Guest Post

Keith Hennessy/Circo Zero, “Sink” November 2, 2019

Guest Blog Post by Julian Carter

I’m not an uncritical Keith Hennessy fan—are there any of those? He’s not an easy artist. He puts himself out on the edge, he asks his audience to join him there, and he doesn’t give you a spoonful of choreographic sugar to help things go down. I don’t always enjoy his shows, exactly. But I go back because something in every Hennessy performance makes me feel with a sharp clarity that lodges and persists for years. So on November 2, I chose “Sink” over significant competition: the Maryinski was doing “La Bayadere” at Zellerbach Hall, and the world’s largest queer country-western dance festival was hosting the Sundance Hoedown at the Regency Ballroom. I made the right call. “Sink” was a magical evening.

The evening began softly with a typical Keith welcome. He wandered back and forth as people were getting settled, saying hello, offering paper cups of lemon- ginger tea with an optional splash of Jamison’s. Rows of plastic chairs faced a curtain made of used blue plastic tarpaulins artfully draped from the ceiling in huge swags. As we settled, Keith made a detailed and specific acknowledgment of our presence on unceded Ohlone land; then he asked us to turn to strangers to share our hesitations, confusions, and resistances to this relatively new social ritual that asks us to consider our involvement in the ongoing history of invasion and genocide. I admit I am sometimes wary of land acknowledgments made by white people, who can use them to signal their own wokeness, so I especially appreciated the opportunity to have this discussion. And in this case, the ritual seemed vitally connected to the work. “Sink” is a summons to pay passionate attention to the enormous violence of this place and time.

The first movement began with a short solo executed atop a small stool in front of the blue tarps. Dressed in white and gold and crowned with a bright wig, Keith danced to his recorded voice speaking about the rich who are claiming our country as their own. Constrained by his tiny stool-stage, the movement flowed upward through his hands and head in complex and mesmerizing counterpoint to the sharp, even biting quality of the analytic text. When he observed that for indigenous activists an environmental award is a death sentence I felt my stomach drop. When he said “It is much easier to open prisons than to shut one down. I wish the same could be said about hearts and minds” the bodies around me rustled like leaves responding to a wind. 

The blue tarps rose on a stage-space startling in its sudden revelation of piled orange: he explained that these were life vests, from Lesbos, where he will be going to participate in Ai Wei-Wei’s 1000 person opera on the beach responding to the global refugee crisis. Keith migrated us watchers onto the floor and took the time to make sure everyone had the seating they needed before the tarps descended and we were enclosed with him on the stage. A few of us used the vests as cushions for a while; there was no chastising irony here, no sense of mockery at our presumed complacency about our unearned good fortune, but instead, a profound welcome to our place in the circle of mourning for a world both drowning and on fire.

I’m groping for a way to explain the emotional and political significance of the ritual Keith offered here. The best I can do is put the dance in relation to powerful memories of past gatherings in moments of great collective pain. At the end of October 1984, seven months after HIV was isolated as the cause of AIDS and the week before Raegan was elected to a second term, I walked a silent night path through an oak wood to observe Samhain with a temporary coven gathered by a Welsh witch. At the end of January of 2017, I joined a thousand strangers thronging San Francisco Airport’s international terminal to reject the Muslim ban’s claim that we must buy security with cruelty. On November 2 Keith gathered a hundred of us around the marley in Joe Goode Annex on Dias de Los Muertos to cast a spell for all our kin harmed, betrayed, abandoned, left to die.

Each of the dance’s six segments had its own ritual power. In one passage Keith’s movement was mirrored by a much younger body, supple muscles round and full under his white hood. They danced to abstract sound distantly derived from Nazi death metal, side by side, upside down, twining their ankles around their own feet, suspending themselves on their flanks in a gesture like a shared howl. Worlds folding into one another. In another segment, Keith sat on the floor and accompanied himself on a droning squeezebox as he chanted a long song about mass murder: “Why pick up a gun? You can’t protect yourself. You know it can happen here. It is happening here.” From my angle of vision, he was framed by two pairs of men leaning against the wall across from me. They had settled into matching spoons, one in each pair cradling the other against his chest. Their faces shone with tears. Around the room, many others were holding hands as Keith sang the litany of murder: “A knife a gun a bomb a backpack a truck that is a bomb a body that is a gun.” Christchurch, Gilroy, Paris, Charlottesville, London, Orlando. The list goes on and on. He brought us the news of our common vulnerability, the bitterness of frustration and fear, our shared inheritance of mistrust “like ghosts, like bruises, like terror.” 

It’s an enormous tribute to Keith’s compositional skill that he could and did transition from this appalling encounter with violence and despair into three more segments. One featured Keith bounding goatlike on spring stilts, crowned with ivy in a bright corset woven of Maypole ribbons, matching his young partner’s grand allegro to Sylvester’s iconic “(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real.” The woman next to me was doing a shoulder dance. When the music dissolved into a stormy industrial grind the smiles dissipated and the performers, no longer mounted by the gods, panted hard as we all remembered gravity’s burden; but then Keith swung himself into the air, into a song of love and freedom suspended on a stream of blue and green light punctuated with silver shapes as reflective as crumpled aluminum foil. As he slowly rotated head down the people across from me looked like they were gazing up into an aquarium, absorbed in timeless blue. 

