I was in Ann Arbor last weekend for the first-everconference on queer dance, co-organized by Clare Croft (whose dissertation I waspleased to advise at the University of Texas at Austin) and University of Michigan dance professor Peter Sparling. Two days of panel discussions, workshops, andfilm screenings were capped each evening by a program of performances thatshowcased some of the most interesting work in the field, and that read backnicely over the days’ discussions about how we define, study, and create queerdance.
Presented in the Betty Pease Studio Theatre at theUniversity of Michigan (whose Department of Dance and an impressive number of othercampus units hosted and sponsored this landmark event), the performancesoffered a fascinating mélange of bodies in motion, choreographed abstractly orin snippets of narrative scenarios brushed with wit, beauty, and grace.
Diverse across gender, race, ethnicity, and theperformatives of sexuality, both performance evenings played with the knowntropes of queerness, referencing the familiar without being predictable. For instance, the drag duet called “TheCherdonna and Lou Show,” performing outout there (A Whole Night Lost), might have reminded spectators of dragqueen and drag king performances, since the two performers were costumed andmade-up in the over-emphasized gender accoutrements of out-sized masculinity and femininity.
But that both performers were women and that theirduet was funny and entirely unexpected, lent the act a freshness and surprisethat made it memorable. “Cherdonna,” thefemme (I guess you would call her), towers high above “Lou,” the “butch,” whoseslight form is nevertheless appealing, with her drawn-on beard and moustache, herbowler hat, and her plaid suit. Cherdonna wears a pleated white dress, high heels, and an even higherbouffant hairdo that poufs memorably over her head while she dances.
Both performers’ faces are made-up in theclown-like lipstick, eye-shadow, and colorings reminiscent of the late Ethyl Eichelbergeror Taylor Mac, a kind of Godspell-esque presentation of outré gender that’s bothfunny and queer in this context. The dance shows the duo as a couple whose affection alternates with rage and who finallypull (obviously fake) knives on one another, stabbing their partner and themselves in rhythm tolight-hearted music danced with whimsical steps. The piece is a hysterical, warm commentary onrelationships and Cherdonna and Lou’s bodies and movement styles muddleanything we might presume as binary gender.
In her conference welcome speech, Croft situatedthe panels and the performances in both a personal and critical lexicon thatrefracted usefully across the two days. She shared an anecdote about the first time she was ever called “queer,” which was in adance class when she was eight years old. A little friend turned to Clare with haughtyantipathy and called her the name. Croftsaid she thought for a moment, and then told her friend that if “queer” meant “strange,”she stood guilty as charged, proudly claiming her difference without at thatpoint needing to carry what later became its sexual baggage.
The sweet and funny story linking queerness toa profitable strangeness echoed throughout the conference, in Cherdonna and Lou’sodd couple and in other equally generative performances of unaligned,cock-eyed, off-kilter gender and scenarios of sexual desire which, by accumulation,demonstrated “strange” as a really useful way of thinking about embodied queerness.
In her too-short discussion with the performersafter the final evening’s presentations, Croft also noted that what distinguishedmuch of the dance we saw together was that the performers looked back at theaudience, an invitation to intersubjectivity that might in itself beparticularly queer.
In fact, theconference’s first panel, “Queer Nations/Queer Boundaries,” included papers byRamón Rivera-Servera (Northwestern) on dance floor gossip in queer Latino/aclubs; by Nic Gareiss (University of Limerick) on being a queer performer intraditional Irish dance; and by Sara Wolf (UCLA) on artist damali ayo’s performance of a publicclaim for race reparations. All three papers teased out the specific queerness of publicintimacy.
Gareiss described how the popular Irish dance form(marketed especially to tourists) interdicts the exchange of queer gazes by insistingthat the male dancers look either at their female partners or out at theaudience but never at one another. Gareiss demonstrated his queer resistance to these constraints, showinga clip of him dancing solo, accompanied by a male Irish fiddler, in which heseemed to be performing the step dance directly for his musical accompanist. The personal yet public performance exchange rewrote the more frontaland certainly more heterosexual conventions of the dance.
Likewise, Rivera-Servera’s ethnography described whathe called queer world-making through gossip on the dance floor. He suggested that gossip createsa profitable friction around what can be a too homogeneous notion of latinidad. He quoted informants who watched andcritiqued sotto voce one another’s dancing from the sidelines, pointing out thedifferences in styles across the ethnic diversity inherent in a pan-Latinocommunity. Gossip about movement, Rivera-Serveraproposed, nuances what might look like a shared politic.
