Hypothetical Arrangements

My review of Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show out now in the February issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

For a further discussion (that is both riveting and frustrating) around this show :

All the Naked Ladies

USE Y/OUR WORDS

poetryinlotion:

                                For ks, always & again

 

You get ideas and I do the heavy lifting

Or maybe that was Cuba talking

Shit in one hand, wish with the other…

I mean, how do you stand it?

I care nothing for rules

Dirty little tramp cocktail

But, you know, some people:

It just doesn’t come naturally to them

I’m going on my lunch break

I’ll take yours, too           

Modern-day mythology                it takes some getting used to

Darling. Don’t you know?

I do my best thinking on my feet

My insights are fueled by need

Read More

I will be co-leading the workshop with Professor Rachel Mattson on March 31.

CLAGS Seminar in the City: Queering the Curriculum
Spring Series Helps Educators Develop LGBTQ Curriculum

This spring, beginning February 4, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and The Hetrick Martin Institute will host a series of workshops addressing queer pedagogies and culture in the classroom. Seminar in the City: Queering the Curriculum will take place over the course of four Saturdays at the Urban Justice Center in downtown Manhattan.

This past summer, queer people and our allies cheered the California State Legislature’s requirement to include the contributions of LGBTQ people to history in social studies textbooks and in-class curriculum.. While California’s legislation represents an unqualified first, teachers in New York City—including teachers at Harvey Milk High School—and across the country have already experimented with introducing queer pedagogies in primary, intermediate, and secondary school classrooms. These and other strategies will be addressed in the CLAGS spring seminar series.

In addition to including historical figures as varied as Bayard Rustin, an architect of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, and Sylvia Rivera, a long-time activist for transgender rights and economic justice, these workshops also offer primary, intermediate, and secondary educators the opportunity to investigate the queer past before the invention of the term “homosexuality” from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the bedroom of Abraham Lincoln. Furthermore, Queering the Curriculum means calling into question the meaning of “civil rights” by investigating the historical experiences of queer people, as well as other taken-for-granted assumptions such as how gendered categories or ideas of “normal” are socially determined. The seminars will also explore how the history of sexuality complicates the study of race, ethnicity, and gender in the existing curriculum.

Queering the Curriculum will take place over four Saturdays spaced out over the spring 2012 semester. We hope that in addition to new ideas and inspiration, teachers can walk away from these sessions with ready-made lesson plans and resources in hand.

Queering the Curriculum is a series and we encourage participants to come to as many sessions as possible. Educators from all disciplines, fields, and age groups should feel welcome to attend. Teachers and teaching assistants are especially invited, but we also welcome counselors, principals and other administrators, school volunteers, and parents to join us for these exciting workshops. We also wish to welcome participants from across the region, including Long Island, Upstate New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Seminar the City: Queering the Curriculum
2012 Spring Schedule

February 4
Introduction to the major concepts and ideas of queer pedagogies in the classroom as well as possible institutional and other hurdles that primary, intermediate, and secondary teachers might face.

March 3
Exploration of the existing civil rights curriculum and strategies for including the history of queer activism in the broader histories of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and other political movements that sought to expand and redefine civil liberties in the United States and abroad.

March 31
Primary and secondary resources in the development of lesson plans, curriculum design, and school-wide programming.

May 5
Exploration of the institutional resources available to teachers and administrators, classroom and school advocacy for both queer students and queer curriculum, and solutions for moving forward in local and state school boards.

Participants in the seminar and discussion include:

• Darnell Moore and Sam Stiegler at the Hetrick-Martin Institute
• New York City teachers Jesse Chanin and Kevin Connell,
• Pop-Up Museum of Queer History Founder Hugh Ryan
• Professor Rachel Mattson at SUNY-New Paltz
• Professor Robbie Cohen at NYU,
• Education Associate Christine Hou of the Dia Art Foundation,
• CLAGS board members Christopher Mitchell and Daniel Hurewitz

Seminars in the City will be held at the Urban Justice Center on 123 William Street in downtown Manhattan.

