IF, THEN

Kieran Swann on Karol Tyminski’s This is a musical 

You Can Live, Or You Can Die Trying This

Katherine Brewer Ball on Will Rawls’ The Planet-Eaters: Seconds 

That Wild Inside of Dana Michel’s “Mercurial George”

By Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi

To begin, let’s cut to the end of Mercurial George (2016), the skittish dance-meets-performance piece from Canadian choreographer, Dana Michel. At the denouement, Michel traverses, several times over, the perimeter of the Experimental Theater at Abrons. Her clunky, heavy-footed steps appear labored, trudging along in syncopated steps that stress the contours of the space. At the same time, this jagged ambling is equal parts revelatory given the narrative arc of Michel fumbling about the stage, prostrate, in disjointed fits for much of the performance. Mind you, there were other moments besides the ending where Michel is upright: Around the midway point, Michel—complete with a fascinator, faux fur coat, squeeze horn, and bag of bread—snakes about with braggart affectation to Moondog’s triumphant timpani work in Stamping Ground (1969). However, this upturn in fortune is seemingly stalled at the end of the performance: Michel’s swank one-two parade turns into an explicitly recursive movement that hugs the marginal extremes. If we meditate on where Michel walks, as well as the manner, what do we make of said steps that mimic a merry-go-round? Do we read Michel’s circular closure as transformation or habit, progression or regression?^[1] Rather than fixate on one or the other, Michel’s schizoid showing in Mercurial George is as much about the square peg in a round hole as it is about how we recognize—and reckon with—differentiation within repetition that operates outside the knowable, in a quiet place other than public and private.^[2]

 
What is knowable, on instant, is that Michel’s performing persona exists in a strangely ordered delirium. Scattered across the dingy stage are a litany of objects—bags, empty or filled with rice, microphones, a black privacy shelter, turquoise colored dough, toys, cups, saucers and other kitchen utensils. By standard conventions, this scene registers as formless, a haphazard amalgam of trivial items. Animating this and that, Michel produces a territorial maelstrom—a junkyard somewhat akin to Robert Morris’ Untitled (Scattered Piece) (1968-69)—that flirts with disorder, but of a sensible kind. In one instance, Michel struggles to enter a black plastic bag, burrowing its expanse for knickknacks: A microphone emerges; soon after, a rice bag is stabbed, with grains spraying everywhere on the stage; and before her Moondog-assisted grandstanding, a bare-breasted Michel sits within this mess, goggles on, and takes a moment to engage in an indecipherable soliloquy. Her words here are inchoate, notably palilailic, and, at times, inaudible despite an interrogation-like spotlight shining square on her face. Random as it may seem, there is a self-indulgent quietness here: Michel speaks on her time; she maintains minimal, if not zero, eye contact with the audience; and the moments when we do catch glimpses of her face, it happens to be a photograph perched atop her makeshift crown-cum-fascinator. From this repetition of faces to her aphasic speech, Michel enters into a performance of disability, albeit one that sidesteps medical discourses that regard disabled bodies based on limits rather than capacities.^3 [3]Add to that, the affective hold emanating from Michel’s disabled mannerisms isn’t one of paternalistic care, pity or even fear. Instead, questions abound like why these objects? Who is this character? How do we get into their inner sanctum fantastic with motion? For Michel, all this intimates at a black interior operating “beyond the public face of stereotype and limited imagination.”^[4] More or less, disability was her blackness, her body, her imaginary, all navigated on her terms.

