Somewhere Over the Rainbow: NIC Kay’s lil BLK

By J. Soto

Introduction

Friends. Some new some old, some distant and some close. I saw the end of Jumatatu M. Poe & Donte Beacham’s Let i’m Move You four times and the full performance once. The J-Sette dance party ending was the anchor for me in the festival. I could join the audience as it spilled out of the theater or text a friend to meet me a bit early to join me in the crowd. I listened to Erykah Badu’s Trill Friends for two-weeks-straight afterwards. The mathematics of production and space at the festival, the performances joining endings to beginnings, offered an embodied way to hold queer space for relationships to self and each other.

“You just met me / how can you know me?”

“You just met me / how can you know me?”

Somewhere Over the Rainbow: NIC Kay’s lil BLK

NIC Kay slid down the cement banister on their stomach, legs in the air behind them for balance, into the theater, head first as a newborn does. Their entrance was youthful and determined and at the same time, not like a first entrance, but a practiced approach at getting somewhere familiar. A strong sense of anticipation, amplified by the high-low slope of the entrance to stage filled the theater. NIC Kay entered from up there [my upper left, past.] and came down to another level [stage, dance floor, bedroom, street, public park] to perform. This level-change, moved beyond architectural detail and, later, book-ended the work—subtly commenting on Black queer imagination expanding and pushing up against the brutalist architecture of the Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center where the performance took place.

One thing I want to remember, to hold onto, is that NIC Kay’s tennis shoes were bright white and new, but their knee pads were soiled from use. I loved this poetic dissonance in presentation, the grey of the kneepads, the gleaming white of tennis shoes, each confusing the starting points of where new begins underneath the skin and old still remains. It also reminded me of dressing up to go somewhere special and the function of footwear in conveying pride in poc communities. The both hardness and the vulnerability of human knees, their function in making angles in posing and articulating a body posture of suggestiveness in leaning this or that way in cruising, in prayer, and in sex. Also figuring largely into the sparse staging for the work was an industrial sized fan, a white indoor lamp, a glowing rainbow-colored stick, and an off-white crochet blanket—remade again to serve warmth, coverage, suggesting an aged body, and, a spirit.

The first half of lil BLK moved clearly through moments of personal discovery, sometimes full of excitement or or full of tenderness. Early in the journey, there is a prideful and unwitting performance of a little Black girl, embodied by NIC Kay unashamedly performing Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me at a family gathering with spot-on choreography only to be reprimanded for the confident embodied display of sexuality.

I am thinking about the power of shame here, and of the supremely magical certainty in this moment on stage followed by an aching sharp reality of dismissal, or rejection for a young person, for a little Black girl, or “little Black spirit” as NIC Kay says later. In my case, a little Brown tomboy-girl. I am thinking personally of being in some-way misshapen to the values and attitudes of those expected to be central to a family or community, particularly for women and femmes of color. I recall coming out to myself as gay (queer was still out of my reach) at fourteen and then later as a transgender person, and the sharp questioning and slip-away of many of the expectations taught to me which were meant to frame the rest of my life, my relationship to my own body, and the bodies of others. At fifteen, this chasm began to be filled almost immediately with a queer cosmology. I didn’t know it then, but this began out of a need to survive and continued very slowly at first, and forevermore.

A fundamental part of my process of self-awareness and restoration was dancing at any bar with a dancefloor that I could sneak into as an underaged brown baby-dyke in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mostly house music of the 1990’s, some Pop. The bouncers were brotherly and more generous then, understanding that my well-being depended on getting through the door and onto the dancefloor.

I asked NIC Kay in a follow up conversation about these early moments of rejection and growth and they reflected on the way their young and closely-knit queer community in Chicago, where the work was primarily developed, moved through coming-of-age moments together, “Did that happen to you or me? The truth is, it was happening to all of us.” As the performance moved further, the beginnings and endings of each of these recollections became less clearly articulated, flowing into one another, combining para-fictional personal narrative and explosive reclamational dance, into becoming, into growth.

/ Shift /

Sweaty and exhilarated, more than halfway into the performance, NIC Kay is describing a night at the club as if they are talking to a friend who is a little Black girl on their way to being, or themselves, or a close relative, with a kind of indestructible queer Black gender nonconforming sentience capable of creating that kind of multiplicity in narrative. Moving through this recollection of exhilaration, speaking and smiling at the same, time NIC Kay says, “I took my shirt off. You know I love the fan!” removing their white top. Then there is a dramatic shift in tone and a return back to the past, as they say earnestly, “I missed you. I missed you. I missed you.” Speaking with a kind of responsibility to and affection for those who are missed, who perhaps are not there: little Black girls trying to find some release in music right now and genderqueer kids coming of age and learning about themselves through the music. There are so many expectations put upon children, upon queer bodies. I think most queer Black and Brown dancefloors have benevolent ghosts on them.

