dimensions, specifically the visual (I might say, the “stationary visual”), and that such reductions are also elisions of other surfaces and dimensions along which these bodies take on complexity and differentiation. In these solos, the unique ways of moving that define each body, that make visible—however fleetingly—its training, its socialization, its cultures, remind me that these “white women” or “black men” are not merely “white” or “women” or “black” or “men,” but that each of these categories are always already run through with difference, revealing them as contingent and only ever partial. I do not mean to suggest that the complexity of racial or gender categorization can be escaped or abandoned through attention to movement or kinesthetic identity; rather, my suggestion is that in a production that so pointedly set out to address the visibility and invisibility of race, privilege, violence, love, etc., the solo movements of these dancing bodies are one strategy through which individual differences—some of which rupture within the smoothness of racial and gender categories—are made visible.
One such instance of the solo making visible a rupture in the smoothness or stability of what might have been previously ascertainable comes in a solo danced by Danté Brown. What begins as smooth, cool, and groovy moves on the dance floor dissolves into a spoken exchange at the front edge of the stage, calling out to “girls,” presumably in the audience. The monologue dissolves into a more sensuous two-step, a curving sway of the hips that eventually take Brown upstage to pose with the table now turned on its side. This moment of posing, gesturing towards sultry centerfolds and vogue balls, has a feminizing and queering effect on Brown’s body. Suddenly this is a body that no longer comfortably resides in the normative categories of “man” or, arguably, “black” (for a more comprehensive discussion of the intersection of race and sexuality, see Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture by Siobhan B. Somerville). These categories are not fully abandoned through this queering; Brown is still legible as a black man. However, the visible has been amended, and the invisible—here, a latent femininity, or queerness—has surfaced along the curves and swish of his gestures.
Yet the choreography does not become solipsistic; these bodies move through solos, but throughout the choreography bodies find alignments with other bodies through shared vocabularies, shared timing, and shared space, suggesting ways in which bodies of difference are held together, sometimes along visible lines of race and gender, and sometimes across such lines in ways that dance other groupings of bodies. What these shared choreographies accomplished is different each time, sometimes using bodies to demarcate space, sometimes creating presumably unlikely alliances—such as a strip and femininizing duet between Baker-Tarpaga and Brown that then dissolves into some kind of combat—and sometimes functioning more formally, simply showing different bodies moving together.
The demarcation of space is another way in which visibility is lent to that which is invisible. For instance, early in the piece, Brown and Zbikowski’s perform a rapid horizontal shuffling around the stage, marking off an arbitrary parameter. This is not the only time that the motions of bodies will be used to demarcate space, to trace an invisible parameter. Bodies walk in circles; they divide the stage in grids and on diagonals throughout the piece. I resist reading these instances as symbolic; I am not concerned with what it might represent that bodies are used to coalesce invisible parameters and borders on the stage space. Rather, my interest is that I as a viewer am made to see such invisible forms, patterns, and parameters, and that is accomplished through the movement of bodies dancing together. These spatial figures construct arbitrary and fleeting appearances of “insides” and “outsides,” one side and the other side, and the residues of these barely-visible geographies of the stage aggregate over the course of the choreography, showing that what was “inside” might now be “on the other side,” what was “over there” might now suddenly also be “out here.” There is a multiplicity to how space is demarcated and organized through the movements of bodies dancing together, revealing that these sorts of spatial dimensions are a positional production; they are in no way fixed, and over time intersect with other [sometimes paradoxical] positions and orientations. This is not visibility that is given in a single image, but rather that accumulates over time as an invisible residue of the visible.
Perhaps the most demonstrative performances of making visible something that does not lie in plain sight is through the use of impact throughout the choreography. Impact is first introduced in the opening scene of the dance, with the ropes tying Baker-Tarpaga to the table creating the concrete “edge” of her dancing; the source of the force of the impact is visible and concrete. Yet impact proceeds as a dominant movement motif throughout the piece, often with invisible sources, circulating through all of the performers at various points. What I mean by impact is multiple: first, I mean the force with which the movement stops, as if hitting an invisible surface. This surfaces in movements that strike suddenly, the collision of movement with the strength and control of the body. By impact, I also mean the illusion of the body being struck, performances of feigned combat throughout the piece. By “feigned,” I mean only that in these instances there are no visible opponents; the combat is an effect of a single body’s motion. I do not mean, however, that the force or even violence of these impacts is diminished for having been feigned. On the contrary, the is a poignancy to the extreme force with which bodies box with invisible opponents, jerk and thrash as if struck, and are sent tumbling and rolling across the stage space as if tossed by someone much larger in size and strength. One of the most memorable of these moments is a solo performed by Abigail Zbikowski, lit only by a floodlight handled by Baker-Tarpaga. Zbikowski begins to move with undulating, smooth and circular movement, as if her body is continually curving and sliding around itself. However, as Baker-Tarpaga approaches her with the hand-held light, her body responds violently, as if struck repeatedly from all directions. I want to emphasize that while this violence is an effect of the performer’s body on itself, this does not make the violence of these actions any less real. These sudden contractions, these rapid impacts and blows, while effected by the body also affect the body, live on in tissues. I begin to speculate about the physical costs of performing; the sometimes inherent violence of choreography—imposing, even consensually, movement on an-other body; the ways in which choreography/performance produces the body, participating in the formative history of the individual; and finally, the internalized force of social choreographies such as gender and race. It would be a stretch to say that all of this is directly addressed in these physicalizations of impact, but what can be said is that Zbikowski’s solo, and similar movement throughout the piece, show the force of the body acting on itself, a force whose source, unlike the ropes at the start of the piece, is never entirely visible.
Finally, the image that lingers with me the most as I live with my experience of the piece over the last several days is the use of the light and the front edge of the stage, both of which seem to be principally concerned with visibility (the light illuminating what can be seen a directing the viewers attention, the front edge of the stage being the precipice between the audience seeing and the performers being seen). Both elements are used almost as weapons throughout Beautiful Struggle, the bodies of performers being sent tumbling across the stage into the floor and the back wall of the stage. Both seem to suggest a physical violence to being or becoming visible, that what is or can be seen acts forcefully upon bodies. These images raise questions, even concerns, about visibility, almost a suspicion of the visible. I am reminded of Peggy Phelan’s Unmakred: the politics of performance, and her struggle with the ideology of the visible. She writes: “It is assumed that disenfranchised communities who see their members within the representational field will feel greater pride in being part of such a community and those who are not in such a community will increase their understanding of the diversity and strength of such communities. Implicit within this argument are several presumptions which bear further scrutiny: 1) Identities are visibly marked so the resemblance between the African-American on the television and the African American on the street helps the observer see they are members of the same community. Reading physical resemblance is a way of identifying community. 2) The relationship between representation and identity is linear and smoothly mimetic. What one sees is who one is. 3) If one’s mimetic likeness is not represented, one is not addressed. 4) Increased visibility equals increased power. Each presumption reflects the ideology of the visible, an ideology which erases the power of the unmarked, unspoken, and unseen” (7). Phelan attempts “to find a theory of value for that which is not ‘really’ there, that which cannot be surveyed within the boundaries of the putative real…. attempting to revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not visibly representable” (1). This seems to be the Beautiful Struggle engaged by Baker-Tarpaga and company, a discrepancy between what is seen and what is unseen, between the urge to increase visibility and the tangible apprehension of the violent power of visibility. The piece struggles between the restaging familiar tropes of visible identifications, making visible the often invisible or elided complexity of such identities, and preserving the importance of an orientation and attention to what cannot be seen, what does not lie smoothly on the surface.
Beautiful Struggle does not resolve, not should it. To resolve would suggest that resolution of the issues it addresses is possible or achievable, and such resolution does not seem to be possible, at least/especially within our current historical moment. However, this production does not grieve the unresolvability of this struggle; rather, it stages the beauty of such struggle, the aesthetic and ethical value that is possible only through sustained engagement within difference, conflict, contradiction, the visible, and the invisible.
Filed under: culture | Tags: annie sprinkle, bodies that matter, crash pad, crash pad series, daily writing practice, gender, heavenlyspire, james darling, judith butler, madison young, porn, pornography, queer porn, quinn valentine, sex, shine louise houston
I was recently inspired/challenged by one of my faculty (Dr. Harmony Bench) to begin a daily writing practice as a method for not only developing as a writer, but also in preparation for the intensive writing I will be doing for my candidacy exams and dissertation. I will not post everything I write from this daily writing practice here on the blog, but what I wrote today is something I want to share:
I am enamored with Shine Louise Houston’s work, on both her Crash Pad Series project and on her more recent endeavor, HeavenlySpire.
