There’s shame in our passion and passion in our shame. Feelings may drag across the desert before being acknowledged or wanted. When these two women hold each other there is tenderness and vitality and a strenuous agenda. The love is there and vacant. It brews…
My response to Molly Lieber + Eleanor Smith: Beautiful Bone on The Performance Club.
**Photo: Brian Rogers
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
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.
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.
Like three estranged muses they emerge from the darkness. They move slowly, subtly and organically on a shallow wooden platform in the center of the stage. Their bodies, dressed in loose black shirts and leggings, rub against each other as they entangle themselves in a state of torpor. They appear to be under some sort of trance, seductive and otherworldly. There is a hint of determination in their eyes.
Marilyn Maywald, Jimena Paz and Maggie Thom inhabit a ghostly, domesticated landscape in Vicky Shick’s Not Entirely Herself, which premiered at The Kitchen in March. They engage in physically dysfunctional relationships, mysterious and often times unsettling. They wander, uninhibited, arms flouncing around in dreamlike rapture. The lights fade.
When the lights come back on, they look like mystical goddesses joining, and dispersing, in cloud-like formations. Paz puts her arms around Maywald; she gently assists her and whispers in her ear, while Thom twists and bends in rapid, upbeat successions, occasionally gazing blank-faced at us. Sometimes they caress each other and sometimes they ignore each other.Their facial expressions are for the most part neutral, but also break into subtle moments of song, girlish smiles, and mildly devious expressions. They could be bored teenagers, hippies or druggies, awkward lovers or foreigners.
…This was the middle
ground. Some women lounged on the clipped
grass, shadows and intelligence moving
lightly over their skin, compelled by
the trenchant discussion of sovereignty.
…The feminist sky split open.
Writes Lisa Robertson in her book-length poem, Debbie: An Epic. And poetry is precisely what Shick gives us: an elegant feminist mystery without resolution and without a need for one.
Even the objects on stage have an eerily animate presence. A tall white gown cut for two heads and two sets of arms looms in the corner. It is lit from behind by a single spotlight and conjures the presence of an ominous guardian angel, while a demure, sparkling curtain inhabits the opposite corner. Shick’s longtime collaborator, the visual artist Barbara Kilpatrick, created the hauntingly beautifully stage set, and costumes, which consist of a fabulous variety of skirts and dresses. Elise Kermani’s soundtrack, complete with bagpipes reminiscent of circus music, static buzzing, pots clinging, mellow drumming, and wind chimes, evokes a sort of freakish, abandoned house in the countryside. Credit, too, must be given to Chloë Z Brown’s dreamily atmospheric lighting.
For all of its evocative moments, stage props, and stunning opening scene, Not Entirely Herself meanders a bit in its aloofness. It is also in part due to the noticeable disconnect between the first and second sections. Both are poignant but somewhat jarring in juxtaposition.
The stage lights dim once again and the three women seem to flutter off the stage, only to be replaced by Schick and Neil Greenberg. Greenberg is perfect as a sort-of overgrown child in a cable knit sweater vest, and cargo khakis, while Shick radiates with confidence and beauty as a partner or close friend. The tone, however, is completely different from the first part. It’s more lighthearted, and Shick and Greenberg feel less like one amalgamated abstract being. Instead, Schick appears cheerful, but emotionally distant, oblivious to the seriously boyish Greenberg. The closing image of Schick with her back towards us and her arms lusciously snaking the air aside a light stand is a powerful one. The lights go out and we awake.
**This article was first published in the April 2011 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Special thanks to Claudia La Rocco.