If you can attend, please RSVP to queeringthecurriculum@gmail.com by January 29, 2012

I will not remember, only describe.
This is the first time I’ve really wanted to be accurate.

                                   —Lisa Robertson, “Face/”



The women form rows


Lingering variations, slightly layered
it is noon


A crouch
delicate bend at the knee


How a painting’s low rumble patiently exists


Why do we need the experimental feminine?


What is necessity in relationship to due time?


I don’t know of many changes


Start over swimmingly if not backwards and through


Part of their bodies are over the silver lines
like an imaginary, rotating system


It is impossible to maintain a mirror image


Even though the ground is slippery


Women who are with each other belong
as in being long


I can see what’s the same with stern yet minimal grace
all the more rolling


As bodies become each other’s witnesses so do I


Symmetry can be purposefully


Difference is a circle, unfurling

History is nothing other than the infinitely intricate present that surrounds us—the panoply of residues and effects, accidental and chosen—that adorn and litter the landscape of our desires.                                                                
                                                  —Joan Retallack, “The Experimental Feminine”

I stick my tongue in it to try to stop it 

 faster 

The temporal feminine sticks to it

A mosaic

of facts abruptly

Makes the body disappear over time. 

Stick my tongue in it

The impatient lover

Reclining fast and then slow

Like an instance of recognition 

Lovely freak unwind this love

**Image: Nan Goldin, Swan-like embrace, Paris, 2010, Chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inches; 76 x 102 cm.     

What follows a strict chronology has no memory.

          —Lyn Hejinian, My Life

 

Longing produces modes of both belonging and ‘being long’ or persisting over time.

          —Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

November 10, 2011                                                                                     

To begin

To begin in time

To imagine alternatives

As forms of doubt and curiosity

As persistent restlessness

As a form of resistance

Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly

Reusable Parts/Endless Love

Homage/critique

Begins and begins again

In 2010, Gerard and Kelly encountered Tino Sehgal’s Kiss at the Guggenheim. Drawn to both its physical and ephemeral nature, as well as Seghal’s consistently heteronormative casting, Gerard and Kelly visited the piece several times to create an audio score of the work, “notating the dancers’ movements as accurately as possible and in real time. We deciphered the work consisted of a roughly 12-minute choreography, performed on a loop.”

An other is a possibility, isn’t it.

           —Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Initial performances that stemmed from the recording consisted of reenactments with the heterosexual couple replaced by same-sex pairs and trios. However, Gerard and Kelly didn’t want to “simply swap one representation for another” a seemingly superficial response that parallels the all-too familiar gay-friendly trend to “normalize” or “equalize” queer lifestyles without challenging the status quo that excluded them in the first place. Reusable Parts/Endless Love is not a reenactment of Sehgal’s work, but a queer critique of notions of progress, a reconstructed system, an experiment of the body in time.

Experienced as an installation, spectators move in and around five partitions composed of two mobile walls meeting at right angles. Cylindrical speakers suspended by copper wires hang in a grid-like pattern over the floor. The moving spectator becomes part of the work. Time is not marked in seconds, minutes or linear narrative, but the mere repetition of language and movement.

“His hands on her lower back.”

“She’s straddling his right thigh.”

“Hand on her crotch.”

“Three steps…and she’s crawling towards him.”

Observation becomes text. Text becomes score. And score is transformed into movement. After three dancers (Yves Laris Cohen, Jose Tena and Roger Prince) have created their own scores, a fourth dancer, devynn emory, steps in to observe and record the movements of the three dancers. This generates a new 12-minute score, which is then performed as a duet watched by two other dancers. New duets are formed and new scores are generated.