“HeavenlySpire is a Shine Louise Houston creation for the purpose of masculine appreciation. HeavenlySpire focuses on masculine beauty and sexuality and how it manifests on different bodies. Following the same vision as Houston’s previous projects HeavelySpire focuses on capturing genuine pleasure with a unique cinematic style.” This work is personal and intimate in ways that is traditionally considered to be antithetical to pornography. The performers are introduced as people: they discuss themselves, their sexual predilections, their appreciations of their own bodies. They set a context of individual and aesthetic appreciation in which they then display their own bodies and sexual behaviors. In a sense, it functions as portraiture. This work functions as a kind of “docu-porn” (other work with which I am familiar that would fit into this category includes Madison Young’s Fluid series and Annie Sprinkle’s Linda/Les and Annie, the first FTM trans love story/sex film, in which the re-presentations of bodies/sex/sexuality/sexual behaviors operate within the framework of personal identities), and emphasizes what I consistently consider to be one of pornography’s potential virtues: a public archive of human sexual behavior, responsible for both the documentation, preservation, and re-presentation of bodies, sex acts, and sexual (inter)subjectivities, and for the production of sexual subjectivities in the virtual and actual experiences of the spectator of pornography. Porn records and produces the ways in which people perform and understand sex, and thus themselves as sexual subjects.
HeavenlySpire as an archive does something more: in the interview segments, the performers call attention to erogenous and erotogenic zones and surfaces that exceed genital sexuality. They call attention to their forearms, their eyes, their chests, their legs, their asses, their nipples, etc. They introduce themselves in their own languages, and we are then given access to some sense of how they consider themselves as sexual beings as we encounter their displays of their own sexuality. Heavenly Spire is also radical in its treatment of gender/sex (the two being perhaps not as discrete as they may seem): in these videos, we are introduced to cis-men and trans-men, those who identify outside of the gender/sex binary of man/male/woman/female. We are asked to consider bodies both within and outside of these binaries.
Last night I watched a video featuring James Darling and Quinn Valentine. It blew my mind. It is elegant and a little campy, and one of the most illuminating artifacts of human sexuality that I have encountered in a while (although I would say that the illumination of the range of human sexuality is a mission furthered actively by Shine Louise Houston, Madison Young, Courtney Trouble, and the plethora of directors, performers, and producers in the “queer porn” genre).
In the video, the boys introduce themselves, and James confesses that he’s been checking Quinn out for a while, online. Quinn says, “You had a picture of yourself in sparkle unicorn drag, and I couldn’t resist.” They laugh. James say, “Yeah, you were the most sparkly, femme cis-boy I’d ever met, and I was just enamored immediately.” They talk about the first time they hung out (a “really fun time” in James’ shower) as “the beginning of something amazing.” They talk about what they love doing to one another: James says that he loves fucking Quinn, that he’s really into Quinn’s cock, but that he really enjoys fucking Quinn in the ass, and the sounds Quinn makes when he’s cumming; Quinn talks about going down on James—“I could get lost in your junk for days …”—and holding James while he fucks him, feeling the movement of James’ muscles; James’ facial expression; his chest. The way they look at one another while they’re talking is the way that I look at someone when I am so moved by their beauty that I can no longer contain my desire to touch them.
The scene starts in black and white, both wearing bowties, Quinn wearing fairy wings, with white feathers falling and floating in the air around them. An old time-y piano song in playing in the background, and there’s something tender and nostalgic about the romance being staged.
The music fades out as the scene saturates to color.
These boys kiss long and hard, and the way that their lips press and linger is both calm and electric, a stillness full of activity.
I won’t go into a detailed description of the video (Buy a membership to HeavenlySpire to see the video. Support queer porn.). But I do want to give attention to one moment in their scene, the moment when James penetrates Quinn. A cis-guy being penetrated by a trans-guy is something that I have never seen re-presented in a pornographic archive. Having spent my week reading Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (for the third time), I can’t encounter this scene without recalling Butler’s discussion of “the phallus” as the imaginary position characterized by its own uninhabitability. The phallus is a position of privilege and power, considered to be the ultimate signifier, the form by which the intelligibility of objects and subjects are understood. It would be easy to read the phallus as symbol of the penis, and in doing so attribute this privileged position of power (and its form) to the position of male bodies in social economies. And yet the male position is characterized (for Freud and Lacan) by the fear of castration, the anxiety of losing the phallus, an anxiety that exposes the reality of the phallus having never been fully possessed to begin with. The phallus, then, is never fully attainable, always transferable. Butler even suggests that the phallus is the very principle of erotogenic transferability, the capacity for other bodies and other organs to take on the erotogenic potential ascribed to the phallus. When James Darling dons (what looks like) the Feeldoe dildo, taking it into himself as [part of] himself, and penetrating/fucking Quinn with it, my morphological registers are disrupted. I see both of their cocks, and both organs are taken out of this penetrative configuration. The dildo functions in a way that recalls some of what I’ve read of Beatriz Preciado’s philosophy of “dildonics” which substitutes the “dildo” for the “phallus,” casting this privileged signifier not only as a commodity, but one which can be exchanged, taken in/taken on, a prosthetic device in the construction (and deconstruction) of cyborg bodies (and in our post-human era, all bodies are cyborg bodies, always already composed of [biological, psychical, cultural, social, etc.] pieces and parts in machinic systems that we stabilize/treat as stable in our reference to their corporeal coherence. Cyborg is not a secondary/compromised position of bodies that are somehow less than whole; instead, it is a position that seeks to expose the never-whole/always-open-to-completion condition of all bodies, whether they be trans or cis, whatever their range of ability, etc. Elizabeth Grosz has also written intelligently about the inherent openness of biology to cultural inter-constitution). The significance of the penis (an idealized significance that might be considered consistent with the notion of the “phallus”) is here displaced from organic material and transferred into the synthetic. Bodies become denatured in a way they liberates them from the sexed specificity. Organs lose the clarity of their significance, and in becomes free to become more ambiguous surfaces of intensities (I’m here reaching towards an understanding and application of Deleuze, a theoretical frame to which I am attracted but with which I am only familiar in a fleeting way). This sex act reconfigures bodies, giving them significance that exceeds their normative boundaries, borders that it simultaneously displaces/disrupts.
When Quinn cums, I am drawn to the noises that he makes, having been told that those noises are part of what is hot to James. As Quinn cums on James’ chest, Quinn’s appreciation of that chest is part of what makes it hot. These bodies (bodies in general?) are not only remade by re-presentation of their sexual behavior; their sexual behavior is given [part of] its significance by the exposure of its personal meaning for the performers. Through this docu-porn format, I am offered new personal experiences and understandings of sex and bodies to inhabit in my spectatorship, and in my willingness to do so, I allow this information to participate in the materialization bodies, especially as they materialize in/as sex.
This is a rough first draft, but ideas that I wanted to share.
Filed under: Dance | Tags: 2010 spring dance concert, amanda byars, betsy miller, chalk boundaries, dante brown, erik abbott-main, gender, kristen jeppsen, les noces, mair culbreth, osu
This week I have had the opportunity to see (and even participate in) so much live dance. I could not possibly write about all that these opportunities have inspired; in fact, I’m fairly certain even a partial reflection will warrant multiple posts.
To begin with, this week was the 2010 Spring Dance Concert(s) (extravaganza). Two concerts, twenty-five pieces, over four days. I will only write about a few pieces, a sampling of some of the great work being produced in the Department of Dance at OSU.
Betsy Miller’s “El Otro Lado/The Other Side” was a quirky, sultry, sassy, and often surprising exploration of movement vocabularies that recalled a range from classical character dance to burlesque, organized in lovely and memorable group movement through space (running sprints back and forth from the stage left and stage right wings, a slow counter-cross of a trio and a soloist at the end, etc.). In addition to clever dancing and beautiful dancers (Alexis del Sol, Lisa Dietz, Katy Gilmore, and Rashana Smith), Miller offered the rich opportunity of seeing beautifully hand-crafted costumes (designed and sewn by the choreographer herself) in motion.