 There is no way to conclude. The world we inhabit is very far from stable – climate chaos, fascism rising, endless incarceration and inevitable extinction. Some of us are surviving and some are not. Keith can’t wrap that up for us. But he has wrapped himself around it and wrapped an audience around the work. For 37 years in San Francisco Keith has helped create and sustain a community that can receive this beautiful ranting. “Sink” is the work of a fully mature artist embodying his place and time with integrity and breadth. Happy 60th birthday, Keith. Thank you.

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Dancing Around Race, Public Gatherings #1 and #3

Guest Post by Julian Carter

Public Gathering #1 Thursday, September 20, 2018
Featuring Aruna D’Souza, author of Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in Three Acts

Public Gathering #2 Thursday, February 28, 2019
Featuring Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor of African and African American Studies and Theater Studies at Duke University.

“Dancing Around Race” was a year-long series of dialogues generated and hosted by choreographer and dancer Gerald Casel in his role as Lead Artist in his 2018 Community Engagement Residency, a program of HMD’s Bridge Project.  For his residency, Casel convened a cohort of 5 dance-makers to explore “the role race plays in dance production and presentation.” Yayoi Kambara, Raissa Simpson, Sammay Dizon, David Herrera, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto spent a full year researching and discussing the layered intersections of artistic practice, community engagement, institutional resources, and racial identity, awareness, and ideology in the contemporary dance world. Casel also invited three highly-qualified outside experts to the Bay Area: art historian Aruna D’Souza; Barbara Bryan of Movement Research; and dancer/choreographer/writer Thomas DeFrantz.

I went to the first and third public events. Both events began by introducing the artists of Casel’s cohort and proceeded with presentations by the invited experts. In session #1, there was a potluck at Humanist Hall, an Oakland community center. People mingled in the garden and there was a general social excitement in the air. Someone took time to lay out beautifully articulated ground rules for talking about race—guidelines intended to foreclose specific kinds of derailments and especially to guarantee that the conversation would not get bogged down by white defensiveness and willful ignorance. Instead, it was constrained by the expert presenter, Aruna D’Souza.

Aruna D’Souza is a dynamic presence and her book White Walls is a quite wonderful analysis of the racial economy of visual art exhibitions in the contemporary white box. Under many circumstances, I would enjoy listening to her do a keynote, but I had been invited to a conversation about dance, and so I was restless at discovering myself in the audience for what seemed more like her book tour. I doodled and wondered whether my fellow audience members were also feeling the energy drain out of the room. I was curious about why Casel chose not to redirect her comments to speak more directly to our common interest or create space for other voices and perspectives to be heard. Relief came in a group activity: we were instructed to migrate around the room writing on hanging pieces of butcher paper in response to prompts like “what would racial equity look like in dance?” I gathered that these prompts were generated by the artists in the cohort, who had been working on them together for several weeks.

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Photo Credit: Hope Mohr

When we returned to large-group conversation there was some powerful testimony about racial type-casting, and a few important threads emerged about:

  • how dance training leaves legacies of white dominance in the body;
  • how our standards of excellence continue to be shaped by white aesthetic traditions;
  • how work made in those traditions (specifically ballet) receives disproportionate funding and attention.

But the evening was almost over and despite a general atmosphere of willingness, and many people’s decision to stay far later than the original posted ending time, the discussion did not go very deep before I had to leave. Writing for inDance, Sima Belmar noted a similar feeling.

Session #3 had a completely different and much more intense quality. Over 70 people, more than half of them white-appearing, crowded into the Eric Quezada Cultural Center, a small featureless Valencia St space. Tommy DeFrantz’s brief presentation blended personal reflection with historical analysis before he invited Gerald Casel into dialogue. Then the assembled audience was broken into 12-minute small-group discussions led by the artists of the cohort. At the end of this exchange, each group selected a representative to report back to the re-assembled room, thus initiating collective discussion. Time was carefully monitored and transitions had been planned. Overall the evening was structured with much more attention to sequence and flow; yet the room seemed energetically foggy and withheld in a way that queer artist of color Bhumi Patel, who was the Dancing Around Race Program Coordinator for HMD, identifies as white anxiety.

I came away with two responses and a list of questions. First, I was struck by the way that this conversation kept returning to the quantitative: people talked about budgets, scarcity, rents and wages, audience sizes, and tokenization. All these issues are absolutely real and yet I found myself wondering whether the recurring emphasis on numbers was also a tactic for keeping things abstract–not too visceral, not too personal. Moments, when people left numbers behind to talk about the quality of human relationships and interactions really, stood out.  