 
These interrogations into a different interior, as well as the performance itself, trouble what Delueze and Gauttari call a system of facialization that ascribes significance and subjectivity to faces in addition to the bodies, objects, and landscapes they move through and inhabit.^[5] In this system, the face desires interpretation, a set of signs that grant recognition. While the attribution of meaning brings social visibility to the face and, in turn, the individual, for black hued bodies or people with, say, Down Syndrome, the inward turn to now develop subjectivity is delimited such that “[t]he way a person looks, [and] the things they do, become taken up as indicative of what they ‘are.’”^[6] Aware of these restrictive corporeal codes to subjectivity, Michel latches onto Deleuze and Gauttari’s insistence to “escape the face” not via a primitive, pre-facial return, but by constructing “probe-heads” that take up different faces concerned with organizing “strange new becomings, [and] new polyvocalities.”^[7] To this end, the motionless simulacra of Michel’s face fastened to her headpiece prods and pokes the audience, gazing outward while her character parades to the snares of Moondog, an experimental composer who happened to be blind. The axiomatic thread of disability in Stamping Ground punctuates the interior of Michel, allowing her “a space of wild selffullness [sic]” that “gestures away from the caricatures of racial subjectivity.”^[8]This type of comedic play on race was at issue in Yellow Towel (2014), the companion piece to Mercurial George.^[9]Performed at American Realness 2014, Yellow Towel saw Michel navigate a racialized envy towards her blonde haired classmates; as a child, the choreographer wore a blonde towel to emulate this hegemonic signifier of whiteness, their standards of beauty. If Yellow Towel was Michel’s embodied deconstruction of public stereotypes on beauty, then Mercurial George presents as a “locus at which self-interrogation takes place.”^[10] That is to say, Michel, herself, noted Mercurial George was “Yellow Towel under a microscope.” As such, the concerns of the public are secondary in Mercurial George, their gaze an afterthought; instead, the expressiveness of the interior was of utmost importance here. However, when one is cognizant of the gaze, of being surveilled, we often enter a resistant interior of silence that mirrors a “refusal or protest” that tends towards a withdrawn, absent, and still self.^[11] Michel is far from still, from absent, but her performance bursts with a contradictory aesthetic of quiet that is—much like silence—inward, but, more importantly, abundant, wild, “watcherless”—carrying on unbeknownst to the gaze.^[12] By not making an effort to engage the audience during Mercurial George, one can say Michel is not attuned to (or has already tuned out) that which is public—the gaze. Taking it further, Michel (courtesy of her facial stand-in) watches us watch her quiet inside as it basks in an inexpressible expressiveness that evades (outside) systems of signification.

 
While difference—be it disability or disorder—abounds in Mercurial George, the basis for Michel’s about-face constituted a sort of repetition, a “changing same” that materializes itself within a black radical aesthetic.^[13] For late cultural critic James A. Snead, this tendency to repeat—to bring it back, come rewind—is the hallmark of a black performance practice built on “progress and a willed return to a prior series.”^[14] Thanks to time, progress can become an illusion in materialist cultures; however, repetition thwarts this artifice by complicating time as this objectively linear unfolding. Snead argues that returning to the past welcomes the succession of cuts, ruptures, accidents, and surprises of yore in ways that risk derailing what is already in progress. But by making room for the unknown, black performance daringly asks the barbed, almost disabling, question: why not go back to the past, painful as it may be?

 
Coming full circle, again, to the end of Mercurial George, we now see that those spherical flows of movement from Michel’s character cannot be easily reduced to growth. Such a read presumes an accurate beginning. But in the trashed stage—object laden to begin with—we encounter an excess materiality (or mess) that contradicts this logic of accuracy. Even the cimmerian scene where Michel seductively dances upright in the privacy shelter: her speech is at its most intelligible here as she goes on about the frothiness of milkshake and whipping things (most likely the milkshake). However, the strobe lights fracture Michel’s fluid, vogue hand performance, immersing the stage in a disjunctive shimmer of sight and sound. No sooner did the strobe lights peter out, than Michel was slump on the floor, kneading dough, and struggling to place it on a table. Positionality, whether vertical or horizontal, did not lend itself to progress here; whether crawling about on the stage or pacing the contours of the theater, Michel remained self-absorbed, closed off to outside chatter and stares.

 
Again, on accurate beginnings: Didn’t “The Man with The Yellow Hat” lure and kidnap Curious George from Africa? From Yellow Towel to Mercurial George, the lineage of black (dis)quiet is evident, necessitating a negotiation of the anoriginal abstraction that gets grafted onto blackness.The through lines—childhood angst, historical violence—are there between the two works, but Michel doesn’t dwell on these connective threads in Mercurial George or force it upon the performance in ways too obvious. Instead, Michel playfully cuts up throughout her performance, coding this corporeal, psychological, and material violence against blackness into a repetition that “continually ‘cuts’ back to the start,” while also making room for the difficulty that comes with surprise encounters. ^[15]With this severing of black culture and place, cutting up takes on tenor of deterritorialization that easily extrapolates to the simultaneity of capitalist flows and schizoid affectations—a subjectivity that withdraws into self, only to then express itself in startlingly ways. The cutting up within deterritorialization moves in a similar fashion for blackness; the violent cut that persists and the subsequent invagination finds the black body repeatedly folding back on itself, generating a space of ingrowth for survival.^[16]