I consider the dancefloor a kind of school and church for poc queer folks. It is a place where sex and desire are performed in multitudes of subtle and public cues taught to younger generations of queers of color in a language of movement that is infinite and full of possibility. It can be the dead of winter outside and, with enough bodies moving together, the room needs an industrial-sized fan for the duration of a solid DJ set. In these moments, a fifth season is created as they generate their own magnetic fields between each other and their own temporary microclimate.

The title, lil BLK, is purposefully open, creating space for the gender journey and struggles to be, within. Toward the conclusion, NIC Kay begins addressing the audience, dancing around the stage repeating, “I know the rainbow’s been rough! I know the glitter’s been tough!” and, “Little Black girl you can do anything!” The language play begins to move here into possibilities, to summon the the lil BLK femme, femme boi, tomboy, and little Black sissy, or “those of us who had no idea.” Little Black spirit?…yes. NIC Kay is speaking with vitality in the the present, from some other place, for them directly, with power, tenderness, and affect– this performance is for them.

In a bookending fashion of evolution of growth, in one side, out the other, NIC Kay exits the stage [my upper right, future] wrapped up in the crochet costume, covered, but hyper-visible both ghostly and conspicuous to the surrounding environment, strangely-shaped, a timeless spirit moving slowly up the stairs.

Notes and acknowledgements:
Introductory quoted text from Jumatatu M. Poe & Donte Beacham’s Let i’m Move You

Thank you to NIC Kay
& Magali Duzant

Photo By Ian Douglas

On Gaskin & Kosoko

By Keijaun Thomas

keyon gaskin
[a swatch of lavender]: a self portrait
Also featuring a book created in collaboration with sidony o’neal, Litia Perta, and Sharita Towne.

When I began taking notes and writing about [A SWATCH OF LAVENDER]: A SELF PORTRAIT, I wanted to portray how it felt to be in the room with Keyon and his collaborators as a cohesive unit, with multiple moving parts that made up a series of cycles. Each cycle, gesture, movement and transition a factor in the story. Each moment feels like a page. I walk into the room and Keyon is waiting for us. They tell us how it’s going to start but not when then hand us a book that is square shaped with purple paint on it, it looks like they’ve rubbed the book portrait with their hands. A hand print. Each one uniquely graced. It feels Intimate. Looking at the audience mingling and drinking wine. Keyon says, I’m gonna make them move from against the wall soon and the audience can be anywhere in the space. Move around. Drink wine and have some snacks.

I make my way onto the space, holding the book. Open. Flipping through the pages… theses moments stand out:

“Disconnecting”

“I did not agree to this”

“The blankets beneath me are softer when lying down to sleep away the feeling”

Blanket pages empty

“Dafuq you looking at?”

“The book as dance”

Lavender fields

…

Upside down, you got to flip the book over now to continue reading. The performance has already begun.

Pot on head, scoot and balance.
Oily
Sequined
Lamps
Sequined page, flip.
Rooster lamp, Move. Eyes closed, steady

We all hold some of them… pieces of the portrait, perhaps. I hold the book to my chest, making sure it is safe. I feel closer now that it’s started. As I am watching the performers I think to myself: We feel the wait now of the body and the book body as dance. Lying down, I peek thru a crowd of feet. Tap shoes, sound. There are multiple pages all happening at the same time. The audience moves to keep up. There are multiple parts that make up the whole. You have to move, you have to pay attention and multitask. Boiling ramen in a corner.

How many bodies move to see what’s happening. We become apart of choreography, the cycle. Leaving traces. Self portrait, selfie, can you take a pic with me. Pose. You smell the ramen. You can hear the water boiling. Ramen tracks on the floor mirror the field of lavender rows in book. Ramen as hair got Ready-Set-Cooked but not seasoned. Set this shit on fire. You can smell the burning, too. We are dancing, dancing around each other, moving. Phone in jar, she’s ready. Dance.

I look over and there is someone standing in the corner, back of the room rubbing their feet together, no shoes. The cycle begins. Cleans up her mess. Now a pile is forming next to the rooster lamp. How many pieces till the portrait is complete. Moves thru the crowd, they been moving, moving us from the jump. Their shirt reads, “I suck” same text and color as in book. Purple.

The plants rises again but this time there’s no hair to help it balance on top of their head. People want to see magic they want to see ha balance and by “ha”, I mean, her and by her I mean the plant. Like waiting for a magic trick, they want them to succeed. Reward them with claps and applause. You smell black hair burning. They end up here, next to, on top of, around, the rooster. Make the sequins reflect!! Shining, granted beauty. We reflect together, there is overlap,
Moving together.

Trina
Cardi
Princess Nokia

All the books have been collected now, too. I think to myself, “Give me my body back”, and by “my”, I mean Keyon’s, book but ours now too.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Séancers
SÉANCERS
with special guest M. Lamar

I walk into the theater and it is sold out and full. I find myself in the very from of the room sitting on the floor. Immediately upon entering the room you walk in and Lamar is at the piano—they are singing and playing.The energy in the room in electric. People talking, listening and finding space. I am looking around the room trying to orient myself:

White baby doll cut-outs

Mylar wall

A table for two

Two wooden chairs (one has a white robe)

Two cups

An electric kettle

A portrait of a black man

Books

I see an X and I think to myself X marks the spot. The piece has started before we even enter. Selfie recording, self playing the piano. A record of sorts. We hear the voice and The piano.