Second, I noticed that a lot of the conversation in session #3  took an interrogative form. I found myself fancying that might have something to do with women’s leadership in the dance world, and many women’s deep training to soften declarative statements into questions; and also that it might have something to do with an ethic of inclusion in many marginalized communities, where questions rather than statements can be a way to hold open the space for collective critical thinking. These are the ones I wrote down:

  • How do we know when a dance is good? How do we know when we’re racializing a dance to determine whether it’s good?
  • Who are you facing toward? Who values what you do?
  • How do we value who we address?
  • Who is this dance for, and what role do I play in that?
  • What can our art make possible, and for whom?
  • How would it look different if our work was fully facing our communities, rather than keeping one eye on the funders?
  • Why don’t we push back and say no, this grant isn’t enough for what you’re asking me to do?
  • How are we sharing out toward an assemblage of care? What is it to move toward, to be in, relationship?
  • How do white people see one another? How do we hold one another accountable
  • How do we get past the person at the top?
  • We have alternative models for relationships and institutions; why don’t they get taken up?
  • Why do we imagine that problematic institutions should be fixed instead of destroyed? Why can’t we just cut them off? What if instead of reinventing institutions we ended them?
  • What actions can actually overturn the existing power structure?
  • How can I as a white person work to create a more powerful space for people of color? What power and resources do I need to yield or hand over?
  • What is the line between stepping back and retreating into white silence?

These questions are powerful and ongoing. For me, they are the measure of the events’ success. It remains to be seen who takes them up, how they are answered, and whom those answers ultimately serve; but they define important conversations that all of us need to be having.

Molly Rose-Williams and Co., “Social Movement,” November 17th & 18th 2018

Guest Post: Using Ridiculousness and Some Dance Moves for Social Change by Dalton Alexander

“Raise your hand if you have ever felt small.” The majority, if not all of the audience raised one hand.

“Raise your other hand if you are pro-nuclear disarmament.” The collective was taken aback by this out-of-the-blue proposition yet chuckled at the incongruous juxtaposition made by the performer, Chelsea Boyd Brown. Most raised their other hand. An intertwining trio then engulfed Brown to the rising volume of rock music. Her voice softened and slowed as she was pulled backward saying, “You can put your hands down now.” The ridiculousness of a scene like this highlights just one theme in Social Movement.

On November 17 and 18, 2018, Molly Rose-Williams and Co. presented Social Movement, an evening of dance, moving targets, hope, and human pyramids with opening-act guests, Suzanne Beahrs and Jiten Daiko at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center (SADC) in Berkeley, CA. The central question of the evening was: What roles might dance, art-making, and performance play in creating social change? I wouldn’t say the evening worked to directly answer this question but did create a space for one to be affected and potentially changed by the dance’s provocations.

SADC is a house converted into multiple studios and can be used in various ways as a performance space. The audience began downstairs on night one with two dance films by Suzanne Beahrs. Night two featured Jiten Daiko, a young taiko drumming group of 7. On both evenings, the audience was ushered upstairs where the company performed an evening-length work focused on themes like community, individuals, frustration, and awkwardness.

My experience began with Jiten Daiko’s Yama Kawa. As the performers started clicking their sticks to resonate the wood of their drums, a sense of ritual and history felt grounding. As the performers danced through and around the drums, the energy of the group maintained as their dynamics ebbed and flowed – supported by two tempo keepers. Moments of kaleidoscopic turning and polyrhythmic playing by two, three, and finally all seven performers were as much visually as aurally pleasing.

Onward upstairs to the main studio, Rose-Williams welcomed us with a laughing exercise by posing: “Often dance is very serious. Here is your permission to laugh. Let’s practice.” We laughed – fake at first, but more legitimate as the laugh redirected to ourselves and the situation. Just seeing Rose-Williams’ bright smile pulls a giggle or two out of many that know her. And that is exactly what the audience felt like in general: a community of people who Rose-Williams has gained the trust and support of.

Social Movement (the dance piece) began with an entrance through a door, then a retreat. Followed by a build-up of many chases, run-ins, and lock-outs between gendered bathrooms and the studio entrance. We got glimpses of every-person-for-themselves as well as more collective efforts to open a locked door or squish through another. The focus zoomed in when Galen Rogers, the only male dancer in the company, began backing slowly out of the men’s locker room while exploring intricate hand movements. The other three performers attempted to mimic, distract, or distort his task, but fell short in changing his course. Was this meant to be a comment on gendered bathrooms? If yes, it was very subtle and would only be noticed by those actively searching for “meaning.”

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What was clearer was the theme of the individual versus the collective. In these moments, the audience could focus on what one person had to say and then witness the improvised responses by other members in a “Yes! I have felt the same,” manner. In another moment, as a quartet attempted to pretzel their bodies together in a pyramid to fully support at least one person and transport them through space, success, not surprisingly, did not come the first time. We humans try and try to advance things for the better, but often feel like we are getting nowhere. Social Movement wove the successes of embodied tasks with a collective understanding of the frustrations within a fight.

