Outside and Outside

This essay was originally in Blog Salon at theoffcenter.org, and was first published last June.

During a panel discussion of queer choreographers and performers at the CSU East Bay Queer Dance Festival earlier this year, someone asked the $100 million question: What makes your work so queer?” Moderator and Dandelion Dancetheatre Artistic Director Eric Kupers was quick to interject:

“Or, how do you use queer in your work?”

For me, a better question may be How does QUEER use YOU?

Do I have a dysfunctional relationship to queer? Yes, perhaps. The myriad options queerness presents – in terms of its ontological possibilities as well as what potential it holds for my own mode of being – gives queer, the act of being queer, and the tactic of queering and performing queer a thorny and nebulous nature. An approach to answering this question of how queer can be used might start with the ongoing and complex theorizing around what, anyway, queer even is. A performance of shame or a performance of performance; a means of identification or disidentification; a survival strategy; a communal and utopic perspective on the quotidian; or —? Is it simply feminism in the era of the identity politic? Queerness undoubtedly owes much of its present incarnation to feminist movement from the 1960’s and on. The interrogation of gender and sex, and the emphasis on domesticity and traditionally unrecognized labor and productivity are all central themes to contemporary urban queer life.

Well, I am a feminist. I am a collectively-minded disidentificatory feminist mired in the ongoing performance of my own shame and embarrassment – so there is my simple answer to the question of how I use queer. But how does QUEER use ME? And why do I so often feel that a movement of queer performance for me exists not as a gateway offering potential bright futures but instead as the swinging door upon which I sometimes bang for far too long without answer, sometimes turn from and run? As a queer-identified performer who consistently works with themes of blackness and racial ambiguity, who owes their DIY aesthetic and conceptual investment in the temporal to feminist performance and minimalist video art, and whose source material ranges from speculative fiction to critical race theory, my work is QUEER as long as we consider queer to be ambitiously expansive and unabashedly inclusive.

Ironically, it is the investment in utopic community and feminism, so central to queerness, that drives the dysfunctionality of my relationship to queer performance culture in the Bay Area. I am far too aware of the many iterations of feminism and utopia that have been superseded by a “possessive investment in whiteness” (to quote George Lipsitz), and I understand all too well the means by which a white spectral presence can loom within and even construct the zeitgeist of a movement regardless of individuals’ skin tones. (See the work of critical race art theorists like Martin Berger and Africanist dance historians like Brenda Dixon Gottschild, both of whom discuss at length the nature of unnamed whiteness present in both plastic and performance art.) There is, anyway, an undeniable lightness to this “new” Queer Performance Movement in the Bay.[1] But beyond melanin levels, there is also an approach to queer politics within this movement – as well as the tendency to leverage critiques of institutionalization and funding streams as justification against self-segregation – that is conceptually white.

That is to say, it is a movement that struggles with cannibalization, strict border demarcation, and a singular approach to the political.

I use the term movement – as opposed to community – intentionally. I believe that the queer performance community in the Bay is far more diverse than this Movement that is currently being circumscribed and dilineated not only by Robert Avila but also through allocation of resources and other accolades. And I believe it is the strength of this diverse and historically rooted community that presents opportunities to settle the dysfunctional urges I feel towards the movement. Our community is, actually, quite professional (even while DIY) and exceedingly savvy (even while critical of institutions). It is within this boundless community that I feel the potential for real growth – as opposed to the spoken of and spoken for movement. It is not the community that I feel used by.
Having said all that, I do just have one request of my community: If we can agree that queer performance in the Bay is indeed becoming a movement, let us please give language to it before everyone else does. Let us, for the love of queer, define it as exceedingly expansive, anti-hierarchical, intentionally and pointedly political, and truly feminist. The type of movement that we all have a stake in, and that closes its doors on no one.

[1. Indeed, this Queer Bay Area Performance Movement is unarguably homogenous in terms of body-type: light-skinned, able-bodied, cisgendered, and young.]
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Anyway, here’s a few folks have I been watching over the past year, and would love to see some more of. NB: The Grotowski Workcenter, Walid Ra’ad, and Hennessy Youngman are not explicitly queer. But I feel queered by their work, I think their presentation is incredibly important to the issues artists are currently grappling with in queer performance, so I’ve included them in this list. Call it reclaiming…

The Grotowski Workcenter at the Performance Art Institute. A very very strange performance. Clearly influenced by Hair, a European articulation of spirituals from the Black American South, Allen Ginsburg, and acid. I’m not sure that any of the artists were queer, but everyone in the audience certainly experienced some element of that queer affect of outsiderness and collective discomfort.