 
Following these lines of thought, it’s safe to say Michel invaginated the Experimental Theater at Abrons—going inward and then out, finding every nook and cranny to revel in an abundant wildness and hysteria that was of her own design. It’s a wildness that would have pleased bell hooks.^[17]But it is also a wildness that can bide its time much like Janie (in Their Eyes Were Watching God) waiting for that “something to [fall] off the shelf inside her” and having the pluck to go “inside to see what it was.”^[18] This fall from stability, from what is known, is no doubt dizzying. Yet the beauty of Michel’s métier is how she negotiates this dangerous declivity—this need to fall in order to experience some type of authentic upheaval.^[19] Though free-falling might be framed as liberatory, Michel’s haunting performance in Mercurial George channeled the discord of such a vertiginous feat, reminding us just how frightening yet necessary that quiet, inward search to live can be.

 
Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi is a Nigerian Australian curator and writer based in New York City. He is a curatorial assistant at Performa and the 2016-2017 Curatorial Fellow at The Kitchen. Onyewuenyi maintains an ongoing writing practice, with his work appearing in Afterimage, ARTS.BLACK, BLOUIN ARTINFO, Carla, and Performa Magazine, among others. He is an MA candidate in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

 
^[1] James A. Snead broaches this apprehension among certain cultures in recognizing repetition, even when view culture as progressive or regressive. At the end of the day, for Snead, difference doesn’t negate the presence of repetition, but forces us to question the gains in thinking about difference as something that we’ve experienced before. James A. Snead, “Repetition as a figure of black culture,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (London: Routledge, 1984): 59.

^[2] Reflecting on Snead’s “quality of difference” alongside Kevin Quashie’s aesthetic of quiet is revealing insofar as it affords a meditation on the interior space that Dana Michel orchestrates in Mercurial George. Michel enters an expressiveness that isn’t tethered to publicness, discourses of resistance, the gaze of the other/another, and this fiat of black culture to be known and public. Instead, her interior is wild, exploratory, playful, and welcome to repetitive gestures. The latter may seem compulsive to the public eye, but are simply Michel working through prior narratives. See Kevin Quashie, “Publicness, Silence, and the Sovereignty of the Interior,” in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

^[3] This idea of a performance of disability borrows from Michel remarking that she is “drawn to disability.” In keeping with this, cultural theorist Anna Hickey-Moody argues that performance offers new ways to be affected differently by the disabled body so that we can shift from medical discourses that organize the disabled body based on “bodily limits, rather than bodily capacities.” Anna Hickey-Moody, “Becoming–Dinosaur: Collective Process and Movement Aesthetics,” in Deleuze and Performance, ed. Laura Cull (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009): 161.

^[4] Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004): x.

^[5] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988): 180.

^[6] Hickey-Moody, “Becoming—Dinosaur,” 167.

^[7] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 171-191.

^[8] Quashie, “Publicness, Silence, and the Sovereignty of the Interior,” 21.

^[9]  This coupling of tragedy and comedic relief can be found in the works of W.E.B. DuBois (i.e., his smile simply conceals his inner conflicts in The Souls of Black Folks, 1903), Frantz Fanon (i.e., Fanon’s 1952 essay, “The Fact of Blackness,” finds the political philosopher attempting to laugh as a child repeatedly calls him a negro), and Ralph Ellison (i.e., in Invisible Man, 1952 during his marijuana-induced euphoria, the protagonist is joined by an aged woman who laments, “I laughs too but I moans too”). All three, as well as Michel, turn to wry forms of humor before delving into a discussion of black interiority.

^[10] Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003): 383.

^[11] Quashie, “Publicness, Silence, and the Sovereignty of the Interior,” 22.

^[12]  Ibid.