We were also shown unison choreography that advanced through the space powerfully but fell short in relaying the strength of the collective that the improvisation allowed. By working with fantastic improvisers, the choreography felt and looked uncomfortable at times. Nonetheless, when speaking to James Graham of James Graham Dance Theatre (and renowned Bay Area gaga teacher), he shared an appreciation saying, “It was a very interesting compositional choice to see the company do movement that was clearly from Molly and then to see Molly, herself do it right after in her solo.” Often this is not the case for the choreographer/director to also perform the same movement separately, or at all, from the group as “other choreographers may come across as ‘one-upping’ their dancers, but Molly’s acumen as a performer and charismatic M.C. helped the choice come across as rather curious and bemusing.”

For the third part of the evening, Rose-Williams very much did perform her material as a solo entitled Soliloquy. She performed with an intricacy that made you want to zoom in and be in on the secret. It was the silence she held when entering, seeing the audience for who we were and knowing that we saw her, which catapulted us all into a shout at a corner, a collecting of imaginary apples, a making of a stew by drawing “ear dust” from the audience, and an exit that was just that, an exit. Rose-Williams’ transition from fully energized physicality to a shrugging off of the entire event itself allowed us a deeper connection to who she is and showed us a confidence that she’s just “doing the thing.”

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There are two definitions of social movement which Rose-Williams and Co. brought to mind. First, there are the political and justice-oriented social movements. These are the “good fights” that we may or may not be privy. Then there is movement within a social scene – a boogie, a jam, a place to be more embodied and research what that means. By working in the latter embodied realm, Rose-Williams and Co. were able to physically address their own battles which could be (and were) interpreted in many ways by both performers and audience.

Is not the simple act of being exposed to things we would never think of in our daily lives a social change in itself? We are asked to interpret new experiences through previously constructed mechanisms. Yet, we fall short because the moment is so new. We must be open and chuckle when we are taken by surprise. This is what creates change. This is how we build new ways of seeing the world. Unfortunately, not the whole world looks at dance this way, nor is aware of possible internal changes due to, simply, the scene of address.

Was the company’s question answered then? Can dance, art-making, and performance create social change? That’s a hard ask and one that needs to be assessed on the individual level. I am changed by seeing friends perform in ways I have yet to. But do I feel more pro-nuclear disarmament? Not more than before. But it is now on my mind. To be able to change people’s perceptions on specific social issues through dance performance, the audience needs a clearer and more directed message to dive into, tear apart, and reflect on internally. However, by just creating a scene where new experiences are expected and even welcomed, we can argue that this flows into how people look and interact with the world outside of the performance scene.

In the moment that this performance was occurring, over 600 people were still unaccounted for from the Campfire north of Sacramento – California’s deadliest fire to date. It seems even more necessary that this community that so loves and supports the work of Molly Rose-Williams and her company members leave their isolated homes despite the hazardous smoke outside. We need that touch, that laughter, that connection.

Nov. 13th Aura Fischbeck Dance, “Dusk”

Guest Blog Post by Julian Carter

The sun glares weak and orange through the ashen skies at noon. By 4 it looks tired. We stand in the little lobby at Joe Goode Annex waiting for the house manager to let us in; when she pulls the door-curtain back, the tall western-facing windows glow brighter by contrast with the gleaming black floor. There are four bodies scattered in huddled lumps that remind me of dropped socks, although these, unlike laundry, are moving…. A red line of chairs frames the three unwindowed walls.

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Many audience members stride into the space and choose seats without visible self-consciousness. Maybe they’re schooled in contemporary performance, and aren’t easily perturbed by the lack of clear boundaries; maybe they’re just focused on getting to the bathroom. Either way, we all share the stage for an extended moment. Without a light cue, it takes quite a while, maybe ten or 15 minutes, for the house to settle down.

Was there sound when we entered? I think so, and it has no propulsive energy or melodic structure to mark time. At some point, I realize I recognize only two people there, choreographer Gerald Cassell and tattoo artist Idexa Stern. The red chairs are full and a house manager comes to offer floor mats. I stand; several children choose to sprawl. After what seems like 10 minutes, the dancers are moving more now, not faster really but more frequently. Eventually, it becomes clear that the one closest to the windows is migrating toward the audience, while the other three, already closer to us, are migrating toward one another. I think about knotted clumps of worms. I wonder about their timing, and I fancy I can identify a leader from whom the other three are taking some cues. I notice that two of the dancers are now touching—spooning in slow motion– while a third is several feet away and the fourth is still separated from them by yards. From 4 individual sock-piles, they’ve morphed imperceptibly into a dyad with two asymmetrical outliers. At the end of the evening—after much dancey-dancing– they huddle under the windowsill, where the streetlights can’t touch them and their shapes recede into the shadow, four individual bodies in a line that then stand to come toward us and take their bows.