We are caught in a recursive loop. Time slows, stammers…falters. The highly systematic approach feels senseless amidst the heaving and determined bodies in the room. No longer am I trying to follow the rules of the system, rather feel time’s effects; its tactility reverberating in my psyche. Gender roles are reversed. Genders meld into one another and expand upon each other. Intimacy reveals itself in repetition with variation. The present signifies not a continuation of the past, but a series of layers—an accumulation. Time does not signify progression, but an investigative poetics of bodies in space.

Gerard and Kelly cast a marvelous group of dancers, all of who possess distinct identities that antagonize society’s restrictive gender binary. Cohen, a transgender performer, opens the Thursday night performance by reciting Gerard and Kelly’s recording (via headphones) as accurately as possible, including all the slips, hesitations, and elongations, into a recording device. He has a powerful presence, bearing an uncanny similarity to a play-by-play announcer. As soon as he finishes recording, it is played back while he follows his own instruction, enacting both the “he” and the “she” of Sehgal’s Kiss. His movements are confident and mesmerizing to watch as he exhibits both a sense of ownership and estrangement in relationship to the words that surround him—familiar in that it is his voice, unfamiliar in its duel-gendered content. In an opposite corner, Tena’s speech is gentler and softer than Cohen’s. Language and movement are layered on top of one another to create a repetition with variation, a strange and seductive stutter.

Where Sehgal’s dramatically drawn-out Kiss elongates chronology, Reusable Parts/Endless Love expands and twists it—queers it, suggesting that our bodily experience are the basis of our memories and identity. Reusable Parts/Endless Love privileges intimacy and our physical relationships with our bodies over maximum capitalist production. Emotions like passion, desire, empathy, and affection do not abide by the same rhythms as the 9-to-5 “work time” rather adopt a psychic space that has no predetermined logic or system.  

Because of my body

In the absence of system

(It is both in ruins and still under construction)

          —Lisa Robertson, R’s boat

In the end, a recording from one of the microphones used to generate one of the new scores is played back into the headphones of all the dancers. An uncomfortable silence pervades the room. The sounds of heavy breathing, falling, and the friction of cloth and carpet replace the multi-layered text scores. I am on the verge of tears. I am enthralled.

Not the sum of parts

But permutations

Of bodily rhythms

Imagine alternatives

As substitute for progress

Bodies and boundaries blur

We have yet to begin…






**Special thanks to Austin Alter.

I couldn’t shake this sense of dread, a deep-seeded anxiety; I couldn’t stop thinking about the way perspectives can be warped and abused through a gendered lens—and how this has the power to annihilate a sense of self, emotionally and physically. Rarely, has empathy and repulsion been so bravely and viscerally portrayed. Rarely do I leave a performance feeling the way I did on this October night, walking away from Heather Kravas and Jeremy Wade’s shared program at Danspace Project. I felt violated.

Kassidy Chism, a new solo by Kravas, meticulously examines emulation, endurance, brutality, and the often-punishing limitations of exercising control over our bodies. The work calls to mind an eating disorder mentality, the way women obsessively examine their bodies. Named after YouTube sensation, Kassidy Chism, a 10-year old competitive hip hop dancer, Kravas’ performance takes place on a simple set: a large mobile rectangular mirror supported by two triangular wooden structures, and two looming, unwieldy spotlights on three-legged stands. Enter Kravas, sporting hot pink high tops, matching fingernail polish, bright red lipstick, and a short-sleeved, thigh-length black dress cinched at the waist. Kravas opens the piece adopting Chism’s poppy and ecstatic dance moves in a free-ranging, hip-hop performance filled with flare and jazz to the soundtrack from electronic musician, Preshish Moments. The beats get turned up. Dogs bark. Arms square off and then spin like pinwheels with exacting precision. Kravas’ presence is highly theatrical to the point of unsettling fakery. Something eerily animal and primal lurks beneath.