Operatic

Poetic

Angelic

Orchid rest on top of the piano. Little black figurines. We wait. The audience. Active talking and you can feel the shift in Lamar’s voice. Earth shatteringly beautiful and hunting at the same damn time. Becoming, shifting. Messy and contained. I keep on looking closer and a skull reveals itself under the sheer fabric on the floor. There are small details everywhere, if you take the time to look for them and or allow them to find you.

Jaamil enter the room with a sheer robe, sequin bottoms and black gloves to the elbows. Black lipstick. A short haircut. With their hands together and they feel like hands they’ve been to church. Like my aunties’ hands or my mother’s hands or my grandmother’s hands.

They see a friend, they say hello.

Then I remember I’m not supposed to be here. I came to the theater because I couldn’t make it to the day that I was scheduled to see their performance, but I’m here, inside. Thankful. As Jaamil walks through the center of the aisle speaking to audience they offer us chocolate candy kisses. Pass the kisses. You want a kiss? They ask the audience as they make their way through the audience.

I need someone to take care of Tata (a black baby doll). They ask who can take care of this black baby and add you HAVE to make sure you take good care of them. Handling with care. Healing

And Lamar begins to speak (filled with gratitude)

They let us into their day and what they’ve been thinking about lately around there own death and accomplishments. Playing with metal (actually plastic infused with light). Police button. Making the plastic chains float they feel like ghost. Black radical tradition…We have to bring martin Luther King up because this is his day, Jaamil states then they continue: You always ready to die (and through this you might be able to access of legacies and histories )

Education as a process of dying.

I can’t die yet because I have so much work to do (Lamar)

I am listening to them and I ask myself: What does it mean to share Performance space? to share the stage? How do you let each other hold space? How do we hold space for each other to thrive and be of service to each other?

They sit down on the floor with us and begin to speak:

In order to survive

Only interested in talking about black people

Black voices

All voices matter

The voice begins to echo

Deep

Blood, in the sand , the only liquid for miles

And the imagined taste

Thirsty

Blood

The Whiteness of desert sand

Only the sun will bleach his bones quicker!

Stepping on white babies
And there are tapes to prove that

What is justice?

When is it done?

4 centuries of white male approval

I have not been able to touch the destruction within me

…

They turn the kettle on… and the black Barbie rests, the lights go down. Under strips of ribbons.Wild like the wind on the surface of the desert. Free as the pom poms of a cheerleader raising every voice. Lost in the storm. Angel wings flapping in gold ribbons. We are in the eye of the storm. Sitting down, they feel so familiar like a mother, a mother who has had a longggggg day. Pouring hot water. affluent. Tea time. Class. Stress
Shivering
Shacking
Nervous
Release
Grief
Imagined
Black, mother and child

and I find myself at the language of my youth. I know this body, I recognize this language, the body. Remembered. Black, man, child. So sharp. Cuts anyone who gets too close. Blowing up condoms like balloons.

“Lost in your own pussy”
“I just get so lost”

You got a little heart in your t

“I try my whole asss life”

“TRIED MY WHOLE ASS LIFE”

“To live and be good”

What does it mean to try your whole ass life, I think to myself. Dancing in the black light. Be myself . Ghost like, “Didn’t want my body no more”. They leave the stage, but you know there is more to learn. Light pulses, Smoke rises. They reappear as sequined stars. New weave on fleek and the center of the room in a bodysuit. I remember to look back and check on the black baby doll. As the person holding them, is directly behind me. I ask myself, Who remembers? What do we pay attention to? Who else is thinking about little black kids and our well being? Entertaining. Piano Playing. High Drama. The diva. Exaggerated. “What they want?” Close to death? “Everyday we get closer to being a ghost”. The audience laughs. I wonder if they listening tho? They say, “you made me into an entertainer. A clown. A happy meal” Then put on blonde, white gurl mask with a blow up doll open mouth. Nappy blonde hair. Backwards. The previous Afro wig fills out white girl face. Walking up the aisle through the audience. Close enough to touch. Dancing for us. I recognize the music from Jason Friday the 13th soundtrack. Compiled. accumulated. Wrestling on the floor. A pile of white bodies and synthetic hair, They are In the spotlight, now. White theology. How do you actualize the reality of a world where whiteness is no longer an essential? This stick with me. Blowing up another condom. We are prepared now. Waiting for the pop! “I tried my wholes best tonight”.