I’ve come to this performance for three reasons. One is that dusk has always been my favorite time of day. The other two are Arletta Anderson and Karla Quintero, who are dancing tonight; both are lucid, eloquent, and intelligent movers, always worth watching. Anderson is quick and fierce, with something urgent in her concentration. Quintero is languorous and elegant and sophisticated. More than once during the performance I find myself imagining that Arletta is setting the pace, but when I seek confirmation by focusing my attention, whatever I thought I saw has dissolved. (Phoenicia Pettyjohn and Aura Fischbeck, the choreographer, are the other two dancers. While I’ve known who they are for years, I don’t know that I’ve ever watched either of them perform before.)

How do you track the fade to grey? When does afternoon give way to evening? What is the difference between twilight and nightfall? These are questions that occupied and enriched the seasons of my rural childhood, quiet in the backyard near my brother; I’m well prepared to pass time with people, being near them as darkness gathers, sharing the end of the day in silence. Maybe that remembered companionability is part of why I am most attracted to the segments of the dance when the edges of the stage dissolved. At one point, while the other dancers are leaping about, Karla lies down on her side with her back almost brushing the toes of the people sitting two chairs to my left. In front of me on a floor mat, her back brushing my toes is a child (about 8) whose body begins to vibrate with the extra energy of Karla’s proximity. Careful not to be in the way, she pulls herself into her center the way a snail pulls in its eyestalks; and taking up a smaller space makes her dense so that I can feel her intensified presence as a charge in the air. I am half-hoping and half-fearful that this subtle disruption of the boundaries between dancer and audience, stage and house, will be developed. Will the child by my feet be able to hold even more energy? That’s when I realize I’m really not finding much meaning in the larger composition, and without formal clarity or choreographic experimentation to engage me, I am reaching for relational motivation. It isn’t isolated and framed and highlighted and developed the way I’d like it best, but it’s there. At another point Arletta mirrors Karla’s placement, curling up on the floor across from me. The audience members behind her—both women– simultaneously swing their closed knees to opposite sides, opening a V between them as though they’d rehearsed becoming a frame. Here as in our entrance into the space it seems as though we are about to be solicited to understand ourselves as in the dance, with the dancers. It’s as though the point of dusk is to be in it together.

These moments are fragmentary, but even as shards they are beautiful and not always safe. Twice Arletta performs a series of short runs, full tilt on a straight line directly toward the end of a row of seats so that her feet have to stutter under her, breaking her momentum just in time to avoid a collision; and again I find myself eager and interested. I hope she is looking directly at the person she is running toward. I hope she slips and careens into them. I do eventually identify a couple of unmistakable cues the dancers use to shift into new sequences, but I no longer concern myself with them, because it seems clear that the relationships among them will remain abstract and disconnected as long as they are on their feet. When they are on the ground, something else happens. Toward the end the four women curl around one another in a loose and mobile geometry, limbs and heads resolving into momentary comfort before one slight adjustment sets off a chain of responses in all the bodies.

The dancers’ mobile spooning reminds me powerfully of the way infant mammals climb on their mothers’ bodies, of the comfortable accommodations of middle-aged lovers, of the presumption of sexual innocence in contact improvisation. What would have happened if the dancers had inserted themselves into the body of the audience with the same calm and skillful boldness? What might have happened if the lights had not come up as the sun went down and the movement gained force? Could touch and sound have taken over from vision as a way to know who was where in the room, doing what with whom? I don’t mean to imply that Fischbeck ought to have staged an orgy, but rather to underscore the interesting moments of discomfort she created when the boundaries weren’t held stable. I’d have liked to have spent more time there, then, hovering in the moments when it isn’t clear whether it’s day or night

August 10, New Original Works Festival at REDCAT, L.A.

Guest Blog Post by Julian Carter

The 2017 NOW festival events are presented in REDCAT, a decent size black box theater with a fancy lobby. It’s on the ground floor underneath a major symphony hall (the Disney, natch) and across the street from the Broad Museum of contemporary art—a top-notch address if you judge by the neighbors, and a space making some architectural claims about its place in the art world. The promotional materials on the REDCAT website reinforce the message that we are supposed to sit up and prepare to be impressed. But that’s not why we went. We’re in LA for the weekend and our host, who is deep in the LA dance scene, wanted to come. He had to be downtown anyway to meet a young person he knows through the LA LGBTQ center’s mentorship program, and also out of personal loyalty to choreographers Jeremy Nelson and Luis Lara Malvacías. He explains they’re a transcontinental couple, which means they almost never get to work together, and he wants to support their collaboration.

I agreed to tag along because I am interested in my friend’s mentorship relationship, and also because Nelson has a reputation as a truly marvelous teacher. I’m a touch ambivalent about a second piece on the program called “Butch Ballet.” My host is dreading it rather but I have some hope that its maker might be a person I met at a dance event last year and liked very much. I don’t quite recognize the choreographer’s name, but it all adds up to mean there is a consistent element of queer sociality and community in this outing. Before the show begins we’ve already agree to leave before the third piece on the program. We drove down from SF this morning, we’re too tired to stay out late, and the description suggests it’s going to be very loud.