^[13]   LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s articulations on black music identified the “blues impulse” as the wellspring for the mid-twentieth century emergence of dynamic black musical  expression found in jazz avant-garde (or the new black music) and R&B. Jason Robinson, “The Challenge of the Changing Same: The Jazz Avant-garde of the 1960s, the Black Aesthetic, and the Black Arts Movement,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 1 (2005): 20-37.

^[14] Snead, “Repetition as a figure of black culture,” 67.

^[15]   Ibid.

^[16] “These material degradations—fissures or invaginations of a foreclosed universality, a heroic but bounded eroticism—are black performances.” Here, Fred Moten roots black performance in invagination, which is a process of differentiation and, ultimately, growth that occurs when a thing turns inward or folds back on itself. Invagination is inherently cyclical, an endless turning over from outside to inside that precludes a unified identity. Fred Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” in In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 14.

^[17] “Wild is the metaphoric expression of that inner will to rebel, to move against the grain, to be out of one’s place. It is the expression of radical black female subjectivity…cultivate this ‘wildness’ as a survival strategy…[since] folks seem to be more eager to read about wild black women in fictions than to make way for us in real life.” bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992): 49.

^[18] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1937): 87.

^[19] Cradling us in (im)possibility, Frantz Fanon began and ended Black Skin, White Masks (1967) with this sense of upheaval and free-fall. That is, Fanon bookends upheaval with notions of descent, declivity, or just the act of coming down. These words communicate that black bodies must fall to get back up and be. As an example, Fanon made reference to Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire who came down to the “very depths” in order to foster a “psyche of ascent” wherein black bodies are able to rise from the “chaotic rivers, seas of corruption, [and] oceans in convulsion.” From the stage itself to Michel’s body, Césaire scene of descent and ascent mirrors the anarchy of Mercurial George..

photo by Ian Douglas

Performance and Language: On Trajal Harrell’s “Twenty Looks, or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church”

By Maya Harakawa

 
Frantz Fanon begins his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks by discussing language. “There is an extraordinary power,” he writes, “in the possession of a language.”^[1] Power is the operative word here. Black Skin, White Masks is a study of the effects of colonialism on the black psyche and as such is thoroughly concerned with the fundamental power differential that distinguishes the colonizer from the colonized. The primacy language assumes in Fanon’s formulation of this dynamic is worth highlighting. By devoting the first chapter of his book to the question of language, Fanon treats it as more than just a means of communication. While it is often analyzed at the level of syntax or content, Fanon’s interest in language lies somewhere else entirely. Language for Fanon is a matter of ontology, of being. Fanon argues that “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.”^[2]

When the colonized Antillean (the primary subject of Fanon’s book) masters the French language, and demonstrates this mastery via speech, she does more than simply learn a new vocabulary and grammar. She adapts to a set of values encoded in the language itself. According to Fanon, “a man [sic] who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language.”^[3] And what world is expressed in the language of the French colonizer? It is one predicated on the inferiority of the colonized subject, an inferiority that becomes internalized and entrenched every time the French language is externalized in speech. Language, then, is an agent of power, a tool of self-objectification that, in the colonial context, results in self-alienation rather than self-affirmation.

I find Fanon’s approach to language extremely compelling. We know from J. L. Austin that words are performative, that you can do things with them and that they have material consequences. But Fanon’s theory of language, while it can be extrapolated to performative ends, is distinct because it is predicated on difference. Language organizes the psyche of the locutor when it is operating in uneven terrain, when there is directionality behind its exchange, moving hierarchically rather than laterally. The question behind Fanon’s understanding of language might then be posed as: How does language operate at the point where two worlds meet?

Trajal Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S) asks a similar question: “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ballroom scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?” This conceit crafts a fiction predicated on difference; difference in geography, in gender, in race. Forcing an encounter between two milieus that, in 1963, were distinct and physically separated, Harrell employs a variety of languages to visually interface between the two. Fashion is one of these languages. Movement, the morpheme of performance, is another. In each case, a set of conventions—rules that dictate the intelligibility of a given visual language—are reworked rather than accepted or enforced. Like Fanon, who understood that language was more than just the meaning of words, Harrell performs the exchange of language itself. It is the communication of both form and content.