Photo By Ian Douglas

The Power of Interiority

By Angie Pittman

I walk into the space after being on the waitlist. This gives me time to observe keyon with a glass of wine in their hand and lavender lipstick on their lips greeting every person as they come in. While handing them each a numbered book (I assume a system for keeping track of them) they tell folks to feel free to look through the book before and during the performance. The book is a beautiful collection of self portraits; artistically assembled words, photos, and a page of purple sequins. But just as I look at it, I hear keyon say, “Please give them back directly at the end of the show.” Although beautiful, this is an object that I will get to enjoy for the time being. It will not be mine. I will not own it. You deal with the feels associated with that realization as you enter the space. The space is a gallery-esque, empty storefront. It was lowlit, and because I was late, I entered witnessing others already negotiating with each other on where to stand. I couldn’t help but ask, Where is the “best” spot to see the “show”.

There are a couple of house lamps and a hot plate with boiling water in the periphery of the space. I choose to stand next to the boiling water because I liked the sound it made. A performer comes out dressed in a loose fitting cropped tshirt and pants underneath an open bathrobe. They donned tap shoes and balanced a green potted plant on their head navigating the audience nonchalantly. The performance that ensued was a constellation of three performers doing autonomous tasks in and around the crowd. Some of the tasks included boiling a ramen noodle pack (without the seasoning) and then laying out the warm noodles and using it like hair, burning keyon’s hair that was formerly housed in old weed containers, dancing to a Rihanna song playing from an iphone inside a glass pitcher, and walking around with a scarf covering the performer’s face. The whole performance was like a long and slow dream. It ended with keyon shutting on the fluorescent overhead lights abruptly and says “alright give me your books”.

This piece was performed as if it were already a memory. keyon gaskin’s [a swatch of lavender]:a self portrait does the thing that memory does when it conflates time and the senses. I conflated the memory of the smell of burnt hair alongside the subtle tap shoes scraping the floor, even though in “real” time these things happened separately. The volume of the performance seems to be set at “consistent murmur” throughout the duration, making me hyper aware of my own breath. It reminded me of the way it feels to be a little bit drunk at home alone. This dance engages the senses by nudging them. You hear the slight boiling of water from the hot pot in the corner, the scraping of the performer’s tap shoes on the ground, and can almost feel the warm ramen hair on your skin. You can touch and feel the closeness of your fellow audience as you navigate each other in the space and all the emotions along with that. (1) It was almost hard to see. It was actually hard to see. Seeing was the hardest sense to engage with in this work because you as an audience member had to grapple with your own dance of seeing and not seeing. Performers were coming and going out of your line of sight. When the dance came near to me, I thought “what a treat” and when it didn’t I delightfully fell back into my other senses or rifled through the book they gave me. Oh this is it. The difficult of “seeing” this work is important. It’s what it is actually. Obscured visibility is the space in which the incapturability of Black performance lives.

I have been watching Get Out on repeat consistently for about a month now. What this practice has reaffirmed is how important it is to not be captured, symbolically and literally. How does one do this? By remaining your own whole Black ass self, whatever that means to you. FURTHERMORE Get Out reminds me that Blackness in and of itself is impossible to capture. Blackness reminds us, no matter how hard whiteness tries to contain it, that it is infinite, uncontainable, and wonderfully uncontrollable. (2) So the work becomes reminding people of that simple fact because sometimes wypipo (3) forget and try us. With inscriptions in the book that you are holding like “Dafuq you looking at?” and “I will never come in handy” gaskin is saying, not today. They are constantly pushing against and resisting white voyeurism and its attempt to consume. My bathrobe is open and I DGAF (4). Oh and those beautiful self portraits that I gave you to hold and look through? I will be taking all of those back most definitely; you don’t get to keep me. How do you center your Black experience in performance while being in conversation with artistic spaces and institutions that have White people all up in them? This work is a particular answer to the question, with its wealth of choices that are intentionally working against normative modes of entertainment. Blackness cannot be commodified or “had”.

In a single performance of this work, three songs from Rihanna’s ANTI were played from a performer’s phone. What was ANTI proposing? I think ANTI, in all of its glory, oozes a type of independence that operates from only Rihanna’s desires. On “James Joint,” she assures us that she’d “rather be/Smoking weed/Whenever we breathe/Every time you kiss me” in her most dulcet tones.” (5) Having Rihanna’s voice as part of this work supports its tone and demeanor. I trusted and believed that this performance came from deep inside. Interiority is life, its where all of your guts are, your secrets, and your dreams. Looking at a performance that is in tune and activating their interior self makes us wonder what is happening inside of a performer creating empathy and forging connections. This is one thing experimental dance does well and one thing that keyon does really well.