Tina Takemoto at the SF Public Library for RADAR. She presented a short drag number addressing her gay muscleman fantasies of a real-life prisoner in a war-era Japanese internment camp. The piece was over-the-top campy, and at the same time spoke directly to the time-lapse phenomenon in queer self-identification and social construction.

Hennessy Youngman talking to his homie Jacoby for the Gay perspective on Youtube. Youngman is my go-to for up-to-the-minute critical art theory. In this episode, Youngman breaks from his usual news and views to interview a young queer gentleman wearing a golden turban imbedded with a video of a fish aquarium about what gay people are really like.

Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans at SFCamerawork. Their piece was aptly titled: Falling in Love… With Chris and Greg. I think I went on Facebook the next day and wrote something like, “Chris and Greg – the most important queer artists in the Bay right now?” That’s love.

Ralph Lemon at Stanford, discussing his various “buck dance” research projects. In particular, the very intimate projects he did in the homes of elderly Southern black folks who have some relationship to this early black American dance, which precedes hoofing and has its roots in Irish-American step.

La Chica Boom at the California College of the Arts Visual and Critical Studies Symposium. As an introduction to Marta Martinez’s masters defense, La Chica Boom performed her short burlesque piece Dominatrix of the Barrio, which ends in the fisting of a little burro piñata. Watching qpoc burlesque in a college lecture hall surrounded by academics and Ranciere-ites was strangely hot.

Nomy Lamm at Z Space with Sins Invalid. She sang some sort of watery siren song, dressed as a mermaid, while attending to giant snail and stork puppets! Totally brilliant and weird.

Philip Huang at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (to an audience of fine arts gallery types in the middle of a Sunday). Everyone was very uncomfortable. I believe Philip said, “What am I doing here? I’m used to performing in spaces where everyone is drunk and dying of AIDS.”

The Dandelion Dancetheatre Band at the CSU East Bay Queer Dance Fest. At the end of a full day of performances and workshops, Eric Kupers led a band in a prideful rock song and invited all students and performers on stage to sing along to the celebratory chorus. This was unabashedly adorable – like the kind of Pride I could take my little cousins to.

Walid Ra’ad, trying to move on from The Atlas Group. Where he used to perform his lectures in character as an historian and archivist, he now struggles to address this curatorial project as himself – a visual artist no longer interested in memory and collective trauma in the same ways he once was. His more recent lectures, which can be found online, are a very different kind of a performance: an artist struggling to distinguish himself from the identity he constructed through its performance. I think most queers – regardless of their on-stage performance history – can relate.

Conversations: American Dance Theater and Ohad Naharin's Minus 16

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) is currently touring a number of works, including Ohad Naharin's Minus 16, and the collaboration strikes me as both obvious and incredibly significant. Ohad Naharin is Israel's 60 year old preeminent choreographer, and director of Tel Aviv's Batsheva Dance Company. He came up dancing under Martha Graham, and his works have been performed globally, primarily in Europe and the Americas. He has been praised for his creation of Gaga, a dance language that both reconsiders the dancing body and eliminates the relevance of the image or ideal, focusing instead on feeling. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has been widely-recognized as a pioneering integrated dance companies in the United States (having formed sixty some years ago), receiving honors from several US presidents, the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, and the keys to the city of New York. So for the AAADT to perform work by Naharin seems like a no-brainer.

But there is something more profound about AAADT and Naharin working together that does not come across so clearly on paper. I witnessed this Saturday night at the Sergestrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, as the company performed a lineup that included choreography from both Ailey and Naharin, as well as the late Ulysses Dove. To understand the way the reinterpretation of another artist's work can also expand the meaning of the work, it is important to understand the context of said reinterpretation.

Sergestrom Hall is an opera house theater: a capacity of almost 3,000, with proscenium and several tiers coated in a Napolean red plush fabric, and red walls that stack up to 125 feet. A deep red hue, urgent and impressive, serves as backdrop and backstory to any performance on the lit black stage. Being raised Catholic, it reminds me vaguely of the churches we would visit as children - not so much for prayer as for tourism, because with all the visual significations of glory it was hard to focus on god. It is a Real Theater, the kind kids being groomed for a life of performance, enrolled in Ballet III and Advanced Tap dream about. These are the sorts of places AAADT performs.

An important side note is that AAADT is a brown company, made up almost entirely of people of color, most of whom are African American. Similarly, the majority of the Sergestrom attendees Saturday night were black. Black people who came to see a black contemporary dance company dance black choreography. They got that. But they also got something else.

Minus 16 includes excerpts from Narahin's Mabul (1992), Zachacha (1998), Three (2005) and Anaphaza (1993). From Anaphaza comes one of his more well-known pieces, Echad Mi Yodea. Performed like all of Anaphaza, the piece is performed by the full company in black slacks, black jackets, white shirts, and black hats - dressed more or less as Hassids, a costume which they remain in throughout the piece except for a brief period where they disrobe.