Kravas slowly and steadily morphs from a cheery dancing child star to a deranged feminine monstrosity—a sort of freakish and bizarre woman-child, jaw stretched to maximum capacity, veins about to explode in her neck, eyes completely rolled back revealing only her whites. Cats screech in the background. Her head slowly and painfully tips forward, saliva dribbling in a perfect stream down her dress. After her slow-motion exorcism, she systematically shifts the mirror so that it is directly parallel to the audience, a mechanism to simultaneously deflect and intensify our gaze. She takes off her shoes, pulls her black lace underwear down around her ankles and hitches up her dress, duct taping it at waist length, exposing her pubic hair and genitals. The lights go out, birds begin to tweet and the houselights slowly brighten. As if activated by the flash of the two spotlights, Kravas moves mechanically to aggressively cranking sound cues. She bends over. She falls hard on her knees. She falls hard on her hands. She faces the mirror. We are faced with her gaping asshole and cunt:

Fuck me.

Help me.

Do you see me?

Do I sadden you?

Do I disgust you?

Do you quiver in fear of me?

After engaging in a series of extreme and violent cat and cow-like yoga poses (I feel nauseated just from watching), she stands up and rocks and bangs her head back and forth, eyelids aflutter and mouth open wide. “Stop” she says, then adjusts her positioning in the room and starts up again, “Please.” She pauses to change her positioning in the room and then methodically repeats it several more times.

I feel guilty and ashamed. Please, stop.

A childlikeness that can sometimes bleed into childishness—I know I’m not easy but I’ve always loved with an unguardedness…like a child or an animal… It’s confusing to encounter people whose love is complex, a doling out and then withholding, an obsession with control.

–Dodie Bellamy, The Buddhist.
 

Kassidy Chism is torturous, disheartening. Something beautiful yet despicably honest is going on here…and I can’t look away.

A childlikeness that can sometimes bleed into childishness…

Wade’s fountain is a logical companion piece. Wade, like Kravas, bears a magnetic presence, possessing the ability to gather, sway, and rile the audience—he’s a cultish leader of sorts. He starts off by using speech to cultivate a threatening energy in the room. He draws our attention to the interior architecture of St. Mark’s cathedral, the industrial carpet—its neat seams and perfectly aligned corners. He frantically races across the floor to the stained glass windows that allow light to pour into the space, “illuminating all the dancers that were here.” “This is my blessing!” He shouts. After a few more rants and raves about the liveliness of the space, he asks the audience to join him at the altar, to feel the energy within and “gaze backwards over the arches.”

Wade comes across like a tweaked out meth-head, a schizophrenic shaman indoctrinating us into a bizarre circle jerk. Funnily enough, we are asked to sit in a large circle. He makes eye contact with individual audience members and slurps the air with growing intensity. Wade is a captivating, growling demon, spastically continuing to “suck” the life out of each one of us. His transformation into a revolting beast is fountain’s strongest moment. Wade eventually returns to his disingenuous charismatic persona, asking us to hum aloud, harmonize with each other, press our hands against the wall, send our “energy around the world,” and swing our arms upward in unison, as if we were in a self-help seminar. Why does he do this? To mock us? To show us how easily we can be emotionally manipulated? To show us that he, in fact, is the one in control? I’m not entirely sure, but I wish he hadn’t.

**This article was first published in the November 2011 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Special thanks to Claudia La Rocco.

“And I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“And I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“And I didn’t know what to do with it.”
 

A sense of not-knowingness emanates from the bare and undulating bodies within The Smell of Want, a work by the Irish duo Fitzgerald & Stapleton, which premiered at the Abrons Arts Center in October. There’s much to be said and felt here: anxiety, confusion, doubt, to name a few sensations. Yet the atmosphere is relatively subdued; a tranquilizing feverishness pervades throughout the black box theater. Emma Fitzgerald, Áine Stapleton, and Carl Harrison, along with a four-member female chorus, all perform nude. Their honest bodies move in sluggish rapture, revealing the peculiar power dynamics at play between the man, Carl Harrison, and Stapleton and Fitzgerald. All are adorned in primal, minimalist body paint: Stapleton’s body is bisected with a strip of red paint, while Fitzgerald has a thick black bar painted horizontally across the front of her waist, and Harrison is covered in a white chalky substance from neck to upper chest. 