Take style for instance, as another language of performance. Just like spoken language, style is a complex system of disclosure. It is connotative, it conveys meaning, and it follows a set of rules that must be mutually recognized to ensure intelligibility. The voguing of the Harlem Ballroom scene and the postmodernism associated with Judson are two distinct styles of dance, meaning that their practitioners adhere to different coherent qualities. Voguing draws inspiration from the poses of fashion magazines. The lines are hard, the movement is exuberant. The Judson variety of postmodern dance emphasizes continuity. The movement is deskilled and factual; non-mimetic and anti-expressionistic. If the walk of voguing is native to the catwalk, then walk of postmodern dance is far more pedestrian.

Walking occupies a prominent position in both the balls of Harlem and postmodern dance,  and Harrell exploits this formal similarity. A gait—its pace, its rhythm—is highly coded, the product of cultural meaning ascribed to bodies based on race, gender, and class. Bringing two highly charged styles to bear on a single movement, Harrell reframes its communicative function, creating a space for the viewer to rethink their meanings.

Harrell’s walk in Twenty Looks speaks multiple languages. Slowed down to a glacial pace, the walk is one seamless expenditure of energy. It is, in other words, “good” postmodern dance; it follows the rules of that aesthetic tradition. And yet, the purposeful placement of the feet, the upward thrust of the knees, and the elliptical motion of the hips are unmistakably mined from high fashion, a reference to the movement vocabulary of voguing. The walk is a slow motion strut exaggerated for artistic rather than comedic effect. In this one movement, we see a dialogue of styles. The languages of multiple traditions speak to each other, communicating tensions and convergences rather than domination and submission.

How do we communicate across difference? It is not my intention to suggest that Harrell’s performance is a utopian resolution of meaningful conflict. There is antagonism and incoherence throughout the work. Binaries (uptown/downtown; male/female; popular/avant-garde) are just as frequently collapsed as they are left suspended. But, by thinking through these differences through the lense of language, by emphasizing communication and exchange, I wonder if it is possible to at least imagine a way of being through language that, in contra distinction to Fanon, does not inflict alienation or subjugation. If Harrell’s performance is a world in and of itself–an imagined space–then its simultaneously hybridized and conflicting languages transmit, indeed create, their own worldview rather than reify that of another.

 
Maya Harakawa is a PhD student in the Art History department at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
 

^[1] Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 2.

^[2] ibid., 1.

^[3] ibid., 2.

photo by Ian Douglas

IF, THEN

By Kieran Swann

 
If this is a musical – it ends in crescendo. Blown up the full height of the rear wall of the theatre, pixelated, frozen – Karol Tyminski in tight-closeup, smiling out at us with unencumbered, cheeky glee, his face shining from the patina of his off-screen sex partner’s cum. It is this image, this crescendo of queer pleasure, that I return to in the days following Tyminski’s This Is A Musical. Not the frenzied physicality, not the empathetic pain in my own body, not the duality of his present, dancing body, and his mediated form, penetrated roughly by an anonymous partner. All of that replays through my mind as well, but it always loops back, fast forwards, smash-cuts through to Tyminski smiling at the camera and through it to the audience. His face covered in sweat and semen and his eyes bright with pleasure and pride in all the things that this queer body can do.

*

It starts with quiet scraping from his buzz cut head, tracing circles on the floor. Legs stretched out and squeaking against the white dance vinyl. Arching his body back to thud suddenly down, the sharp exhalation of his breath is a shock. Violent; a burst from his open mouth. His body is in dim silhouette; the sound is more important than the visual. His body shivers; his face shakes, air caught in the hollows of his cheeks. Knees beat to the floor. Shudders, thumps, rasps caught by his microphone, amplified and looped, strung together in a visceral soundtrack.

If this is a musical – centred on sound – the aesthetic movement of Tyminski’s body is just labour. It is behind the scenes, it is ancillary. The bruises on his knees and elbows, the bruises on his shins, the wrapping on his ankle – these are not what we are supposed to focus on here. The sounds of the body are at the centre, and its materiality, its queerness, its joys and pleasures and pains are just the labour that brings it forth.