Danté Brown’s “Chalk Boundaries” demonstrated a final incarnation of a piece long in the works. I had the opportunity to see and write about an all-male version of this piece in February, and the piece has grown immensely since then. In addition to having a cast of variously gendered bodies (which also nearly doubled the size of the cast), the complexity of the issues with which the choreography engages has grown significantly as well. Gender is one of Brown’s stated objects of exploration in the work, and in this incarnation of the piece, gender is examined, deconstructed, and reconfigured along multiple performative iterations. And on top of that, the choreography is really stunning. The opening of the piece was choreographically a reminder of the kinds of dances I love most: subtlety, stillness, punctuated by similar actions, individuated in form and timing. With beautiful lighting by Louise Eberle. The piece quickly transformed into driving group movement, in unison, perhaps offering an opportunity to recognize both a possible common state of bodiment/personhood and the intrinsic range of individual variation across bodies. In several conversations recently, I have come to recognize this as one of the values of unison: in unison we see both commonality and the inescapable disparity of individuals as demonstrated in action. The group then took on two groupings, almost organized along a binary of male and female identified bodies, with the subversion of Mair Culbreth (whose dancing provided one of the richest rewards of the evening) dancing amidst the cast of male bodies. In this simple transgression, the binary becomes subject to interrogation. Clearly bodies had been organized into two groups; the socially constructed binary would be that of gender/sex, assumed to be derived from a stable and clear division according to biological morphology. Yet this was not the division on which this binary was predicated. I was invited to question then what served as the foundation for this binary grouping, this differentiation between one group of bodies and another, demonstrated through differentiating movement material. What made these bodies different from those? Was it arbitrary? Are all binary constructions, whatever their function, possibly arbitrary? Of course I have my own conclusions to these inquiries; what I mean to articulate is that the choreography invited me to engage with these speculations.
The gamut of gender construction/subversion continued to be situated along a various groupings and relationships. Amanda Platt seemed to struggle between Chafin Seymour and Loganne Bond; might it demonstrate a sexual ambivalence? Or was this moment an address of the policing of gender along a matrix of sexuality? I saw a woman pushed between a man and another woman. It was within this configuration of bodies that they became sexual and thus gendered. A group of men were transfixed by the sensuous motion of a lone female; as she exited, she seemed to cast a kind of spell on Quentin Burley, who then became a point of resistance for Platt. A favorite moment of mine came when Platt flipped Burley onto his stomach and climbed on top of him; I had a momentary sense of her mounting him (a radical reconfiguration of sexuality and gender), a suspenseful moment that extended into Seymour’s entrance and subsequent mounting of Burley, then further, after a sequence of partnering, into Seymour’s intimate arrangement of their faces forehead to forehead. Were any of these acts overtly sexual? Perhaps not, but in the formulation of gender, sexuality and sexual orientations function as the site of production for intelligible binaries (and the subversion of these binaries). As this mini-drama unfolded, Daniel Holt entered downstage and watched. This was a powerful moment of becoming aware of my own gaze. Holt watched the play between men, touching himself all the while; I couldn’t decide if his handling of himself was an act of measuring or pleasuring, comparison, identification, or eroticism. Seymour responded by mirroring Holt, each one touching himself and looking at the other. It could have been a webcam situation, sensual, but removed by distance. Seymour’s sensuality gave way to aggression. Enter Rashana Smith and Mair Culbreth. The proceeding quartet was some of the most rewarding choreography in the piece, the relationships, the shifting mutual definitions of bodies moving so fluidly that I almost couldn’t keep up. Moments of partnering throughout became a rich device for configuring possible sexualities and genders.
The conclusion of the piece functioned for me as a contemporary remix of Nijinska’s Les Noces. Holt and Smith stood down stage right holding hands, observed (and approved) by the crowd that surrounded them. Repeatedly they broke away, throwing themselves into the arms of homosexual counterparts, to the revulsion of the crowd. Here is where the piece concluded, thrown back and forth between the accepted heterosexual union and the transgressive homosexual embraces. I was left wondering where the range between and beyond these two configurations might be, and if we were to attempt to choreograph that range of those places between and beyond, how might that be demonstrated?
Amanda Byars’ presented a charmingly powerful duet danced by Mair Culbreth and Erik Abbott-Main, entitled “If I were a weathervane and you were a flower.” Without going through a systematic description of the progression of the piece, I will offer that it was fundamentally a recognizable “love story,” a simple, home-grown, just a little outside of the school yard romance. It was subversively heterosexual, a configuration of which I could previously hardly conceive, yet Byars, Abbott-Main, and Culbreth enacted it both simply and expertly. It was consistently heterosexual, and yet there was not a single moment in which it was simply what it seemed, or what was expected. At every turn the relationship, the ways of interacting, the function of each body in contrast to the other, shifted into the unexpected. The subversive. Variously tender transgressions. It stayed light and easy, but with moments of pang: the revisiting of knocking one another to the floor, the moments of separation and coming back together, the sense of having built something (a life together?) in stacking the benches. Even in the final moment, there was a sense of separate beds, but not out of a lack of love. There was the space between, but there was also movement towards within that space.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also comment on the exquisite performances of the dancers in Byars’ piece: Culbreth and Abbott-Main were a joy to observe. The nuance and clarity with which they not only danced but invited me into the experience that they were sharing was unmatched in the course of the evening. Describing “performance quality” can be so problematic . . . but what I think I experienced from them both was a simple kind of sincerity. It was not that the representation of a relationship was “believable;” it was that there was no mask in their actions. They were simply doing, and being with one another, sincerely it felt. There was a naturalness and honesty to how I experienced what they were doing. This was a factor that was profoundly significant to the success of the piece.
Kristen Jeppsen’s duet entitled “Solve” was expert. On the surface, it was a pair of power femmes (of the Bette Porter variety, re: The L Word), dancing fierce and virtuosic movement in near unison. They were dressed in elegant blouses and tailored pin-stripe slacks. They could have been senators or CEOs, clearly evocative of some sort of upper administration. But there was much more to this piece. In addition to the sound score for the piece, the dancers (Jeppsen herself and Giovanna Andolina) spoke to one another throughout their dancing, cueing and almost, it seemed, coaching one another through their movement. It was in this speaking alongside the dancing that the real profundity of the piece revealed itself for me. They enacted a closed circuit exchange of power; their cueing and attention to one another was as if to indicate that they check in with one another and no one else. The exclusionary nature of their interaction disrupted the spectacle of it. The consistent inter-referentiality left the viewer (the legendary “male gaze”) displaced, outside of the equation that they demonstrated. The viewer’s presence felt neither necessary nor of consequence. The piece was being viewed, but felt as if it was not explicitly intended for viewing. Their dancing was for one another, and for themselves. The “dancing for themselves” was a significant attribute of my experience of this piece: these dancers took a palpable pleasure in these ways of moving; the delight of the movement was visible in their bodies. This personal and interpersonal pleasure functioned to reinforce this sense of its exclusiveness.
The speaking served other functions for me. There was a disruption of the traditional hierarchy between choreographer and dancer. The movement may have originated in/as Jeppsen, but in its transmission to Andolina, and in the democratization of its mobilization (both seeming to take on the responsibility for cueing and directing the movement during its performance), the potentially problematic power dynamic (not only the choreographer/dancer relationship, but the further complex situation in which the choreographer is also a participant in the performance).
The speaking also seemed to reveal something of dance practice, taking a kind of coaching into the performance itself, sharing an aspect of how we as dancers work in the studio into the demonstration of the dance itself.
The sound score also offered materials for further contextualization of the piece. Lines that stayed with me were something like “I can’t quire articulate . . .” and a description of a person’s fascination with a machine being more interesting than many conversations with people. This text seemed to emphasize an ineffability of the functioning of certain mechanisms. It brought me to a place of asking, “How does the mechanism of this dance function?” This question was partially answered by the speaking of the performers; but the speaking was to and for one another. I as a viewer on the second row still only heard bits and pieces; it was as if to say that the articulation of the mechanism’s function can only be known from the inside, as part of the closed circuit that the duet demonstrated. You can only ever know it in part from outside of the doing of it. Its function, its purpose, its pleasure, is all situated within the doing of the dance.