After their series of repetitive aerobic choreography to the throbbing beat of The Tractor's Revenge punk version of the holy song from the Haggadah, after the poignant and delicately violent duet between a pair in matching underwear, the American Dance Theater leaves the stage and enters the audience. In order to accommodate the dancers in transit, the house lights go up and for the first time (perhaps ever in this particular opera hall) we the audience are commanded to look at ourselves. The stage becomes backdrop as the dancers in black jackets blend in with an audience dressed for the ballet. One by one, our dancers return to the stage, each now with an unsuspecting volunteer with whom they begin to duet. Their volunteers quickly transcend the mark of "volunteer" by the fact that they are compelled to dance with their partners. Though it is obvious that theirs is an improv to the AAADT's choreography, this is certainly partner dance and the clusters are clearly engaged in the communion of the duet.

And the audience, via the unfocused lighting and the silliness of watching new dancers and non-dancers respond in dance to their partners' choreography, are given permission to project ourselves and our own desires onto the bodies of the anti-volunteers. We hoot and holler and cheer for the untrained partners at least as much if not more than for the AAADT dancers because we recognize ourselves in them, and now that they are on stage and receiving so much individualized physical attention, we also recognize them as special.

There are a number of ways to address the problematics of the proscenium, wherein architecture and lighting create hierarchies of power related to class and visual worth. One is to engage in the vaudevillian practice of "taking volunteers," which I conflate with audience provocation: both practices envelop individual audience members into a show while still maintaining a distinction between the show and the audience. Other tactics are to eschew the stage altogether, perform amongst the audience, or perform with an audience in the round. While perhaps a more dynamic mode of performance, these methods tend to render audience members as unwitting props to someone else's piece. In none of these practices mentioned is the gaze intercepted, and while the performer does take risks by using unrehearsed bodies as props, the maintenance of a hierarchical distinction between performer and audience is fairly critical.

Where the above tactics rely on risk, AAADT's rendition of Minus 16 is more concerned with trust. In Minus 16, partners are allowed the space to figure out the improv and they eventually all do, at which point the dancers embrace them and the duets fall into an easy and intimate two-step. The only direction the dancers give is with their bodies, and their relationship with their partners is a mutual one of watching, giving, receiving, and making room. How much do the dancers trust their partners to make the piece work? How much do the dancers trust themselves to allow their partners to play and discover the improv? And how much and how quickly will the partners trust that they are safe up on this glorified stage - how much will they believe their dancers when the latter tells the former with their bodies that this is their dance too? The dancers remain in their matching and unremarkable costume of black shoes, black pants, black jacket, white shirt. The partners are the special ones for these fleeting moments, not the dancers; it is the partners who are costumed as if they had solos.

Eventually the partners exit the stage and the dancers dramatically collapse to the floor. When all but one duet remains, the crowd grows noticeably hushed. It is as if we are watching our own most private moment. There it is, manifested as a young, strong and graceful brown dancer in undistinguished formal wear in a rocking embrace with a diminutive elderly black lady in a bright yellow skirt suit. Our own desires to be held, to be challenged, to be taken care of, and to be seen are played out between these two, and we - the audience - feel it. Eventually the last dancer collapses, and our own hearts, momentarily trapped in our throats, flex and relax just as quickly. We can laugh with this older woman who, as if awoken from a dream, seems to have no idea what to do next, and looks out at the audience perplexedly. She eventually waves goodbye to our cheers, and as she exits the lights cut. Drama. Only a handheld spot suddenly appearing downstage left follows her, and she makes the correct decision of how to leave this scene without anyone telling her.

American Dance Theater's version of Naharin's Minus 16 is one of those rare performances that is the perfection of that term "conversation" that artists like to throw around - as in, "this piece is in 'conversation' with this other piece." Often, as we rarely use our words, the conversation is one-sided. Almost as frequently our conversations are with dead people who can never talk back. But the sort of conversation Minus 16 is striking - and, in this instance, the very particular conversation of Minus 16 as performed by AAADT for AAADT's audience - is a very rare one indeed. This conversation is mutual, it is engaged, and we don't know where we will end up when it's done. But we feel like it's okay to trust ourselves to follow it.

An Economy of Love

This, a recent entry for THEOFFCENTER blog. Peep this important dialogue later this month on queer economies from artists and thinkers at theoffcenter.org.

As I see it, there is now only one way left to talk about ourselves. And first we must close our eyes.

