My review of Jen Rosenblit’s In Mouth and Vanessa Anspaugh’s Armed Guard Garden at New York Live Arts out now in the March issue of The Brooklyn Rail
**Photo: Ian Douglas
Neither Here Nor There
Feminist Killjoys
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 :
Manipulative Tendencies
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.
I see myself in you.
“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 19th-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.
2 kilos/ of sea (after Deganit Shemy)
First there’s adolescence. Languid and cruel
complexity. A culmination of tiny incidents.
The yellow jack-in-the-box—coil?
The orange plastic fence—picket?
Birthday dresses hide and expose girlishness.
Partnering up explores full bodily queerness.
It’s ‘wild.’ Despite all the severe angles. Androgynous
sweeping in green glow. Emphasize the cruelty of sorts.
Flop like mechanical fish out of water.
But for knees like padded feet.
One may peer over the narrative curve.
Or one may curve over the narrative drawl.
Plastic grass plucked from braid and thrown like
traditional darts. You can learn a lot of things from
the flowers. You can collapse a coil and become joyously
creepy. Spastic tick kicks
the box. Relationships scatter marbles. Not nearly tangled
enough. Movement maunders in an attempt to control
a possessed hand. When moving props to no end.
The crumbling face sways. Why don’t you listen to wild
circus music with one finger raised?
Why don’t you roll like a yellow car rolls up a leg?
The mechanics of play douse a secret in no time.
The body hardens then unravels in compressed states.
Bite the fence and jump. Early attraction constructs
the dipping landscape. Volunteers the sun in your eye.
**This poem was first published in the October 2011 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Special thanks to Claudia La Rocco.
Vicky Shick at The Kitchen
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.
Trajal Harrell at The Kitchen
(M) is for (M)imosa, an unassuming , gender-bending, dancer. Mimosa transforms. S/he is multiple personalities rolled into one: a Latina rockstar, a ballerina, a student studying abroad, a butch queen, and Prince, amongst other things: “I am Mimosa.”
This is Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church: Medium (M), which had its premiere at The Kitchen in February. It is the third in a series of performances [Small (S) premiered at The New Museum in 2009 and Extra Small (XS) premiered at Abrons Arts Center in January] derived from the question: “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early post-moderns at Judson Church?” Harrell is exceptionally smart in his approach to (M) aka (M)imosa, investigatingwhat constitutes contemporary dance with glamour, humor, and wit.. Despite what his starting question may make you think, the result feels nothing like an academic endeavor. In drawing from the voguing dance tradition, a performance subculture that emerged in the early 1960s primarily featuring gay, lesbians, and transvestites from the African-American and Latino community, Harrell calls upon a specificity in human experience that bore little presence in early Postmodern thought. That is, the universalist notion that everyday movement is considered dance and anyone can be a dancer.
Set in a formalized variety show cum underground beauty pageant, (M)imosa loosely weaves four personas together in a seductive, sometimes rambling narrative. A topless and sculpted Marlene Monteiro Freitas gives a memorable introduction. She moves through exaggerated fashion model poses and lewd references to her body with ease and fluidity. She tears extensions out of her black curly hair while her perky breasts bounce up and down. She vogues as if she were on a catwalk, giggles coyly, fondles herself, and then pulls down her black leggings, mooning the audience. Freitas’ frenzied, but distinctly fabulous persona sets the tone for the evening while also standing in stark contrast to the modest Harell, coquettish and sumptuous François Chaignaud, and androgynously sexy Cecilia Bengolea. Cross-dressed Chaignaud, initially sitting in the audience, makes a beautiful, dramatic appearance as s/he descends onto the stage while singing an operatic melody about fucking. Other highlights include Harrell’s elegant New-Way vogue solo, which he choreographed while “studying abroad in Peru” and Bengolea’s creepy, toppling spider dance in a fully-covered nude body suit complete with stuffed phallus and monstrous heels à la Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals album cover.
The pacing throughout the 90-minute performance is a bit inconsistent. There are a few too many predictable claims of being the real Mimosa and two similar back-to-back sets of lip-synching duets. However, (M)imosa climaxes with a compelling black light “fashion show”; replete with neon-glowing thongs, lips, eyelids, and bikini straps, it is an effective, visual critique on minstrel shows. Watching clips from old blackface performances is a visually jarring experience: the mask-like effect of pitch black faces painted against the lighter skin around the eyes and lips, along with offensively foolish personas, is appalling. Harrell’s brilliant criticism of this practice continues to the point of exhaustion on the performers’ and viewers’ part. But exhaustion, and even annoyance, seems to be what he is going after as he raises the obvious question: How could a social practice like blackface have been accepted for as long as it was? The evening concludes with final solo sets from all of the performers, including Freitas’ eerily faithful rendition of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” and Bengolea’s cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” both of which undoubtedly steal the stage.
The most unassuming, Harrell is nonetheless the most captivating of the four. He never changes clothes like the others, remaining in a black sweatshirt and corduroy khakis throughout the evening (with the exception of a few head accessories and makeup). In emphasizing the individuality of each performer, Harrell fosters a truly collaborative environment where identities subsume one another all while maintaining their own autonomy. Themes of gender, sexuality, and race are played out on the stage in a theatrical but unpretentious matter. In fact, the entire front row is dedicated to the cast’s wardrobe, an open public dressing room where identities are no longer magically transformed backstage. Nothing is hidden and nothing off limits. Instead, all four performers engage in a continuous process of scavenging, undressing, waiting, changing, undoing, and redoing. We watch wide-eyed as Harrell and his collaborators embrace this process and all of its uncertainty, with grace and vogue.
**This article was first published in the March 2011 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Special thanks to Claudia La Rocco.
Sarah Michelson’s Devotion at The Kitchen
There are many ways to experience dance without extracting “meaning” from it. Without having to answer the questions: What am I looking for? What do I want from this? Instead, we take a leap of faith. We surrender. Thus is Michelson’s Devotion, which premiered at The Kitchen on January 13.
Sarah Michelson choreographs through a kaleidoscope. Light enters through one end giving view to fractured movements repeating in loose circles. She is searching for the strangeness brought out by infinite and intimate variations—she the creator of beautiful forms.
This epic 105-minute work, which unfolds in three acts on a shallow, horizontal stage, is based on a text written by Richard Maxwell, the artistic director of New York City Players, and read by Michelson as an introduction and conclusion. The story is a contemporary, biblical monologue with a loose narrative reference to the origin of life. The text meanders and is filled with poetic observations, existential questions, and vague references to personal experiences like, “You are innocent when you don’t know what you are. That’s how you feel when you free base.” Rebecca Warner, as the narrator, opens with a rigorous solo, accompanied by Michelson’s voice. Precise, hard, angular positions are repeated in rapid procession. Arms extend outward like vectors in space; her body crouches and then retreats. Arms shield the body in a protective letter O, legs buckle into a letter V. “Experience is pulled in two halves…you need your space….” Michelson reads. We float in and out of the narrative like a fractured dream space. We feel the choreography being pounded into Warner’s body.