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Screen Shot Retrieved on 8/30: https://www.redcat.org/event/now-festival-2017-week-three

Jeremy Nelson and Luis Lara Malvacías, “C.”

The piece opens with what turns out to be its strongest gesture: the two men springing softly into low, travelling hops with their feet in parallel at hip distance and their arms loose. These carry them around the stage in a sequence of loose squares, their feet landing first slightly in front of them, then to the sides and the back. Their feet create a satisfyingly steady 4:4 drumming as they land in emphatic unison on ONE, and more softly on the two-three-four, before their legs swing forward again to mark the downbeat.

The stage is black and bare save for a large screen on which is projected a 20 minute timer and an abstract pattern in green with some movement in it. There is also a potted plant hanging from the flies on a wire. This simplicity gives me a moment to appreciate that Jeremy has a remarkably fluid hop, his legs swinging underneath him with a powerful soft economy. Two stage hands—slender white men in black—come on and dress the stage with white furniture: a table, three chairs, a standing lamp—then leave again along lines apparently dictated by economy: the shortest route on, the shortest route off. The dancers stop their rhythmic bouncing, carry the objects offstage along the same efficient routes, and resume their soft explorations. The audience appreciates this with a laughter that I share. Everyone recognizes the collision of tasks and the need to clear a space for concentration. The stagehands return and repeat. The dancers repeat and return. There is no laughter this time. I normally like repetition and am curious to see how the choreographic relationship between these two contrasting kinds of task-based movement might develop; but it doesn’t get a chance. The music changes, the image on screen morphs into a blue sky with clouds, and the men stop bouncing.

To my mind, the piece could have, and perhaps should have, concluded at any point in this opening passage. The screen got darker and developed menacing imagery. The soundscape got louder and more aggressive. Clouds. Bombs. Fire. Contentious voices talking about God and hell and being an intellectual. For all the intensity of the material, the actual movement got less and less interesting to look at, in a way that made me think they were being deliberately anti-spectacular. I tried to get interested in that but failed. The dancers never connected with one another or with the objects on the set. There were some small exceptions: Jeremy hovered in the act of being about to sit on one of the chairs, for a few almost supernatural seconds that could well have been extended; at another point Luis moved the table just in time to catch a second plant that came hurtling down from the flies and landed with a thud. At the end they turned away from the house and fiddled with devices that lit a pile of vinyl upstage. The glowing result was partially projected onto one corner of the large screen. It seemed possible that there was a technical difficulty that prevented full projection, but since the pile was not very interesting to look at, I didn’t particularly miss its enlarged 2D version.

My notes scribbled on the program say: “it’s a good thing Nelson is such an accomplished mover” and “the less pedestrian the less interesting.” It’s true. The long passages of dance-y movement (in a generic kind of downtown NYC postmodern vocabulary) were so abstract that I found myself longing for the combination of intentionality and a simpler movement.  I would happily watch Nelson brush his teeth, but I could not care about this dance. These artists have sufficient sophistication about the craft of making dances that they brought the thing to a close by returning to that initial springing bounce—this time while banging on small saucepans with sticks—yet the ABA’ structure wasn’t enough to justify the fifteen minutes in between. It looked to me as though the conceptual project of the collaboration had been allowed to take over the stage, with the result that any nascent aesthetic or affective communication with the audience got lost.

Gina Young, “Butch Ballet.”

In contrast, the limited charm of the second piece derived from its absence of polished craft, which made abundant room for the performance of identity earnestness and affective bonding between audience and performers. Here spectacle attempted to compensate for lack of craft and what appeared to be lack of intention about whatever craft was at the choreographer’s disposal. Five butches—or was that 4 butches and a transman? Or two butches, a transman, a lesbian and a nonbinary person? Or…

Anyway, five more or less butch people moved through a series of vignettes “about” female masculinity. Or so the program notes told me. There was bonding in a locker room; competition in a bar; playing video games as an inarticulate form of post-breakup emotional support; a swim party apparently intended to answer the perennial question of what a butch can wear to the beach; building a campfire; and three vintage dyke anthems, two of which were sung live and well. The little dramas seemed to suggest that the essence of female masculinity is an oscillation between  competition and companionship with other butches. The exception came in the most developed vignette, which featured a large pink purse on a high table center stage. One butch began cooing to it to please hold her keys, then her phone and her this and her that; the others came out to add requests to hold notebook, pen, glasses, butch tears, fragile masculinity. The punchline: all the butches say “Can you hold all that?” and walk off.

The performers all seemed to be in their 20s, which might have something to do both with the ADHD pacing of the vignettes and with why my middle-aged companions and I felt a bit protective of them despite our boredom. We were also embarrassed, and even a little indignant. Out of kindness, we wanted to be generous; and equally out of kindness, we wanted to urge them to more rigor. But this wasn’t the place where we could have that conversation. As my friend hissed in my ear, “This isn’t Highways!”—that is, REDCAT isn’t a safe venue for queer identity work; and besides, in decades of going out we have seen this done infinitely better literally dozens of times, in community performace spaces where real creative risk-taking can land well. It was genuinely disappointing to see these people literally half my age repeating the same damn moves I and my peers made decades ago, with very minor development, despite the growth of institutional supports like the LGBT mentorship program that brought us to the neighborhood of this event in the first place, and the material and cultural resources that allow this performance to be staged in this expensive and prestigious space.

