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.
