Hypothetical Arrangements

“When writing about performance, I often feel caught between the body and the word. To attach language to bodies and movement is a complicated matter, calling into question the way words, grammar and syntax codify and enforce the body. A tinge of violence underlies this act of writing — a sort of pinning down of that which is constantly changing. More than a trace, writing marks the body.

I hesitate. I question. Racial identities within performance are too complicated to be pared down to the words black dance…”

My collaborative piece with Siobhan Burke on Platform 2012: Parallels, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones at Danspace Project on Hyperallergic Weekend. Special thanks to Claudia La Rocco

**Photo: Ian Douglas

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.