As a culture of performance artists, if we are trying to dismantle the white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist patriarchy then we have to be sensitive to counternarratives and experiences that are persistent in its normalizing the humanity of Blackness, alongside other claims of Black regality and superheroics. Normal Black performers being whole Black people, not just the superhero or the “Magical Negro”. (6) We must be sensitive and open to hearing claims of Black humanity and life that sounds like tap shoes relaxedly scraping the floor, smells like burnt hair, and feels like warm ramen noodles. We can note the importance of having a balance of Black exteriority and expressivity, but also Black interiority, because we all know that you need two halves to make a whole. And that’s what we are doing out here right? Trying to fight white supremacy by advocating for ourselves as whole and complicated beings? I hear the rallying cries of Black Panther playing through the Dolby Digital IMAX surround sound system, and I also hear the muffled volume of [a swatch of lavender]: a self portrait playing through an iPhone inside a glass pitcher. I’m here for both.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Footnotes
1. “Get out of my way white man” -inner thought
2. Think: Shonda Rhimes’ complete takeover of ABC on Thursdays, Henrietta Lacks, most viral dances, or well, anything else Black people do.
3. White People
4. Don’t give a fuck
5. Brittany Spanos, Rolling Stone
6. Term originated by Spike Lee https://www.salon.com/2010/09/14/magical_negro_trope/

Suggested Reading for further study:

Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior

“25% of Marvel Studios Profits From The “Black Panther” Film Invested in Black Communities” Petition started by Chaz Gormley

“Black Panther: An Allegory of the World Wanting Blackness but Not Black People”? By Carolyn Hinds

“Maybe My Ancestors Were Kings and Queens, but More Than Likely They Were Goat Herders…and That’s Fine!” by Damon Young

“Rihanna: Anti” by Brittany Spanos

“The Offensive Movie Cliche That Wont Die” by Matt Zollar Seitz

Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture

Séanced

By Abigail Levine

How to read Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s performance work Séancers (American Realness 2018)? Don’t. Open the program. He has given you a description of the work, a statement about the piece in his voice, and a critical contextualization by Dance Studies scholar Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild.

Séancers is an auto-ethnographic performance work that… traverses the “fatal” axis of abstraction, illegibility, identity, and gender complexity. (About Séancers)

I am attempting to describe myself into a canon that has tried to omit those like me…
I am performing myself into being…to reveal my survival and my revelry. (Statement about the work)

His concern… is our endangered Black identity which must be nurtured and nourished with a mojo strong enough to fend off the constant threat of ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Where is the Theology with final quote attributed to bell hooks)

Is it our role, then, to respond to Kosoko about the work? No. This, too, he has taken into his own hands. At each performance, he has selected an “intellectual medium” to riff with him on the themes, and to ground the dream-logic, of his work. Each invitee is a Black artist, in the two performances I saw, Okwui Okpokwasili and M. Lamar. These conversations model an engagement with Kosoko and his world and point us toward ideas and interpretations we might or might not notice on our own. They absolve those of us in the audience—or take from us the privilege—of being the sole live interpreters of the work.

These are agile, provocative closings of the circuit of performance and reception. Do not interpret me! See me, feel me, do not be sure you understand me. They may also be last-ditch moves. Certain circles of downtown performance have been live with conversations about how white privilege informs what gets seen in our theaters and galleries, by whom, and how it is understood. However, two recent reviews in The New York Times, one by Alastair Macauley and one by Gia Kourlas, suggest painfully that many, including the critic’s in the city’s “paper of record,” are doing little to expand the context which they bring to a work or question the way they see it. (1) Kosoko challenges back—if you are going to read me wrong, you are going to have to willfully ignore the mountain of information and analysis I am providing you about my work. His approach feels both patiently didactic and like a dare.

What, then, are we to do in this theater?

Our first job is to accept a gift, a literal one. As we enter the theater, Kosoko is a vision in a shiny, black and white geometric jumpsuit, a starlet’s cropped black wig, black satin gloves, and heels. He is, indeed, a lot to read. I find myself focusing on his knees where there is a slight bunching of the fabric. I try to tell if he is wearing knee pads. I hope so. Somehow I already find myself feeling protective of this character, though there is nothing to indicate he needs me. Kosoko smiles warmly and circulates through the crowd. As people settle, he approaches each of us in turn. He reaches out with both hands and offers us a chocolate kiss. If it were only a metaphor, it might fall short, but the shiny silver is exciting, and the chocolate tastes good. I feel special. I am seduced.

Kosoko gives us one more important job. As the performance begins, he picks up a small, brown baby doll, Tay-tay, and carries it up the aisle. He asks an audience member to care for the doll, instructing them to do the job for real, not to let anything happen to Tay-tay. At the first performance, the caretaker snuggles Tay-tay into the crook of their arm and keeps the doll there until Kosoko comes to scoop it up at the end of show. At the second show, the caretaker seems skeptical. Are you really asking me to care for a doll as if it were a real baby? No, not as if. Postmodern dance is literal. Take care of the doll! When I look over later, Tay-tay is lying, limbs in the air, on the person’s lap, their plastic APAP badge swinging unpleasantly close to the doll’s face each time they turn to follow the action.

Earlier in the week, artist-scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz’s delivered a performance-lecture on white privilege. Four times DeFrantz began again:

it amazes me that we still have to do this. we have to gather together to work through the terms of white privilege, white domination, white supremacy, and our responsibilities to each other as artists and people…

The talk ends forcefully, but more hopefully. At first, it feels too hopeful, too easy an assignment:

what are we to do now? to dismantle oppression might be to open toward care. care in listening and watching, sharing and shutting down the bullshit.