The final reward for the evening was “Though I walk, I used to fly” choreographed by Erik Abbott-Main in collaboration with the dancers in the piece, with music by Nico Muhly, and beautiful lighting by Maree ReMalia. Abbott-Main’s piece was, simply, stunning. Truly a masterpiece of formation, unison, canon, partnering, tableau, and journey through time. The crafting of the piece had the feeling of the complex precision and layering of Lar Lubovitch and Doug Varone, but with a quirkiness and curiosity of gestures that lay entirely in the unique configuration of Abbott-Main with this cast of dancers. Description of this piece is as elusive as the piece itself: constantly changing, reconfiguring itself in variations of formation and timing, flowing, swirling movements of bodies through space, their paths indirect, their arrivals always surprising and unexpected. These qualities of indirect pathways and unpredictable arrivals summarizes the most significant components of my experience with this work. But this expertly crafted motion was not perpetual; it was punctuated with the arrivals at unexpected tableaus and frieze-like formations, all imbued with a quality of near-Classical statuary. Faces were not rigid, but neither were they overtly expressive. And perhaps this relates to one of the most pervasive but expressively elusive qualities that I experienced: a kind of impermeable softness, a demeanor that is superficially approachable and intoxicating, but once swept up inside of it, maintains a sense of being outside of it. The tableaus, for all their intricacy and quirkiness, also felt austere; the motion, for all its sweeping pleasure, also read as escaping, the slipperiness of the passage of time. Nothing stays put for too long, and when you try to revisit where you once were, you realize that the “where” is no longer there; and the “you” that you experienced there has moved on as well. The piece then functioned as a demonstration of the constantly shifting and transforming condition of situationally constructed identity, the persistent motion (dissolving, diffusing, recollecting, and reforming) of situations (thus selves), an ambiguity of the present between the erasure of the past and the unpredictability of the future. And a kind of resignation from explicit identification in the face of this ambiguity. Dancers moved from grouping to grouping, pairing to pairing, action to action, as if searching for a fit, for something that might persist, eventually coming to the conclusion that everything dissolves; everyone leaves; and in the final moment a single dancer is left alone.
These were a few of the pleasures of this week.
Filed under: culture | Tags: Family Research Council, FRC, gender, hate crimes, lgbt, matthew shepard, sexuality, Tony Perkins
In response to Congress passing legislation this week that would make it a federal crime to assault an individual based on that individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, the Family Research Council issued this press release:
Washington D.C. - Family Research Council President Tony Perkins released the following statement reacting to today’s passage of “Hate Crimes” legislation as attached to the Defense Authorization Bill.
“In a slap to the face of our servicemen and women, they attached ‘hate crimes’ legislation to the final defense bill, forcing Congress to choose between expanding hate crimes or making our military go without. This hate crimes provision is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality. Expanding hate crimes puts America in lock step with the stated agenda of homosexual activists who will turn next to the so-called Employment Non-discrimination Act, followed by the repeal of the ban on homosexuality in the military and then the Defense of Marriage Act. We call on President Obama to veto this legislation which violates the principle of equal justice under the law and also infringes on the free speech rights of the American people.”
Beyond the personal and political outrage that this sort of statement provokes, I am constantly offended by the fallacious rational of this organization, one of the most vocal opponents of equality in this country. Perkins posits that this legislation could be used to eventually “silence Christians.” This assumes that the voices of Christians are motivated by bodily violence against homosexuals and gender diversity, which is simply not the case. This legislation extends federal protection to American citizens based on sexual orientation and gender expression. Perkins continually speaks of the effects to which legislation for equality may someday lead rather than commenting on the legislation itself. In this statement, Perkins demonizes this legislation by initially characterizing it as a “slap in the face of our servicemen and women,” following that characterization with foreboding commentary about the silencing of Christians and the marginalization of anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality (the assumption seems to be that it is just fine is homosexuals in this country remain marginalized). Perhaps Perkins resorts to this sort of faulty logic because it is not only absurd but seems fundamentally anti-Christian to oppose legislation that exists for the explicit purpose of protecting individuals from violent crimes. To oppose that explicit purpose is to support an allowance for continued violence. Being unable to make that statement, FRC’s press release redirects attention to a fictional future in which equality and free speech are threatened (once again, ignoring the fact that the law as it stands supports inequality).
This press release is fallacious on several counts.
Firstly, freedom of speech is not threatened by this legislation. It is legislation against crimes of “bodily injury.” And it makes a provision specifically addressing these concerns surrounding freedom of speech:
“FREE EXPRESSION- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to allow prosecution based solely upon an individual’s expression of racial, religious, political, or other beliefs or solely upon an individual’s membership in a group advocating or espousing such beliefs.”
Secondly, this legislation does not create inequality of justice, it equalizes the treatment of justice. As the law currently stands, under Chapter 13 of title 18, United States Code, hate crimes committed against individuals based on actual or perceived race, color, religion, or nation of origin are currently considered federal crimes. This legislation amends that existing code by adding to it crimes committed based on actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. It is not providing special allowances for a single population of citizens; it is expanding protection that ALREADY EXISTS based on race, color, religion and national origin to include issues of sexual orientation and gender identity.
What it comes down to is this: This legislation is increasing equal protection under the law, not creating inequality justice under the law. It does not threaten free expression. What it does do is prohibit violent bodily crimes committed based on perceived or actual sexual orientation and gender expression. These are categories that apply to ALL AMERICAN CITIZENS, not just homosexuals. All individuals possess “actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity.” This legislation protects all citizens based on these qualities. It is Perkins and the FRC who conflate “sexual orientation and gender identity” with a homosexual population and agenda. While I would not assume that this organization supports bodily violence against homosexuals, by distorting the general population addressed by the legislation into the specific population of homosexual Americans, and then opposing the legislation, it feels as if Perkins and the FRC are issuing a statement that implies that physical violence against homosexuals is somehow not worth the notice or concern of the nation. Although other sub-populations (those constituted by race, religion, and nationality) are issued federal protection under the law, homosexuals, it seems, should not be. While such a perspective does not necessarily constitute one of violence, it certainly maintains a conceptual space in which violence is more free to occur. This is offensive.
As our nation continues to move towards equality for all citizens, in marriage, in military service, and in protection from violent crimes, it is my hope that statements such as this as well as the discriminatory attitudes and fallacious perspectives that produce such statements will fade quietly into a (shameful) history. That most likely being a fantasy that will remain unfulfilled for quite some time, it is my secondary hope that such public figures and organizations will at the very least address the issues at hand (not imagined future collapses of Western civilization) with accurate data and informed perspectives. It probably will not make their perspective any less offensive, but it might serve to generate a more functional cultural dialogue.
Filed under: art, Dance | Tags: 60x60, coco loupe, david gordon, gender, improvisation, improvisational technologies, random breakfast, sexuality, the strip, valda setterfield, William Forsythe
60×60 is now over. I hope you were able to make it. It was an amazing show full of diverse talent and good energy. I felt that both of my pieces were successful in executing their intentions. The first was an improvisation intending to utilize Forsythian Improvisational technologies to which I was introduced last year, as well as ways of moving that I associate with those technologies. It was one minute long and explored material both standing and on the floor.
The second was dual purposed and highly conceptual. It was an homage to “The Strip” section of David Gordon and Valda Setterfield’s Random Breakfast. It was also intended to deconstruct the relationship between the socially presentable body and the actual body (or corporeal morphology) of the individual. It was something of a temporal palindrome, starting upstage, walking directly downstage while undressing, then moving back upstage while re-dressing. All in one minute. A friend said to me afterwards that the piece could have gone on for much, much longer. I agree. I have a sense that I will re-stage the piece at some point. I am interested in how the fully clothed body that is viewed at the end of the piece is different from the fully clothed body at the beginning because of what has transpired in-between. It is always all about the in-between. The piece also commented a bit on gender and sexuality: I wore heels, women’s slacks, and a large black lambs wool coat. During the performance (the images below are from the dress rehearsal) I wore a t-shirt that says “Legalize Gay: repeal prop. 8 now!” It also had an oddly intimate feeling beyond just the exposed body; there was something about the action of undressing and re-dressing, the clumsiness, the un-sexy-ness.
CoCo Loupe graciously photographed the dress rehearsal. I share those photos now with you as documentation of the piece. Video footage may be posted in the next few weeks or so. Additional footage/images/commentary may appear at http://60×60.blogspot.com/ in the weeks to come so stay tuned there.
Also, I just received this by email today from the directors of 60×60:
“Mark your calendars now. We will be coming back to Columbus to
do this again during the first weekend in October, 2010. Tell your
friends and colleagues. Let’s make the next one bigger and better. More
details will come as things are confirmed…. stay tuned.” Very exciting.
Here are the images from the two pieces:
Filed under: creative process, Dance | Tags: 60x60, columbus, david gordon, gender, judith butler, judson, nudity, random breakfast, sally banes, the strip, valda setterfield, wall street nightclub
Coming 3 October, 60×60, an evening of new, original choreography to Wall Street Nightclub!
You can read a bit more about this event here.
For a longer post about this event by my friend and colleague CoCo Loupe, click here.
“Over 30 choreographers from around Ohio (including me!) have been commissioned to make an evening of 60 1-minute dances to 60 1-minute original music compositions . . .”