If this is a musical, the body is artist and instrument at once; agent and implement for the creation of noise. But it is hard to see past the body in the foreground; and it becomes increasingly difficult. The sounds of it are tied to the sensations of it – as he smashes again and again to his knees on the hard floor; beats his open palm against his own flesh – and the sensations of his body wash out and over us. We see the sheen of sweat flowing from flesh flushing brighter from exhaustion and pain, and the pain of his body echoes in our own, empathetic and viral. If this is a musical, maybe we are the microphone; and more than just sound is amplified inside us.

*

We cannot ignore the body for long, not our own, not Tyminski’s in this work. Over the course of its hour, the work evolves from the flesh’s sonic possibilities to one that is more exploratory. The sexual current of the work becomes stronger and stronger; Tyminski drags the microphone across his flesh, over his crotch; it penetrates his mouth and we hear the sounds of the inside of his body. On his knees, he beats it against his tongue, against his face. The sound evolves from these dull thuds and scrapes of flesh to a more weighty house beat. If we are the microphone, what’s the relationship here? As the exploration of the body turns sexual, what have we moved into? He’s more manic now. His emotional energy has become wilder as the louder and more insistent beat of the music flings his body around the space. Writhing in the kind of performative, tactile glee of a man that looks you in the eye as he rubs his asshole, his gaze a gleeful, insistent dare; alternately angry – yelling at us, then laughing again. He’s looking back at us now, and not looking away; our bodies are pinned tight in his gaze in contrast to the way we chose to see through him – as if this was ever a musical.

Because if this is a musical, then the labours, pains, and pleasures of the queer body fall away into side stage shadows – Tyminski begins the work a literal silhouette, the details of his body obscured. The scabs on his knees from repeated scrapes, the bruises on his arms and legs – the strength of his movement sits behind the musicality in our consideration of the work. We place the music central, strip away the operations of the body, in its bruising, bleeding – its pleasing, its being pleasured – and place them to the side.

But then where are we? Queerness is always concerned with the margins; that’s where queerness happens. This to me is the churning engine of the work; the paradigm by which it makes visible and invisible the queer body. The singularity at the core of queerness has always been its effort to be visible and make difference visible, in rejection of assimilation as an act of labour that allows the non-normative body to integrate into a heteronormative society. If this is a musical, then the work insists on the secondary nature of the queer body that produces it; but these queer bodies have a way of pushing back into the centre, becoming visible, empathetic, bold, unignorable.

*

Projection begins on the wall behind him. Another Tyminski; a mediated, dual body. As the live – Tyminski chants to us, discordant text of the body and the heart, the space awash now with flashing coloured lights (the monochrome silhouette of its beginnings forgotten), the mediated – Tyminski is on his back. Tight close upcloseup on his face. He’s being fucked? Blown? By an offscreen man – then onscreen. But not just another man, he’s silhouetted with oscillating colours – something between a Windows screensaver, an acid trip, and the universe. Something between cosmic and cheap. The microphone has been forgotten now. We are the camera, now, we are the audience in the space as Tyminski chants to us, holds our gaze. Our ears are joined by our bodies, our bodies by our eyes, and our eyes are half in the camera, rotating around mediated – Tyminski as he is fucked hard by the universe in the shape of a man. Hands sometimes tight round his throat, sometimes gripping at soft flesh, sometimes rubbing over his body with the kind of instinctive touch that bodies in mutual queer pleasure tumble into.

Kieran Swann is an artist, curator, producer, and facilitator; with a background in both performance and visual art. His practice returns to ideas of memorial, queerness, performance as archive, the public/private dichotomy, and strategies of co-creation and meaningful engagement with audience, or at least displacing the usual audience/artist relationship. He is one-fourth of The Good Room, an Australian collective who use the anonymous experiences of ordinary people to create extraordinary contemporary performance work (thegoodroom.com.au); and he maintains a joint curatorial practice with Amy-Clare McCarthy working with artists of feminist, queer, and culturally diverse practices. Kieran has studied at Wesleyan University, Victorian College of the Arts, and Queensland University of Technology; and worked with Venice International Performance Week, PICA, Danspace Project; and galleries, companies, festivals and artists throughout Australia. the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has described his work as “nothing short of brilliant” and RealTime Magazine has noted him a “fabulous liar in a mundane world.”