I think back to our shared semi-neglect of Tay-tay. In DeFrantz and Kosoko’s usage, the term care is not a question of good intentions or small gestures; it is a matter of life and death, requiring us to assume responsibility and taking action, at times, even before understanding why.

And, of course, we are at a séance. A séance requires everyone present to be a participant. We have to welcome those no longer living in this world into our presence, maybe even into our own bodies. We have to make space in ourselves for someone else, be an I and a you, or we and them at once—collapse that distance. We don’t have to know or understand. We have to receive and allow, risk becoming someone else. Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is crucial to creating this receptivity. The sound he mixes opens perception, stretches space, sets us into shared rhythms, seems to make this theater a space for those beyond as much as us in here.

***

“No one moves in downtown dance anymore” says Adrienne Truscott midway through her work THIS, presented in the playhouse during the festival.

This is not true, but it is true that just about everyone on the festival stages is talking. We are in a moment of political urgency; voices that speak challenging messages are being willfully distorted and silenced. It seems this is a time to speak clearly and boldly. The ideas spoken, coming from the articulate bodies of dancers—Kosoko, Truscott, NIC Kay, Marissa Perel, Michael Portnoy’s cast of five—are strong, clear, and lodge deep.

I also found myself relishing the moments when these bodies communicated on their own terms. I recall: Perel sharing an intimate silence with an audience volunteer holding a text for them to read; Truscott bent over her own naked body and framed by the proscenium, pulling a LONG paper from her vagina, a send-up to Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll; Kirstin Shnittker performing an unrelenting petite allegro in silence, sweating, breathing harder and harder. The set-up was intended by Portnoy as a commentary, but as she kept going, her dance exceeded its intended message; NIC Kay letting us see their body shake with the strength and vulnerability—or Kosoko’s “survival and revelry”—of Patti LaBelle’s tear through Over the Rainbow.

And Kosoko… Early in the performance, he speaks Audre Lorde’s poem Power. He repeats and repeats the last line: “What beasts they are. What beasts they are…” He moves over to a pile of gold and silver metallic tape, grasping handfuls in both his hands. Facing the audience, staring, hunching, he raises and lowers to shiny thread, beating them on the ground. It’s literal again. He tells you he is a beast, then he become the beast. But then it slips. The monster becomes pattern, the rhythm that of a storm being stirred up. We leave abstraction and enter conjuring. The storm is here, the monster is here, Audre Lorde is here with the subjects of her poem, the killers and those killed. Kosoko is here with his living and dead, both those he carries willingly and those who won’t leave his body be. We are all here, quietly being blown by this storm. And it ends, and Kosoko exits the theater. We wait for him in Toussaint’s sound world. It takes some time; it really feels like waiting. Eventually, he returns—new glittering jump suit, new wig, dark, mirrored glasses—both someone we know and someone we’ve never seen before.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Footnotes
1. Both articles provoked strong and immediate responses by dance artists, critics, and scholars. In response to Macauley’s review of Marjani Forté-Saunders and Gillian Welsh, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Ali Rosa-Salas, and Nia Love gathered in a roundtable discussion for Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence.

Charmaine Wells wrote “Strong and Wrong: White Spectatorship in Dance Criticism” after Gia Kourlas reviewed BAM’s Dance Africa, also published by Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence.

Photo By Ian Douglas

ENCOUNTERS

By Alexis Convento

PRELUDE
October 21, 2016 — Canal Street, Chinatown
“A Necessary Ecology” at Triple Canopy
With Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit.

Bones, hides,
nutmeg, cinnamon sticks,
rope, metal clamps—
strewn across a wooden floor.

Simone in tight dark jeans, boots with toes shaped like animal hooves. Underneath Jen’s T-shirt, a black leather harness rests snug around her hips, straps cinching her bare ass and pussy.

I.
January 14, 2018 — M Train to Industria — South Williamsburg
“Everything Fits in the Room” part of American Realness
Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit with Miguel Gutierrez and Colin Self.
With guest performer Niall Noel Jones.

The city’s behind me. Exit Marcy Avenue, headed towards Industria. I see M arriving, we leave our belongings at the door. We wait to enter, my body inches closer to theirs — so close I can smell the sweetness on their skin.

II.
Thump, thump, thump, bump.
Thump, thump, thump, bump.

My ears fill with techno. The bass echoes, my body pulses. For a moment I’m taken to Berlin — a club where I dance until the sun comes up.

The Room is vast. Cold concrete floors, high ceilings, no windows.
A white brick wall stands alone in the center.

Bones, hides,
nutmeg, cinnamon sticks,
rope, metal clamps,
a braid of red hair.
A chair, a metal ladder,
branches, grapefruit.
Fluorescent tube sculptures,
and bodies.

Apart from M, the crowd is unfamiliar. The performers — Simone, Jen, and Niall — are dispersed, while Miguel and Colin maneuver a rolling kitchen island–DJ setup.