I am creating two new one-minute dances for this event, although I would be lying if I said that I knew exactly what I am going to do. The two track to which I am choreographing are extremely different. As of now, it looks as if the two pieces will be two solos, choreographed and performed by myself. I was hoping to create a duet for one of the tracks, but with the show so quickly approaching, I think time necessitates that I get into a studio with myself and figure out what these dances are going to be. These are my thoughts/ideas/questions thus far:
I’m thinking about nudity. Wall Street is an 18-an-older venue, and it’s unique that I perform in venues like that. I’m interested in what possibilities might be presented by the venue/audience restrictions. I have long been interested in deconstructing the disparity between the “social body” and the “actual body.” To be clear, by the “social body,” I mean something like the clothed body, the body as it is perceived through its social frames of clothing and make-up and hair product, etc., as opposed to the actual body that constitutes the individual. While there are absolutely socially constructed aspects to the body/individual itself (such as mannerism, posture, stance, gait, spatial organization, etc., all as ongoing performance of socially driven perceptions and expectations), those are aspects that are inseparable in each moment from the corporeal identity of the individual. It makes me think of something Judith Butler wrote in an article entitled “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” She wrote:
“Gender is in no way a stable identity or a locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time–an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gesture, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”
Certainly their is social generated and driven content in the bodily identity, even at the naked level. And I am fascinated by this to no end. But what I am more interested in as potential source material for these pieces is the distinction between the regularly perceived social body (the body as we present it to one another on a daily basis), and the irregularly perceived actual body. Both have fabricated elements, but they are not the same. I am interested in how a one minute dance at an 18-and-older venue might potentially contribute to the deconstruction of the “illusion” of the former.
The question for me is immediately: how would this be different from stripping? how is it different from “nudity for nudity’s sake”? will this deconstructive process be successful in the span of one minute, or is our culture so at odds with nudity that it will simply be either shocking, or easily classified as something recognizable?
I’m thinking about runway shows using the body as a support for the display of clothing, and inverting that to make the clothing (or the removal of clothing) a support for the display of the body. Wall Street has a stage and go-go platforms, and countertops. I’m not sure how any of these might come into the work.
I’m thinking about the Judson Dance piece Random Breakfast, the first section called “The Strip,” performed by Valda Setterfield, choreographed by David Gordon. Sally Banes writes about it in Democracy’s Body:
“The first section, “The Strip,” was a dance for Setterfield. Dressed in a long blue velvet gown that belonged to Waring and had numerous small buttons down the front, long gloves with more buttons, a hat, pearls, and a fur stole, she performed a strip tease to “authentically brassy strip music.” Gordon says that, “She looked like Queen Mary taking her clothes off in public. She walked in a circle forever, taking one thing of at a time, all those buttons to open, the dress, the petticoat, a long-line brassiere, garter belt, stockings, bloomers, limping along in one high-heeled shoe, never breaking the rhythm of the circular walk. She was somehow extraordinarily genteel parading in that circle and dropping her clothing. She discarded all the clothing in a neat pile so that when she was done she could stoop down and gather it all up together in a huge bundle. The dowager empress had become a naked rag lady.”"
I’m thinking about the difference between dressing and undressing, or undressing and then dressing. Both create a palindrome in time, but how might where you end up be different than where you began because of what has transpired? How is a clothed body different after undressing and redressing than it is before that process?
I’m also thinking about the slow, sustained quality that my work can sometimes have, and how that might find unique expression in the course of one minute.
I’m thinking about Love Art Lab because I am always thinking about Love Art Lab.
I’m thinking about Clara’s solo from Sketches of Shame, because I just notated a part of it last week, and how that is still some of my favorite movement I’ve ever generated. I don’t know if those gestures/ideas will come into this work or not.
I know SO MANY PEOPLE who are involved in this show. It should be a truly exciting event populated by great artists. I hope you can see it if you re in the area. From CoCo:
“Please SAVE THE DATE for this incredible event! Original contemporary dance and music works …..60 of each….all performed in 60-minutes……at Wall Street Nightclub…..Details below!
WHAT? 60×60 Ohio
DATE? Saturday, October 3, 2009TIME? two shows: 7:30 pm and 9:00 pm
COST? $5 at the door
WHERE?
Wall Street Nightclub
144 N Wall St
Columbus, OH 43215-2800
(614) 464-2800EXTRA STUFF? 18+ only (as per Wallstreet Nightclub) “
Filed under: culture, inspiration | Tags: choreography, cincinnati, citybeat, CS13, fashion, gaze, gender, matt morris, nathan hurst, urban regalia, videodance
Friday, 14 August, I had the opportunity to see the premiere of Nathan Hurst’s new couture collection “Urban Regalia” at his show “Off with Their Heads” at CS13 in Cincinnati, Ohio. According to the show’s facebook, “Urban Regalia focuses on a royal renewal of precious vintage finds, explores the reconstruction of former garments, and serves as a host for his [Hurst's] original design concepts inspired by a reinvention of historical regalia.”
I haven’t stopped thinking about this show since I saw it. I’m not quite ready to commit those ideas to type yet, but I thought I would go ahead and let you in on this inspiration in my world right now. Suffice to say that it was a brilliant first showing from a talented young designer/artist:
You can read Matt Morris’ article about Hurst and the show in CityBeat here.
You can also see images from the show at CS13′s facebook page.
Hurst just posted this video this week. Many of the pieces from the collection are on display. What I love most about it is that just as many of the pieces are appropriated and repurposed garments, their transmogrify is heightened further in their transgression of traditionally gendered morphology on the body of the designer. Just as Hurst engages in processes of “renewal” and “reinvention” and “reconstruction” of vintage finds, former garments, and historical regalia, their situation on the male body both further recreates the garments themselves, and recreates the meaning of the male body. Amazing:
I have an evolving ideology on the concept of the actual body and the social body. The actual body in my mind has to do with biological morphology. The social body refers to the contextual connotations that we associate with the body. The way it’s dressed, the way it’s depicted, the way we think about it because of its treatment in culture. Identity (including corporeal/kinesthetic identity) is situated somewhere in the midst of these. This seems to be the hazard of any sort of focused research: suddenly everything relates to your research interests, but I love how Hurst’s work and this video in particular relates to my interests in the relationship between the body and identity, and that relationship to the choreography of identity.
I don’t want to make too much of the video as a “video dance” (for those of you who are unfamiliar, “video dance” is a whole field of dance expression, choreography and dances specifically made to be explored/directed/displayed via video rather than live/stage presentation), but I do have critical responses to the movement in the video, not just the garments it animates. To be clear, I view the organization of the body itself as a kind of choreography, the carriage of the body, its stance, its dynamics. But there is also the movement itself. Of course the most obvious observation is its appropriation/mimicry of the runway format, the advance and the retreat, the gate of the “model” (and to be clear, I read it as meaningful that in this case the model also happens to be the designer . . . it relates to my perspective on the choreographer and the dancer (see previous post), a relationship that although different is similar in that it involves the creative action of one individual, the negotiation of that creative activity on the body of another, culminating in an event that represents the identities of both. Here, those individuals are the same, the creative activity of the one individual recreated/translated on the body of that same individual, all taking place in and through the site of the singular body), and the punctuation of poses both near to and far from the camera lens. The advance and retreat reads as meaningful to me: the retreat gives way to the advance, moving away gives the opportunity to move forward once more. It’s aggressive. I like it.
I’m also struck by the contraction of time. We know because the outfits change that a remarkable amount of time has passed in the filming, but we are given something far more surreal to be viewed, in which events occur one after another, like a series of fevered memories (memory being the space in which time becomes flexible, fluid, non-sequential). This contraction of time seems to reflect in video editing what has been done in the construction of the garments. It says, “Look again. And again. And again. Because what it once was is not what it is any longer.”
I am also struck by the gaze of the model/designer (can I add “dancer” if I am viewing the video as a kind of choreography?). While the video reads to me as an aggressive invitation to gazed upon, it’s confrontational. The model/designer/”dancer” gazes back. The viewer can actually meet his eyes (negotiated through the video . . . and I can’t even begin to discuss the politics of presence and absence in the medium of video, not in this post). When he is undressed, it is he who undresses himself, not the viewer undressing him.
I love the drama of the tossed fan, the thrown jacket, the twirl of the long white dress, the coy smiles, the laps when he doesn’t pause to be viewed, but moves towards and away in a single path, almost as if to say, “You can look, but I’m not going to assist you in your looking.”
There. That’s my brief critical dance response to a fashion video.