photo by Ian Douglas

You Can Live, Or You Can Die Trying This

By Katherine Brewer Ball

Will Rawls’s work often begins with a small gesture: hands clapping, feet shuffling along a basement floor, Rawls pulling the strings of a hoodie until it covers his face. There are entire oceans of variation inside these minor movements, and inside the alphabetic vocabulary that Rawls introduces in his choreography. In The Planet-Eaters: Seconds (2016), the tender, cupping beats on the gelatinous waves of a fabric wall are only slight deviations from the sharp schoolgirl handclaps that begin the piece, created by Rawls and musician Chirs Kuklis. The rhythmic play conjures the texture and noise of holding hands, of the smack of a jump rope on concrete, of fingers waving in patterns, and the thick, liquidy sensation of a heartbeat. Watching Rawls perform is like being transported to a world inside the minor: a single gesture or sound cracks open to expose an entire landscape. This is a visual world, but also a felt one; the sound of bodies coming together and apart smack like a dry mouth, like the strange tones in the between-vocalizations of a singer. Sounds that make me think of the patter of a dog’s paws, or a horse’s stampede over brick and mud.

“1,2,1,2,1,2,3. 1,2,1,2,1,2,3” gets stuck in my head as my feet rap along the sidewalk. I try to make up my own language to fit the rhyme schemes and beats in The Planet-Eaters: Seconds. Sitting on a bus I internet-search things like “folk dance,” “verse,” “Phife,” “epic poetry,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “Aimé Césaire.” I think of both Césaire and James Baldwin, Black strangers in the villages of the Dalmatian coast and Switzerland, respectively. I think of Zora Neale Hurston and her choreographic research in the US south and the Caribbean on Black “folk” dance forms. I remember the “dance ethnographies” I was assigned in school, but can’t recall exactly why they made me feel so righteous and angry. Halfway through the piece, after introducing the audience to the legs and gods of Balkan folk dance, Rawls sits down and tells a story about a campfire in Montenegro, “it was then that those of us at the campsite had forgotten ourselves and given ourselves up. It was then that those of us at the encampment had forgotten ourselves and given ourselves up to hangovers, sunburns, and being brown.” In his story, the campsite turns into an encampment, and the drunken suntan into a collective brownness shared with Igor, Ivana, Vladamir and Bojana. In these small moments, Serbo-Croatian folksongs merge with A Tribe Called Quest. The fantasy desire of getting a story of “ethnic” dance in translation carries Rawls’s voice in media res, in the middle of the story he has been telling as if in no specific order.

At the top of The Planet Eaters: Seconds, Rawls is a dancing fertility goddess with long blond braids that cover his eyes. Weak in the knees, elbows askew, he soft shoes across the stage eventually bringing us to a wounded warrior on a hill. Rawls speaks about letting go of “the narrative safety net,” of the need to make the stories clear, or to even make them stories at all. When we spoke this past fall about teaching performance, he explained that dance has a “weak semiotics,” which in my mind conjures up a limp wristed form of enunciation where instead of a finger pointing towards the west in a statuesque gesture of colonial expansion, a finger flops or points sideways. Weak semiotics, like weak theory, implies only local applicability; a weak theory can be primarily descriptive without offering a universal explanation. In invoking a weak semiotics, Rawls reminds us to dwell on the detail, on description, and to stay in the minor. The Planet Eaters: Seconds is a dance that is about something without giving it away, a dance that is opaque, and in its opacity revelatory.

In Frontispieces (2012), thin Styrofoam German Shepherds cutouts take turns guarding St. Mark’s Church and flying sideways across the room. In Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow era, the German Shepard was used as symbol of power and population control. Rawls lets the German Shepherds sit prominently across the stage, but he doesn’t take on the task of clarifying his meaning for the audience. We never see through the dogs as either violent monsters or playful companions. Instead, German Shepherds float horizontally and move around the stage in various colors and shapes while Rawls duets with an unwieldy stepladder. In I make me [sic] (2016) Rawls gives the audience his personal family history as he reads out words in alphabetical order: “A. Ambromovic, Animal, Amway.” You might call his dance a poem, epic or concrete. Rawls gives us biographical information, about where his parents worked, and the face lotions they bought him. He stops every so often to tell a letter-appropriate story, but he never completes his alphabetical list or completes his family profile. Rawls stops at “I,” only a third of the way through the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. He stops before it’s finished, resisting the triumph of the west enacted through clarity and comprehension.