III.
Simone, metal ladder above her head,
moves swiftly,
then spins,
spins,
spins
with such force and control
claims her space.

Now around her neck, the ladder
dangles,
a diamond necklace.
A found freeness:
not giving a fuck—
who’s around her,
what’s around her.
Her mind is elsewhere.

IV.
My body, my body, my body (1) is always moving with theirs. My body is always moving, here and there. Listening to them, reacting to them. Feeling you, seeing you. Connecting to bodies I admire, to whom I am attracted, bodies that are unfamiliar, bodies that make me feel safe.

V.
Squished, slapped, beaten: Simone works a grapefruit in-between her hands. She paces back and forth, our eyes meet for an instant. Determined, she finds a cinnamon stick and forces it through the fruit’s center. She sucks the insides out. Juice drips from her cheeks and chin, pooling onto the floor. The pulp runs down her hand, wrist, forearm.

Soft vulgarity, (2) I’m aroused.

While Simone finishes, Jen lays face down in a makeshift bed: a black basin, water, and pine tree branches. Her body spills over as she sinks inside. Without hesitation, Simone rips the emptied grapefruit in half, moves to her knees, and rubs the flesh forcibly against Jen’s skin.

Is this a massage, or a sponge bath? WAM? Violent intimacy? A dance for two?

I’m mesmerized by the energy they create together. Raw, meticulous, yet tender. I’ll take care of you, and you take care of me. Sensitive to one another, they negotiate their roles. Simone’s touch is intuitive and firm, Jen submits as the citrus scours her body.

The audience, enthralled and overwhelmed, finds each other, and shares one intimate, caring, erotic moment: a measure between the beginnings of our sense of oneself and the chaos of our strongest feelings. (3)

VI.
The spell we’re under exists only with deep love, deep trust. When we endure the pain and arrive at pleasure. This kind of magic happens only after we’re bound, pulled, suspended, released, relieved, vulnerable, open, allowing, connecting, careful, compassionate, sharing, indulging, trusting, free, serene, sensuous, excited, erotic, hot, wet, soft, submissive, subdued, giving in, listening, being present, moving through it together.

VII.
Metal chains and a long strand of latex
strike the concrete floor.
Niall handles with force:

Shhhlink—
Thwack… THWACK
Shhhliththawink!

Shhhlink—
Thwack… THWACK
Shhhliththawink!

…

His task seems unending.

…

Shhhlink—
Thwack… THWACK
Shhhlithithawink!

Chains carve out space,
and when he stops, an absence.
Sweat and fluorescent,
the room glows silent.

VIII.
What did I take for myself in each moment? What sounds, what smells, what feelings, what fantasies? The details stay with me. Simone and Niall share a dance together, cuffed in leather, mouths pressed against mangled grapefruit skin. The smell of freshly ground espresso, pine trees, sweat. M’s softness as our hands brush. Lemon jello sliding down the back of Jen’s throat, like swallowing a raw oyster. Cold light traces a profile: Simone, inching the metal ladder from the standalone wall, Jen hoisted above. I’m in suspense. Risk prompts concern, gives way to trust, built in real time.

VIIII.
Lessons to take away:
Use intuition to push past imposed limitation.
Feel more deeply in a public space, more promiscuous in the way you love.
Find a pleasure that is satisfying and resonant.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Footnotes
1. NIC Kay, “lil BLK,” American Realness 2018, Abrons Arts Center.
2. Stephanie Sarley, @stephanie_sarley, Instagram.
3. “Uses of the Erotic.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde, Crossing Press, 2015.

Additional reading and inspo at are.na/alexis-convento/ar-reading-2018.

Photo By Ian Douglas

We’ve Got Spirit. How ‘bout You?

By Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Where are the leather jackets?
Where’s the drumset?
What’s up with that stage on the stage?
Where’s the band?

These and many other queries might emerge upon entering into the spartan landscape of Nora Chipaumire’s #PUNK. Though these questions which might seem superficial and may very well speak more to one’s values and expectations, there is a sort-of thread which weaves through them prompting the audience to ask themselves:

What are the implications of subverting a culture predicated on a performance of subversiveness?

With that question in mind, there emerges something inherently and richly transgressive in the manner in which #PUNK plays upon a social understanding of punk as a form, a set of practices, visual signifiers, and sensibilities, while embracing what pioneering Houston-based noise-rapper B_L_A_C_K_I_E would refer to as “true spirit and not giving a fuck.” That sense of transgression is only heightened and given urgency as it becomes increasingly apparent that what Chipaumire and her accomplice Shamar Watt were presenting the audience with wasn’t at all about not giving a fuck for the sake of not giving a fuck; or perhaps, more aptly, “wanting to fuck the world with a dick” for its own sake. Here, Chipaumire and Watt work with a sort of hyper-consciousness, as their performance of a performative nihilism often found throughout contemporary punk and alternative cultures eschews its most obvious pitfalls: posturing and masculine aggression. In doing so, they simultaneously challenge the assumed limitations of punk formalism, entering a place of exciting unfamiliarity while also affording the audience an opportunity to question why anyone might show up to a performance to not give a fuck as well as their relationship to not giving a fuck.