And yet at the end there was a rush of warmth from the audience, a sincerity of applause, that startled me for a fraction of a second before I recognized its inevitability. This again is something I’ve seen again and again since the 1980s: the overvaluation of predictable performance because it offers gender-minority bodies live on stage. Such offerings in queer spaces are risky because they so often rely on mobilizing a universal “we” that is easily exploded with simple questions about whose subjectivity, whose experience, whose embodiment is being offered as a mirror to the audience. And in straight venues, they risk presenting queer and trans modes of embodiment as tidbits for consumption in a way that leaves me both sad and mildly offended.

But beyond the question of presumptive audience, which is after all not entirely under the choreographer’s control, “Butch Ballet” displayed a disappointing lack of attention to the history and craft of making performances. Between several vignettes there was connective tissue provided by quotations from ballet class that seem to have been intended to highlight the performers’ butchness by presenting them in a situation conventionally associated with femininity. What it actually did for me was highlight Gina Young’s lack of thoughtful engagement either with choreographic technique or with the dancers’ actual individual capacities: several of these people were interesting to watch in different and potentially intriguing ways, none of which were drawn out for the audience to witness. For instance, in the vignette about inarticulate yet effective forms of emotional support between butch friends, one performer slouched onstage, took a seat on a bench facing us, and settled into a spinal C-curve to play an imaginary video game. The calm authority and naturalness of this posture were utterly persuasive, so that for a moment the audience got to be inside the screen, our attention focused on the competent grace of the hands extended toward us, manipulating imaginary Gameboy controls. But this performance had no interest in exploring task-based competency and the beauty it can create, preferring instead to imagine “dance” as ballet and ballet as a synonym for an outmoded system of gender discipline.

By the time “Butch Ballet” was done I was deeply relieved that we’d already agreed to leave before the third piece. Two weeks later, I’m still wondering about the imbalance between the resources that support the NOW festival at REDCAT and the quality of the arts experience we were offered. The REDCAT website is full of claims about fostering dialogue, yet the only connection I could find between the two pieces I watched was that one eschewed narrative and downplayed spectacle while the other relied entirely on those tools. Surely there’s a way to support experimental work by emerging artists while also curating potentially meaningful conversations.

July 20, “Lolas,” Ryan Tacata

Guest Blog Post by Julian Carter

I’ve had a chance to sit a little with Ryan Tacata’s durational performance “Lolas,” held on Thursday night at the Asian Art Museum. As it filters into me I find my enthusiasm and respect growing. At the time there were a few elements of the performance that I might have questioned; but these have faded and the memory I will retain is of entering a lovely soft absorption, punctuated by moments of confrontation with sorrow, the poignancy of loss and the sobering endlessness of labor.

I had trouble parking so came whisking up the beautiful Beaux Arts amber-cream staircase almost seven minutes late. The doors into the gallery were open. My experience of the performance began with my friend Erika, who has made work with Ryan, getting up to come say hello and whisper that although they’d been told to move freely in the space everyone was sitting squarely in their seats. There were perhaps 40 people in stackable chairs ringing the room in loose groupings that established a spacious central rotunda. In the center of that space there was a large indistinct pile of brightly colored stuff, and by it, a balding Asian man sat in a white molded-plastic armchair. Somehow I had the information that this was Ryan’s father making his performance debut. He was naked but for white underpants and let his spine sag like we do when we’re home by ourselves. The posture could read as defeated if it weren’t so comfortable. Every once in a while, Ryan’s father reached between his knees, took the edge of the chair in his hand, and used it to scoot himself forward around the ring a few feet. After a full rotation, he was joined by three more white chairs populated by young brown people in housedresses and boots. This group slowly circumnavigated the central pile. The scoot-shuffle gesture grew variations and elaborations, and a hand gesture was added that also had some variants. Its essence was a full-arm scoop with a double hand flap signaling come here, come here—though in some of its variations it could just as well mean get outta here, or even move, you’re in front of the TV. It was utterly compelling.