Imagine yourself under water. You are a human being, submerged in the depths, able to breath through your human-gills, able to walk along the ocean floor and fraternize with the deep sea fauna. They are your friends, and you have many down here, from the sea lion in a shimmering bubble to the critters that crawl across your toenails and keep them clean). You have all of the freedom that the ocean allows: endless expanse, the ability to float and to contort and to, essentially, fly. You are an anomaly, and therefore not-prey to anything with sharp teeth. You glisten constantly. You shine. And yet you are also human. You are not of this world, this under-the-sea world. With your gills and your webby phalanges, your unbridled capacity to shine and to fly, neither are you a member of the land-bound caste. You have all the freedom that the ocean allows - and yet, your self-actualization is hampered by your distinction. There is the rub, aye.

Okay, open your eyes. And now you realize, with a sigh, that it was all a fantasy. But a useful one: I don’t believe that one can speak of any economy from a queer, ethnically-rooted, gender-transgressive, anti-capitalist and pro-art standpoint without taking account for the ways capitalism constructs fantasy subjects. To be brown, to be queer, to be gender non-normative,* and to be an artist as well is to be confronted with the contradiction that who you are does not exist on paper. We are nomads with prosthetic bodies and chosen families, over-represented in prisons, mental hospitals, and free clinics and under-represented everywhere else. We are many - we are certainly not alone - but the ramifications of being written out of social, political, and historical life are undoubtedly isolating.

However, the isolation that one who identifies in these ways might feel is written about extensively elsewhere and isn’t as relevant to this discussion of queer economies. What I am more interested in is the social disavowal of one’s existence as a queer artist of color that is instrumental to capitalism. Queer artists of color: 1. Engage in sex acts that do not reproduce and serve no obvious economic function; 2. Pose a threat to racial and sexual power structures; 3. Function in capitalist economy as the defining opposite to normalized power; 4. “Work” in a frequently ephemeral and therefore unquantifiable fields that defy monetization.

Plainly: we (brown and queer artists) don’t make money for a system whose priorities are laid bare in the term “corporate personhood.” Yet we also can become enveloped in the same system that devises ways to use us as both examples of what not to be and as opposites of what is. In this way, we can be employed by the system to help it define its Subjects. They are the opposite of us.

Jesse Hewit says this economic invisibility can make us feel like “less than people.” I lean more towards Judith Butler’s position, which properly contextualizes this less-than subjecthood within a capitalist power structure. Butler argues that standing both outside capitalism - and also fitting neatly within it as a functioning foil to normalized power (white cisgender maleness) - makes one’s life less “viable.”

Take this example. A dear friend of mine died last fall. They were a young, queer, poor, gender-transgressive, artist and community worker who lived with bipolar disorder. That is to say, their life did not function very well within capitalism. The day that they died - from a fall, off the side of a building - they checked themself into the downtown university hospital. They are on record as having been checked out several hours later. We still do not, and may never know what happened that afternoon, but it’s very likely that they recognized their mania as verging on dangerous and were attempting to save themself. And it is even more likely that they - a young, queer, poor, gender-transgressive person who lived to create what has not yet been seen (as is the vocation of all artists) - were not a viable life in the eyes of a system that still classifies “transgenderism” as a mental illness.

A system that needs us to be inviable - and, depending on who we are, inviability can mean being locked up, or medicated, or overworked, or dead, etc - works hard to make our experiences and desires seem unreal. This feeling of unrealness can lead us to doubt our impulses. To create, to love, to ask for help, or to be fucking mad as hell can feel like illegitimate pursuits, and when we feel illegitimate we move ourselves closer to the margins. Or perhaps we should think of those margins as a cellar, a foundation, the thing underneath the structure that gets all the attention, the thing that the supserstructure can’t function without. And also, the thing that could just as easily be the rooftops if one simply flips their perspective.

It strikes me that the system that names a full and generous life like my friend’s inviable is the same system that encourages me to stop myself from making art instead of money, and leads me to question why I would invest in a queer loving relationship that will never be recognized by the sate or most of my blood family. Fuck this system. I feel overwhelmed by this system that let my friend go, that I see creeping into the parts of my life that are sacred and should never be trespassed upon - certainly not by a colonialist state. There is nothing to counter this overwhelm, except for the knowledge that as queer artists, and as artists of color, and as poor queers, and as artists who struggle with mental health, and as people of color with physical challenges (and so on and on) we are all existing - FULLY, and TOGETHER - within that cellar-cum-rooftop of inviability. And our only real economy in the face of a capitalist economy is love.

The only thing we can do is love ourselves and each other. I mean love as in seeing one another. Love as in allowing our impulses room to dance. Love as in validation, encouragement, and celebration. Real love, and the wealth that accompanies it. That’s it.

Corny as that sounds, it’s all we really have - but damn if we don’t have have so much of it.

*When I say gender non-normative, I am not attempting to recapitulate to the idea of a gender norm, but rather to acknowledge the socio-political normativity of cisgender maleness.