While this certainly places Chipaumire and Watt in relation to a history of punk and alternative practices which centers interpersonal relation and mindful awareness, #PUNK also enables a deeper understanding of the importance of and symbiosis between non-essentialization, errantry, fugitivity, opacity, and punk and alternative spirit to the survival of radical Black cultural practice. Here, the performers take into account a cultural gaze which presumes its own omniscience and render themselves opaque through a repetition of material to which the audience eventually becomes accustomed. As Chipaumire and Watt introduce and return to similar texts and gestures throughout the space, along not at all similar trajectories, they seem inexhaustible and impervious to the degradation often associated with such repetition. As they repetitively and frenetically oscillate between their stage, itself only a few inches off of the ground, and the actual stage upon which the audience is standing, this gesture softens and becomes a less performatively radical act and more an act which challenges the dominance of performative radicality so present in contemporary punk culture.

Time seems to expand and contract, Chipaumire and Watt continue about the space, still in cycle, fucking plenty with the present and fucking plenty with the future until the two collapse upon one another. Time, then, is no longer perceived as linear, or what Édourard Glissant theorized as “arrowlike nomadism” in his text, Poetics Of Relation. In #PUNK, Chipaumire and Watt were not moving forward or through and there was no destination or allowance for rootedness. Neither was the experience of time in this work a flatly circular one, as is often posited, nor was it an act of Glissantian “circular nomadism,” which might be understood as societies and people existing in a type of relation framed by a “giving-on-and-with” which functions through an errant, yet circular understanding of time and location which refuses the inherent singularity or rootedness associated with “arrowlike nomadism.” Still, to explain the experience of time in #PUNK as such would deny the work’s use of time as a material; one just as unseen, yet integral to human existence.

It is possible, though, that this present yet unquantifiable phenomenon of societies and people entering into relation and thriving because of said relation via temporal and spatial nomadism via a “spirit” might be better understood, not as a circle, but as something more fluid and spherical and, thus, more complex. While this is certainly important in its own right, it also, understanding the temporal experience as three-dimensional might create an opportunity to more deeply consider the intersections and divergences between fluid natural time (potentially understood as the passing of days and seasons as well as other cycles not dominated by human perception), rigidly imposed and codified time (clocks and watches and other manners and cycles founded as a primacy of human perception) and their ability to shape relations and lived experiences. It cannot go unacknowledged that such errantry and fugitive spirit are inherent to the proliferation of radical Black cultural practices flourishing as a result of its three-dimensional nature.

Chipaumire and Watt are still going, with increasing fervor. This incredible dynamism, with their sheer inexhaustibility and rich repetitiveness, begins to exhaust the audience with their own assumed familiarity. Here, the primacy of the dominant gaze has been used against itself and begins to miss small-yet-important and deliberate shifts within the repetition it believes itself to be witnessing. Errant radical moments begin to hide in plain sight, creating a sort-of Moten-Harleyesque fugitivity shared only by the few whom remain vigilant and possess an infinite literacy while knowing that any outward expression of this shared knowledge might render valuably illegible as legible. This relational fugitivity is a brilliant act of espionage and allows for the possibility of a radical and slippery, yet ever-persistent opposition to oppressive structures by avoiding capture, compartmentalization and outright commodification; frequent, if not intentional, consequences of economic and social neoliberalism’s intrusion into individuals, entire cultures, and the relation practices they might develop.

Chipaumire’s understanding of punk as a fugitive spirit sheds the traditional aesthetic signifiers associated with the form and becomes substantiated by refusing alignment their association with a culture predicate d by domination, capture, and consumption. Just as well, an understanding of punk which is unconcerned with nearly any visible or sonic signifiers, its sound and fashion and disaffected affect, frees it from existence as a form, leaving not an essence, but a spirit. In doing so, Chipaumire’s work makes explicit the timeless and spherical nature of a (sub)cultural phenomenon so potent that it might evade a domination which manifest s in the form of being rendered legible as well as the subsequent capture associated with the demise of radical cultures and their practices, while maintaining the ability to gutturally affect all those whom might catch it.

Photo By Ian Douglas

Trans Arts Professionals Forum

A first time gathering at APAP

Presented by APAP|NYC 2018 Conference

 
Friday, January 12, 2018, 12:30pm – 3:00pm
 
New York Hilton Midtown, Bryant Suite, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, Manhattan
FREE / RSVP

Calling Trans Arts Professionals and Allies! The Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), the service organization for the arts presenting industry and convener of the largest international gathering of arts professionals, will hold its first ever Trans Arts Professionals Forum. The event offers opportunities to share experiences, identify challenges, and advise on what’s needed to ensure trans arts professionals have the support, resources, access and networks to grow and thrive in their careers. This event is open to everyone and anyone interested in make the performing arts more accessible and supportive of trans and gnc artists, administrators and other industry professionals.

Photo by Paul B. Goode