Fitzgerald is maddeningly delicious as her body torques into sharp contortions. She slips, slithers and talks matter-of-factly. She methodically interrupts her speech with seemingly involuntary ticks, grunts and hisses, then hums and sings. Her mysteriously evolving presence acts beyond logic or reason, yet instantaneously charges the space. In one scene, Harrison is on his knees reciting fragments of a letter to a former lover. Fitzgerald creepily stands behind him—legs slowly and carefully sliding into a split while she speaks in what sound like imaginary tongues, freakishly similar to the backward-speaking “man from another place” in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Bodies meld in and out of each other. The movement evokes religious imagery, rituals, séances, calling to mind the 19^th-century myth of the hysteric female. Limbs and hands are held in purposefully limp gestures and then raised towards the heavens; a few fall to their knees. Looking upward, they pant in ecstasy. 

Much seems to be at stake here, though we don’t entirely know what.

…This is the story, now—

city of October warmth, our

myth is that we don’t have one—

Alice Notley writes in her long poem, Beginning with a Stain. Together, Fitzgerald & Stapleton are possessed by their own personal history, their own mythology—or lack thereof. However, The Smell of Want feels uncertain of itself and where it’s going—the female chorus feels extraneous, especially when bursting into a repetitive song around the phrase “tired of men.” And Harrison’s role often dips into banality without offering much insight to the gender power dynamics at play.

And still, Fitzgerald & Stapleton’s physical, psychological exploration of the female psyche is a beautiful thing to watch, stirring up notions of solitude, desperation, and desire. Their speech fragments are honest, intimate and marvelously peculiar, hinting at their inability to make sense of their own personal narrative at hand:

“It’s your day. Your big, disappointing day.” 

“I see myself biking. I see myself in you. I see myself banking. I see myself in you.”

“Red pepper apple—do me up the shitter!”

These two are more in pursuit of a question than an answer. They take plenty of risks along the way, using surreptitious speech and physical movement to question, or more accurately, trouble the relationship between audience and performer. Words and meanings stutter.

“I. Love. You. I’ve always loved you.”

**This article was first published in the November 2011 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Special thanks to Claudia La Rocco.

To dwell—delicious—on—
…Bolts of Melody!

               —Emily Dickinson 

 

Each leaf a runnel the
roofs now skiffs in green
I’ve never done anything
but begin.

              —Lisa Robertson 

To wave in comfortable abstraction. The echo remains indeterminably against the fence. Friendship weighs and flatters while approaching the uneven. Do we want concrete? As if uncertainty looms unconventionally like a black skirt in the corner. Sound waves its left hand amongst tremors. The women in search of an echo may unhook themselves from the mirror. Attention can drop thought or hearing. Senses like alert chimneys without instruction. Can personal history be detached from the body? If I start with questions will there be a sense of openness? We started this without completion. Can we succeed in openness? What is succession but a bifocal channel? As if, we women, enamored with sound and curiosity were to rejoice incandescently with candlesticks and frosting. We still perch unevenly in our skirts. Here and there we go. A month. Two. The dialogue unfolds and loops in touring momentum. Cozy habitats bind us. Bending resistance up and down. How did this appear? What made you think of me? To gray indefinitely and then lean heavily amongst leaves. I prop myself up in a popping matter. Not being reduced to smoking chatter. Depth in transparency reveals our guests’ observations. Heaves in only one direction. Audra, you are contact and outline. It is the afternoon. I am reluctant and chiming, counting words inside breath. We must travel slowly and heedfully. So too, the body may be convinced.

*Image: Audra Wolowiec, 2011.