Oh, and this is a picture of Matt and I at the party after the show. I think we look nice:
Filed under: Dance, creative process, culture, research, inspiration, art | Tags: coco loupe, Yoga, gender, sexuality, identity, consciousness, jonathan bollen, queer kinesthesia, corporeal identity, the splendor of recognition, kashmir saivism, spanda, judith butler, mardi gras, amy bloom
The summer is offering a little bit more space for ideas to sink in and saturate and synthesize into new ideas. I’m taking in a lot of material right now, mainly through physical practices of ballet and yoga, but supplemented with readings (some of which were described in my previous post). Currently I am reading The Splendor of Recognition: An Exploration of the Pratyabijna-hrdayam, a Text on the Ancient Science of the Soul. It is an essential text of Kashmir Saivism, and has been influential in the philosophy of Siddha yoga. In a truly fundamental description of my experience with it thus far, I would say that it is a reflection on/exploration of the nature of existence, consciousness, and highest reality. It explores the nature of the Self and its relationship to all things. I won’t transcribe the text here (for this type of reading, context is essential; I highly recommend the book if you are interested in exploring some of these ideas), but I will offer two quotes and one idea that have stayed with me throughout the week.
The first is by Baba Muktananda addressing himself as if speaking to a seeker: ”Because of your existence, Creation exists. If You do not exist, nothing exists. Muktananda, first know your Self. What are you looking for east and west, north and south, above and below? Muktananda, the whole universe you alone are, you alone are, you alone are.”
Out of context, this perhaps seems bleak or irrational, but it follows a discussion of spanda, the divine creative pulsation by which the universe is constantly in a state of creation and destruction. It situates the subject (the individual) as the origin of the universe, because the universe as he or she knows it arises completely out of his or her consciousness of it, and that consciousness is in a constant state of fluctuation (the creative pulsation). In each moment, as we perceive and become conscious of ourselves and the world around us, we are creating that world for ourselves and our own understanding/knowledge out of our consciousness. The world as we knew it previously is gone; in each moment it is created anew within our consciousness. This is the creative pulsation, and this is how the universe only exist because you the seeker exists. It, the universe (or more specifically perhaps, the universe as you know it, the universe in which you live) arises out of your consciousness, and thus its existence is contingent on your own.
The second quote I would like to share is a simple phrase that has been something of a mantra for me this week. I won’t analyze it here, just offer it for contemplation: ”I am a mirror, and my life is nothing but a reflection of my Consciousness.”
The next amazing thing I read this week was an article called “Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor” by Jonathan Bollen. This was perhaps one of the best articles that I have read this year as it specifically relates the understanding and presentation of identity to physical/dance practices, which is essentially where I am interested in my research developing. This article was basically an analysis of gay and lesbian dance parties at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras festival in Australia. It is an amazing read that I also highly recommend (it is part of an anthology by Jane Desmond entitled Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage). It has some ideas that might be more easily extracted from the article. It’s theoretical inquiries create a dialogue with Judith Butler’s performative theory or gender. Butler offers, “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.” This leads Bollen to a discussion of the difference and tension between an enactment of gender as a kinesthetic stylization and the materialization of gender as a morphological process. It is the difference between an indication of form and an indication of action or motion. He explores a fission between the the morphology of the body and the potentially queer kinesthesia with which the body takes actions. Two queer kinesthesias that he addresses are the “girly poofter” (gay men dancing in a demonstratively feminine manner; think show girls and drag queens, lots of arms and torso and hips, light shifts of weight, etc.) and the “cool dyke” (lesbian women dancing in a way that might generally be associated with straight men, heavier weight, grounded stance, less mobile arms, a sort of hunch of the upper torso, etc.). He states that these are hardly the only ways in which gay men and lesbians dance, nor is it the only way to organize an analysis of movement material presented on a dance floor, but were more like kinesthetic stylizations that might be sourced on the dance floor. These are examples of indications of where kinesthetic gender departs from morphological gender; this constitutes queer, the subjugation of the normative, the accepted or expected, in which a body behaves in a way differently than expected from its form. It adds complexity to both a reading of gender and of sexuality.
Another exciting discussion in this article pertains to dance floor practices in general. Bollen discusses the dance floor as the site for not only an unfolding performance (and choreography), but also of training and rehearsal. It is on the dance floor that one learns how to dance on the dance floor, and it is there that one “practices” or “rehearses” those ways of moving, in the process of performance. I find that fascinating, and I am sure that I will never be able to experience a dance floor setting the same way again. He also discusses the dance floor experience in a way that I have been contemplating for a while now, as a sort of emergent choreography, a collective or communal negotiation of space, tempo, temporal synchronization and counterpoint, and movement vocabulary (which tends to emerge through a process of borrowing, appropriating, mirroring, or abstracting gestures from others on the dance floor). I find this fascinating. And it sparks another contemplation: if the way in which we move our bodies is indicative of our perception and/or presentation of our identity (I consider this to be a kind of choreography), then this process of integrating movement derived from the movements of others into the way in which one moves transforms the dance floor into a site for the evolution of identity, literally creating/recreating who we are through the way that we move. I think it also raises some interesting questions about the sourcing of other people’s movement/presentation of identities as material with which to construct one’s own choreographed identity. Clearly this article is blowing my mind.
I am also dreaming up a potential collaborative project with my friend/colleague CoCo Loupe. I’m not yet sure of the details of how it might all work out, but I wanted to share some of the earliest musings on what form this piece might take. This is raw, scattered brainstorming, but part of the function of this blog is to give entry points to my creative process and my dancing life. Everything you read here is a part of that, from political observations, to posts of inspirations, descriptions of course work, etc. I cannot emphasize enough how much all of that goes into the making of the work. But this is a more rare opportunity to share quite literally the earliest ideas for a new piece of choreography. It involves a list of things that I am thinking about (notice its relationship to my tag cloud), pieces of inspiration, and a rough sketch of how I am currently mapping the piece. It may not make perfect sense, and it is hardly a detailed description, but it is how I am thinking about the piece, and that’s what I want to share:
Thinking of things that might inform a new piece.
Transgressing gender boundaries. Me in a dress. CoCo in a dress too? That story from Come to Me about the woman and her transvestite hairdresser friend . . .
queer politics. subverting the normative. how do you subvert the normativity of a dance performance situation? venue? Audience relationship? making it into something unfamiliar, or transforming into something familiar from another setting?
A Wedding? Wedding as performance.
Les Noces? Love Art Lab?
This is moving around an idea . . . how to make it not comic. A wedding touches a poignant political issue for me.
Integration with life. What would that look like? Yoga. Dance floor experience. Lady Gaga. Observing solitude. Secret single behavior. red monster.
Vignettes, moving fluidly from one thing to the next, solos, duets, different ideas suggesting themselves as other things. What is it and what else might it be?
Methods of translation/transformation. Notation/motif/metaphorical description . . .
“I am a mirror, and my life is nothing but a reflection of my Consciousness.”
Cuddle performance (Love Art Lab)
KNOW(TOUCH)ME(YOU)(MY/YOUR BODY) (the piece I developed in the Embodied Knowledge Ensemble with Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil)
danger. risk. violence. the solo I was making for Betsy.
pulling in to the midline. being invisible. squatting. throwing body back through space. hitting the floor. dropping. falling. catching. fighting. struggling.
Les Noces.
austerity of Les Noces. contrasted against the gaiety of Les Biches.
Loving the earth. Making love to the earth.
Making art into love and love into art.
Nicole Cassivio “Many Feathers” duet/group piece.
performance art/service aesthetics.
public/private. bringing the private into public. making the personal universal. May Sarton. Erik Erikson.
“Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing.”
Contributing to the queer history of dance.
TRIO A. TRIO A. TRIO A.
Forsythe principles. choreographic objects. improvisational technologies.
CoCo stands near center facing Michael wearing a dress and high platform boots
Michael begins in underwear and starts by putting on dress. Maybe doing hair into a big Gibson girl wave sort of thing?
Michael meets CoCo at center stage. Turn to face upstage, and perform a kind of wedding march. Michael keeps collapsing/falling, CoCo keeps stabilizing him. This might become a bit more stylized into some sort of partnering or might stay very literal.
Reach “altar” . . . maybe some sort of ‘wedding dance’? Maybe ‘writing’ vows with some part of the body (in a Forsythian manner). Turn to face one another. Maybe some sort of enactment of the KNOW(TOUCH)ME(YOU)(MY/YOUR BODY) piece . . . Michael places CoCo’s hand on his chest, leans in and awkwardly kisses CoCo’s cheek. CoCo gently pushes him away, then put his hand on her chest. Fumbling to negotiate arms for a waltz; fumbling continues as the feet negotiate who is leading and who is following.