Back at the top, Rawls and Kuklis dance with small sections of plastic grass; they unravel and struggle with the green mats grounding the audience in a scene of undone trespass. I wonder what it means to eat the planet, to swallow the rhythms of a people that are not your people? Can you mouth someone else’s dance forms, taste them, echo them without enacting theft and consumption? Rawls counts, “This is how the west was won, 2,3,4. 4,3,2,1.” Watching The Planet-Eaters, I realize that I don’t have a clear understanding of folk dance, but I know it’s a game that is being played, a children’s rhyme of both known gesture and improvisation. This folk practice put on by Rawls resonates with Pauline Oliveros’s strategy of “deep listening” — a complete and total surrender of one’s body to the act of listening. Maybe this is a deep choreography, an undoing of choreographic vocabulary in favor of a somatic attentiveness that does not seek to approximate or consume, but is given over to the difficulties of a conversation. Rawls shows us how to imagine a complicated turning toward difference and collectivity, towards what Rawls shorthands as “self and other.”

Katherine Brewer Ball is an art writer based in Brooklyn. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Performance Studies/African American Studies at Wesleyan University and is currently at work on a book project that traces contemporary Black, Latinx and queer performances that break from the language of freedom to theorize escape. Brewer Ball also curates performance and art events, including the NYC performance salon, Adult Contemporary.

photo by Ian Douglas

Ivo Dimchev

Stage Works 2002-2016

Monday, January 9, 11:00pm–1:00am
Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater / 466 Grand Street / Free

American Realness 2017 hosts a publication release in celebration of Ivo Dimchev’s recently published Stage Works 2002–2016. Over 400 pages document, with text and image, all of Dimchev’s stage works including FEST and The P Project, seen by New York audiences at Abrons Arts Center in collaboration with American Realness and Queer New York International.

Opening Night Toast

Become a Member of the House

Thursday, January 5, 5:00pm–7:00pm
Abrons Arts Center, Culpeper Gallery / 466 Grand Street / Free

Kick off American Realness 2017 with a champagne toast to celebrate the start of the eighth season of the festival! Starting at 5pm American Realness donors aka Members of the House are welcome to toast the season launch in the Culpeper Gallery at Abrons Arts Center.

At 6pm the event welcomes all festival-goers to the revelry. Become a member of the House of Realness by making a contribution at americanrealness.com/donate. Membership perks include American Realness merch, reserved seats to festival performances and behind the scenes VIP access!

Native American Realness

Rosy Simas and Christopher K. Morgan
in conversation with Sara Nash

Saturday, January 7, 3:45pm–5:15pm

Following recent protest of the originally released American Realness 2017 performance program, and the festivals’ historic curatorial blindness towards Native American artists, this conversation welcomes Native Contemporary Choreographers Rosy Simas (Seneca) and Christopher K. Morgan (Native Hawaiian) to discuss the state of Native American performance work across the US and the epidemic of institutional negligence, insensitivity and attempted erasure of and towards Native American / Indigenous / First Nations’ values, histories and contributions to contemporary artistic practice. This conversation seeks to investigate how our dominant culture’s historical insensitivity aids in forms of cultural appropriation, Redface, and racism in artistic practice, spectatorship and presenting. Does Redface sell? Is curating Native artists seen as risky, unsellable, or uninteresting, or does this speak to institutional and societal ignorance? In dialogue with Sara Nash (New England Foundation for the Arts), Simas and Morgan will share action strategies artists, administrators, and audiences can take in order resist our complicity in settler colonial cultural practices. This conversation will additionally include presentations on the work of contemporary practicing Native artists.

Invited Indigenous guests: Elder/Healer Janice Bad Moccasin (Dakota/Lakota), educator Ramona Kitto Statley (Dakota), Andre Bouchard (of Kootenai and Ojibwe descent), choreographer and activist Emily Johnson (Yup’ik), director of Dancing Earth Rulan Tangen, co-director of Safos Dance Yvonne Montoya, and many others.

photos by Tim Rummelhoff and Brianne Bland