Lolas

sketch by Julian Carter

I did feel a little conspicuous about wandering around at first but I didn’t have a chance to claim a chair anyway so took up the invitation to follow the performers around the rotunda, perching briefly on the occasional empty seat or slipping behind a pillar as I pleased. The structure of the piece and its 2.5-hour duration engendered a kind of free-form engagement that was shared, in different ways, by all observers. Groups of museum-goers came and went and a few stayed on. At one point I noticed I was getting a headache and went downstairs to drink some water and shift focal length for a minute. A handful of artily-dressed people who seemed to have come specifically for this event stayed the whole time; other equally fabulous folk came late or left for a break. A man wearing a camera split off from his tour group to watch longer and stayed until the tour leader came back to collect him. The ebb and flow of the audience in the space meant that the social and energetic frame of the performance changed from one moment to the next. Over the course of the evening, more and more people shifted their comportment in response to the long relaxed unfolding. At 7:30 Muriel Maffre balanced upright at easy attention, her elegant head poised and her elegant legs folded elegantly. At 8:30 she was leaning back, her knees slightly open with her weight behind her. One beautiful young man wearing beautiful fashion lolled sideways to rest against his companion’s shoulder, and then eventually reclined onto her lap. People got up and moved around to watch from a new place. Julie Tolentino reached up from her relaxed sprawl on the floor to whisper into Stosh’s ear, one hand broadcasting delicate yet emphatic air signals as she talked. The glamorous blonde to my left watched me watching Julie and laughed in a conspiratorial way, then mouthed to me that she knows we have met before and was it at Franconia Salon? Or Stanford?… During all this, the performers moved along their prescribed paths, either solo or in canon without any form of interaction or acknowledgment of one another’s proximity. There was a kind of reversal here, in which the audience was mobile and social, the performers comparatively contained.

The overall structure was a series of tableaux, linked together in a loose sequence that could be seen as the artist’s lola, grandmother, making a garden plot and tending it. Perhaps this was also a depiction of others making Lola’s grave in the image of her garden. However you interpret the construction project of the piece, its most prominent and consistent materials were rolls of Astroturf and white-painted rocks; its live sound score (by Derek Phillips) includes the oddly soothing repetitive clink small rocks in a clay saucer, fans whirring, a lawn sprinkler…My companion for the performance whispered that these were the sounds of remembered summers in central California half a century ago. The soundscape merged with the slow, slow movement to create a sense of endlessness, the spacious temporality of childhood and extreme old age.

One of the things I found especially satisfying about “Lolas” was its array of characters. Three people in housedresses, one in white underpants: at first I assumed that the housedress meant “grandmother” and accepted that the artist’s grandmother had, through some creative necessity, assumed three bodies, while the man in his underpants was representing a man in his underpants—perhaps her husband, or perhaps Ryan’s dad, her son, both of whom must have watched her working. As the performance progressed the possibilities seemed to expand. After all, Ryan was performing his grandmother; perhaps his father was too. Perhaps all the housedresses were one Lola; perhaps they were Lola plus aunties; perhaps they were the three graces, or a chorus of mourners, or both. Perhaps Ryan’s father was a Lola too. I let my attention shift to enjoying the patterns in the movement unfolding before me.

About an hour into the performance I asked Erika “why doesn’t he call this work dance?” She whispered back “too much school.” Perhaps I’m undereducated but I want to identify it as dance because I care about the artfulness, the formal intentionality, and the technique of this patterned abstract movement for ensemble with rotating soloists. A good deal of the piece was built on the movement vocabulary of gardening, as executed in old age. It featured the shuffling slow gait of bodies with bad knees, sore feet, and hips that don’t work right anymore. We watched as these Lolas built mini stages for each tableaux. Spines arched like question marks, faces pointed down, they brought rolls of astroturf from the central pile, spread it out just so, and held down its edges with the white-painted rocks. Even with three Lolas sharing the labor, moving rocks with your chest bowed and your pelvis immobile takes a long time. It was made even slower by patterned pauses: a lola would simply stop and rest while the others continued with the task at hand; then another would stop. In another section, the performers built a fountain out of their bodies, Ryan’s dad in his white plastic chair at the base, framed by the three younger performers. The two who rested their heads on his breast each extended one leg out to the side in a lovely flying-buttress kind of pose. They held this position for about 4 minutes, long enough for me to ponder geometry and line and the classical aesthetics of garden statuary, and how Jerome Bel underscores the enormous disavowed labor of transforming oneself into a decorative object.

There were moments of intensity, too. The most memorable of these for me was a sequence that began with the three housedresses sweeping the ground between their feet with little hand-held whisk brooms. Stooping over to remove imaginary imperfections from the Astroturf gradually unfolded into full-body movement, all three whisk brooms flicking in a circular gesture at shoulder height while the other hand rested in the vicinity of the heart. The abstraction and development of sweeping worked in part because the original gesture was so potent and so communicative in its literalism. I saw this as a recreation of Ryan’s grandmother’s absolute refusal to tolerate dirt out of place; in that refusal was contained a rich relationship to housework, husbands, and the natural world.

I could go on and on, like hot summer afternoons, or housework, or gender relations, or grief, or old age. I suspect that is the point. So I’ll just stop here, with a final observation about the performance’s paradoxes. It was about the endlessness of labor, and it left me feeling creatively refreshed; it explored a kind of lonely isolation in that work and yet left me feeling warmly connected to the performers and the other audience members; it gestured repeatedly toward loss, yet created a space suffused with an active love; it had a clear formal structure and temporal duration, yet left me free to engage with it as felt right to me. I left deeply impressed by what I saw as the mixture of craft and integrity in this work, and I am looking forward to Ryan’s next production.