Waltz carries them to tiny dance floor space (maybe described by a lighting special, maybe not), music changes to Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance;” bust into club style dancing. Coco starts collapsing/falling (escaping?) as Michael did in wedding march, with Michael now catching/stabilizing her. Eventually she hits the floor and begins ‘violent solo’ (struggling in the floor, thrashing, throwing body/limbs into the floor, etc.). Michael begins by pulling intensely into midline, legs falling open, trying to walk. Walk becomes labored by the muscular action, incorporate lowering to squat. Eventually throw back in space and begin violent solo (same movement sequence as CoCo). CoCo at some point has softened to gaze at Michael. As the violent solo builds, she builds in involvement/vicious jeering as if ringside at a fight. As Michael eventually softens in the violent solo, CoCo stands and begins a strip tease (which means she needs to have layers . . .), perhaps moving around the space (ref. Judson). As the strip builds, Michael builds in vicious jeering (also as if ringside at a fight or a scary strip club). CoCo’s stripping becomes angrier, culminating in throwing her shoes (maybe at Michael?). This starts a physical “shouting match/knife fight” sort of thing with distance between the figures.
Both (or one person) begins to get tired, weak, exhausted, sick, etc.
I don’t know if it makes more sense for each to continue in the “fighting dance” as the other gets weaker, or for one or both to show concern . . . but I think this is how the piece ends, whether in some reflection of compassion or continued animosity. . .
In the list of inspirations for this piece, I mentioned Amy Bloom’s short story “Only You.’ This is an amazing little story that I have loved and contemplated for years now. I think it completely relates to whatever it is I might be investigating in this new choreography, and I thought I would share it with you. It can be read here, and it’s a pretty quick read. I hope you enjoy it.
Finally, also related to the evolving new piece is this fascination with violent action. This is not a new interest. I can see it in my work as far back as . . . well, the first thing I choreographed, really. To be clear, rarely is it an interest in interpersonal violence, but in intense, almost uncontrolled action of the individual. I think the sense of violence comes from the sense of impact in which I am interested: bodies hitting the floor, falling, throwing, swinging with a terminating impact, etc. I am also interested in the fact that this sort of action cannot be faked. There is a tangibility and a reality to it that can be felt. I am currently questioning the nature of presentation, of staged dance works (as opposed to dance as it is experienced by the dancer, a kinesthetic experience rather than a visual). The value I can currently still find in the visual presentation of a dance work is the way that seeing might be related to feeling, how a viewer might relate their visual experience of the dance taking place to their own corporeal and kinesthetic experience, a kind of kinesthetic sympathy. I find this sort of “violent” movement to be much more evocative sympathetically. We tend to feel it when we see it; we cringe, we pull away, sometimes we hold our breath. It evokes almost a sense of terror . . . and I don’t mean that it is my interest to terrorize my audience, only that if my interest in presentation is to evoke this kind of kinesthetic sympathy in the viewer, this sort of violence lends itself powerfully to that kind of experience. I am also interested in the irrevocability, the irreversibility of this kind of movement, unlike the slow, almost meditative quality that my work can sometimes tend to demonstrate. This violent action is one that cannot be faked, and it cannot be taken back. This is true of all movement, but this quality is emphasized in this type of action. So in the description of this new work that I am contemplating, this is what I mean when I say “violent.”
Those are my thoughts this Sunday afternoon.
Filed under: art, culture, Dance, inspiration, yoga | Tags: annie sprinkle, blue wedding, choreography, columbus pride 2009, elizabeth stephens, ethan philbrick, gender, karen eliot, labanotation, labanotation teacher certification course, lady gaga, sarah ainslie, transgender, Yoga
Yesterday was the last day of my Labanotation Teacher Certification Course. As soon as I turn in my final project, I will be certified through the Dance Notation Bureau to teach Elementary Labanotation. My head is swimming with symbols and theory and integrated class/course designs. My final project is a course that I developing entitled “Choreographic Knowledge: Integrated Repertory, Composition and Movement Notation.” I am fairly excited about it, but also just exhausted.
Today starts my summer quarter, which will be mainly a mix of ballet and yoga in varying degrees. Ballet three days a week with Karen Eliot. Then a larger research investigation of yoga history, theory, philosophy, and practice that will involve a survey of literature (reading list below) that either describes the history/theory/philosophy of yoga or was/is an important philosophical/sacred text that was responsible for an evolution in the system. This study will then be integrated into my own yoga practice (five day a week asana practice, meditation, pranayama, etc.). This research is intended to deepen my own understanding of this system/practice, both for my own personal development and growth, but also as a preparation for teaching yoga in the fall. I am also finding some of the readings relevant to my larger research interests of the integration of life/art, the relationship of the bodily experience to identity, and the choreography of identity.
Here is the reading list, if you’re interested:
Shantananda, Swami. Splendor of Recognition: An Exploration of the ‘Pratyabhijna-hrdayam’, A Text on the Ancient Science of the Soul.
Feuerstein, Georg. The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy, and Practice.
Iyengar, BKS. Light on Yoga.
Iyengar, BKS. Light on Pranayama.
Muler-Ortega, Paul Eduardo. The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir.
Singh, Jaideva. Spanda-Karikas: The Divine Creative Pulsation.
Kirk, Martin. Hatha Yoga Illustrated.
Friend, John. Anusara Yoga Teacher Training Manual.
Only a little daunting . . . I have until the end of August to read/synthesize that information into my practice.
I also wanted to share some scattered inspirations right now. I am contemplating my making, what comes next, what to create (too many ideas in too many directions), whether to continue work on “Red Monster” or leave it for a while. My creative activity might take on the form of notating my piece About. I am interested in that, and also how preservation is a creative activity. But other than those interests, here are things that are “sticking” with me, for various reasons. Mostly they are fun, but all have deeper points of interest as well:
Photographs by SARAH AINSLIE of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ Blue Wedding:
Columbus Pride 2009 (photos various from Flickr):
http://ethandancesinpublic.blogspot.com/
Ethan is an artist working out of Cincinnati. I think his projects are sort of amazing for lots of reasons, not the least of which being that they take dance into public, into uncontrolled spaces, inserting a trangressive body into society/culture/architecture/etc. The dancing body is one which moves outside the boundaries of the social strictures for bodies. It is safe and sanitized when it is removed or remote on a stage space, or on dance floors (which can function as in-between spaces, where rules are subverted, and bodies explore alternative roles/identities), but on sidewalks and parking lots and city streets, it is in violation. That is exciting to me.
Ethan did this amazing project exploring perception of the gendered body. The video is above. The post describing it can be viewed here. Ethan wrote in a January post on his blog, “The thrill of transgressing normal in public space is like a drug. It’s much clearer to me now how oppressive normal can be sometimes.” I feel that way when I am viewing the work. I hope you do too.
So, carrying with me Lady Gaga, Love Art Lab, Columbus Pride 2009, and Ethan Philbrick, I am off to ballet, yoga, reading reading reading, then likely going out tonight. Boys night at Wallstreet.
Filed under: art, culture, Dance | Tags: abby yager, anne carson, autobiography of red, ballet, bournonville, choreography, dance history, dance_mf, fairy, frederick ashton, gender, harry hay, identity, jane desmond, jonathan bollen, la sylphide, labanotation, lgbt, no manifesto, non-normative, northside tavern, queer, queer kinesthesia, radical fairy, red monster, sexuality, SIP, somatics, the dream, transgender, trio a, yvonne rainer
The spring quarter is almost complete. Two informal showings today, and I will be off into my summer. For a day, at least. Wednesday I start a two-week intensive Labanotation Teacher Certification Course. Which then segues straight into the summer quarter. But the schedule will have bit more breathing room.
Perhaps my largest project this quarter was in my History, Theory, Literature of Choreography course. I decided to do a queer analysis of choreography by Frederick Ashton. Originally it was my intention to analyze two ballets, The Dream and Sylvia, but after in-barking on the analysis of The Dream, I found it so rich in “queer potential” that the emphasis of the research became The Dream alone.
My primary interest in this research was to consider the potential contribution of Frederick Ashton’s choreography to queer culture, or for his choreography’s queer contribution to dance culture. It also came primarily as a response to Jane Desmond’s assertion of the centrality of dance history and queer theory to one another in her book Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On & Off The Stage. She writes:
“. . . to understand dance history and dance practices, we must analyze them in relation to histories of sexualities. Conversely, it suggests that the analysis of dance, as a form of material symbolic bodily practice, should be of critical importance to gay and lesbian studies and the ‘queer theory.’ Until now neither analytical approach has received much attention from dance studies scholars or from those in gay/lesbian studies . . . What happens to the writing of dance history and criticism when issues of sexuality and sexual identity become central? And what happens to our considerations of queer theory and to gay and lesbian studies when a dancing body takes center stage? What do we see that we didn’t see before? What questions do we ask that were heretofore unspeakable, unnameable, or unthinkable? What analytical tools will we need to formulate these questions and to develop provisional answers? In what ways might these initiatives reshape our readings of past histories and give rise to new ones? . . . This claim for the necessary intersection of sexuality studies and dance studies is based on two assertions: first, that issues of sexuality, and especially of non-normative sexuality, are not merely relevant to but play a constitutive and under recognized role in dance history; and second, that dance provides a privileged arena for the bodily enactment of sexuality’s semiotics and should thus be positioned at the center, not the periphery, of sexuality studies.”
These ideas were a central point of departure for this research. When I first became aware of Ashton’s sexuality, I was struck by the fact that his work (like so many other choreographers) is not discussed in relationship to his queer identity. It is not that I was interested in establishing a causal relationship between his autobiography and the content of his choreography, nor even speculating about his intentions for his own work. Instead, having become aware of his queer identity, I was interested in how one might interpret his ballet through a queer lens, and how this interpretation might reveal a relationship to queer culture.
In the paper, I attempt to situate The Dream in relationship to the queer culture, such as the relationship of the term “fairy” in the late 19th century and early-to-mid (to present?) 20th century describing an overtly effeminate man who was assumed to solicit male sexual partners (as opposed to “normal men” who abide by the socially expected behavior of masculinity). I also situate the ballet in relationship to the Radical Fairy movement of the 1970s that evolved out of the social politics of gay activists such as Harry Hay. Besides this “cultural situation” of the subject matter of Ashton’s ballet, the paper is primarily a choreographic analysis, looking at the narrative, character development, relationship of characters to one another, individual movement vocabulary, and use of partnering as it relates to the notion of “queer,” or a subversion of the normative or heteronormative.
While I would love to post the whole paper here, as it represents a significant investment in my own research, I will resist the urge. If you are very interested in this analysis, just let me know and I’ll try to find a way for you to read it.
Another significant portion of research this quarter has been in the are of Labanotation. In addition to pursuing my Elementary Labanotation Certification (almost done), I did the work of reading/learning two pieces of choreography in my Intermediate Labanotation course. We learned from score: Yvonne Rainer’s ”Trio A” and three versions of the Sylph’s variation in act II of La Sylphide (the versions were from 1849, 1865, and a version considered current to today). These were in vastly different dancing styles which necessitated different methods for employing the notation system. But more importantly (to me) they addressed a certain kind of hunger in the study of dance history. Too often in studying dance history, our primary points of access are through watching (visual) and reading/lectures (linguistic). Rarely do we have the opportunity to embody seminal dance works from the past. Both of these pieces represent profound periods in the history of dance, La Sylphide representing the Bournonville ballet tradition and the Romantic ballet, “Trio A” representing the 1960′s Judson/post-modern shift in American dance. Not only did we have the opportunity to understand the meaning of these periods in our bodies, but they were made to co-exist within our bodies, disparate styles and periods collapsed into a singular corporeal experience.
I want to briefly describe my experiences of each of these pieces. “Trio A” was surprising in many ways. The first was the extreme complexity of the notation for this piece. “Trio A,” along with most of the work that came out of the Judson group, is considered pedestrian, anti-thetical to traditional theater and concert dance. For me, having read and written about this work, it has always seemed as if it would be simple. The notation revealed that it is not; it is incredibly specific. This quality revealed itself further as we interpreted the notation and learned/practiced the piece. It demanded so much concentration which gave it an almost intense, meditative quality. As it became familiar, it retained this quality of a moving meditation. Some of the directives in the score have to do with evenness of tempo, phrasing, and dynamics. Nothing is to be emphasized, nothing should be given more importance than anything else. And like Rainer’s “NO Manifesto” (below), it is a run-on sentence, nothing repeating, just streaming along in a similar fashion. I feel this quality, the meditativeness, the almost effortless physicality (paired with intense mental focus) infecting the way I approach other movement material as well.
“NO Manifesto:
“NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendence of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.”
“Trio A” was meant to embody these ideas. You can see how they translate in Rainer’s performance in the video below:
La Sylphide was more difficult for me. The notation was specific but not as specific as “Trio A.” It made assumptions of certain stylistic understanding. Because my ballet training is not in Bournonville, these assumptions were lost on me. The learning took far more time. The most interesting part of this process was recognizing the relationship of one historical interpretation of the choreography to others, how movements were rearranged, cut, reversed, sped up, or slowed down, etc. It raised questions (that have come up throughout this year) about the nature of choreographic information. If the steps change, what is it that makes each “version” the same ballet? What is the choreography beyond the steps? What is necessary to its integrity? Etc.
I tried to find a video of this variation, but I couldn’t find the exact section on youtube.
One of my most interesting courses was a Somatics survey taught by Abby Yager. The goals for this course were for practicing a deep listening to the body, cultivating a appreciation and understanding of the Self through this awareness of the body, and the development of a personal somatic practice based on one’s sense of one’s own body. This sort of information feeds directly into a central research interest of mine, the relationship of the body to identity, the embodied nature of existence and experience, and the relationship of a dance practice to the development (or choreography) of identity. I am interested in how these investigations might synthesize in my creative practice and choreography, how choreography might come out of this kind of self awareness, or how I might consciously consider the practice of choreography as a shaping of individual identity through its engagement of the body. In a larger scope, I am interested how individual identity comes out of the way we “choreograph” ourselves, how our conscious and subconscious choices of the ways we handle ourselves physically come to define us for ourselves and others. I am interested in how a cultivated awareness or “deep listening” of the body might contribute to this choreography of identity. The modalities explored in this course (Qi’Gong, Alexander technique, Yoga, Trager, experiential anatomy, Klein technique, etc.) have offered me a wide range of approaches to this sort of research.
This quarter I also produced a solo-in-progress entitled “Red Monster.” It was partially inspired by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, and evolved (for me) as an investigation of the ways in which shame and desire transform us (me) into monsters. I just posted a video of this piece on youtube. I don’t think it is an ideal performance (15 May 2009, as part of SIP, the first year dance MFA’s informal showing), for many reasons, but it does offer a look at what I have been exploring choreographically. I may continue to work on this piece. I’ll keep you posted on its evolution.
Here at the end of the quarter I also made several trips to Cincinnati where my twin brother lives. These trips were mostly about seeing art, but this past weekend I attended an event called Dance_MF, which was essentially a huge late-night dance party at Northside Tavern. It is a monthly event, and this was my first time there. It brought several things to mind. The first was a fairly simple observation, something that I have observed before in “dance floor” situations: individuals are far more likely to dance around one another or even in reference to one another than they are to actually dance with another person, by which I mean share any sort of physical contact. It’s always struck me as a disparity, that a social situation primarily characterized by its intense physicality is more based on a visual engagement than one of connected physicality. This is indicative of a larger social disparity with which I’ve been discontented for some time: despite the fact that we are embodied, corporeal creatures, our engagement with one another or knowledge of one another as human beings is more based on our visual interpretations of one another than our actual physical engagement. This strikes me as odd, in culture at large, but especially on a dance floor. I wonder if this awareness has emerged from my dance/choreographic life. To consider a three-to-four hour dance “composition” or “improvisation” in which the participants rarely touch one another feels either boring, ill-crafted, or a very specific social statement. What happens when we engage with life as art, social behavior as composition? How might “society” become a comment on society within the confines of the dance floor?
It also made me think of Jonathan Bollen’s article “Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor” (a portion of which can be read here). I’ll try to summarize this article sometime soon.
Another curious effect of this event was an awareness of myself as a “transgender presence.” I decided to wear a dress to the dance (an evolution of wearing skirts and heels and other traditionally female articles of clothing and accessories), not in an attempt to be female, but as an interpretation/expression/expansion of masculinity/my own identity as not being relegated to the narrow expression of identity traditionally associated with masculinity and maleness. At some point during the evening, I became aware of how much the population on the dance floor respected the gender binary. I do not identify as transgender, but in my transgression of traditional male expression, I became a kind of symbol of transgender. Which was an interesting dynamic on a dance floor, not to mention an interesting evolution in my perception of self.
And that’s my reflection on the spring quarter.