This public intimacy and useful parsing of queerdifferences seemed very much evident in the performances as well as in thepapers. Jennifer Monson and DDDorvillier presented RMW(a) & RMW,a piece they first performed together in 1993, revived in 2004, and havepresented once a year or so since.
In the first half of thetwo-part dance, they wear wigs and make-up reminiscent of Cherdonnaand Lou’s, the drag-like/clown-like, exaggerated eye-makeup and inked outlinesthat signal overt gender performance and that point in a Butlerian sort of way togender as a surface rather than a depth.
Monson wears a black andwhite, short print dress and blond wig, while Dorvillier cavorts in anoversized lime green shirt and pink gym shorts, wearing a curly black wig. The two women dance in parallel, taking turnsperforming more angular and abstracted movement while the other sets a timerand then watches her partner dance.
As Rivera-Servera pointed out to me later, the sceneis vaguely cruise-y, as it seems like they’re purposefully performing for oneanother. It’s certainly seductive; oneof the performance’s pleasures was how keenly Monson and Dorvillier watched oneanother. It occurred to me that werarely see lesbians looking at oneanother in representation. How pleasurable it is for queer spectators to witnessthat gaze exchanged.
The two switch places by mirroring one another’s lastgesture as they then take over the solo. With their increasingly rigorous movement, their wigs fall off and arekicked aside. As this first part ends, Monsonand Dorvillier lie on the ground with their costumes pulled up toward theirchins, their bare torsos and buttocks making funny sucking sounds against thedance floor as the lights fade out.
When the second part begins, the pair appear dressedin matching white t-shirts and rolled-cuffed jeans and jackets that soon comeoff. They proceed to dance one of the most erotic, athletic duets I’ve ever seentwo women perform. They rarely (if ever)lose contact during the piece’s second half, climbing over and across andaround one another’s bodies in a tangle of limbs and muscles and desire thatwas thrilling to watch.
In one glorious moment, Dorvillier climbs upMonson’s legs and torso and stands on Monson’s flat back, balancing precariouslybut somehow surely. This second halfbuilds to a wonderful deep kiss, and then Monson and Dorvillier literally lock lips, remainingattached at the face in this extended erotic contact as they keep moving theirbodies around and about and over and under one another.
Part of what was moving and lovely about this piece,in addition to its frank woman-on-woman sexuality, was that the two dancers aresquarely middle-aged. Breathlessly watchingthem perform such virtuosic athleticism felt like an affirmation of persistentlesbian desire.
By “persistent,” I meancontinuing over time—that is, knowing that Monson and Dorvillier have performedthe piece for almost 20 years demonstrated that time can be a medium in which arelationship like this—physical, affective, aesthetic—can grow, change, andcontinue with a queer sort of commitment. Such persistence, and such lesbian/queer relationships, are too oftendisappeared (and I mean that as an active verb) in live performance and representation.
In fact, Hannah Schwadron (UC-Riverside) gave awonderful paper about the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swanearlier that day in which she argued that it refers to lesbian sexualityonly to deny it, just as the film also “disappears” Jewishness through theconventions of white-encoded ballet (and the Anglicized names of its stars: Natalie Portman, née Hershlag; Mila Kunis, born Milena Markovna Kunis; and Barbara Hershey, born Barbara Herzstein).
Given how often especially middle-aged lesbiansare forced into invisibility in mainstream and even queerrepresentation, watching Monson and Dorvillier so palpably, frankly, andbeautifully create, explore, and perpetuate a queer desire felt exciting, as well as deeply political.
Other performances were equally provocative andgenerative. Remnant Hit/fix, by performer/choreographer Amy Chavasse, set morequotidian movements to various texts and songs, as Chavasse addressed theaudience with a frank and ingenuous tone. She seemed to talk personally, but as in many of these pieces, thestatus of “autobiography” was difficult (and somehow unnecessary, finally) toascertain. To finish the piece, Chavasseselected a woman out of the audience to sit on a stool across from her andlisten to Chavasse’s final monologue. Again, the public intimacy was moving and compelling to watch.
Cositas,choreographed by Joel Valentin-MartÃnez, presented dancer Javier Marchán-Ramos ina tight-fitting red satin ball-gown with a corset-like closure laced up bothhis chest and his back. He entered fromdownstage right, and slowly crossed upstage left, trailing the exceeding longtrain of his dress behind him. Part ofthe simple dance's allure was the suspense over how long his trainwould actually be; the end didn’t appear until Marchán-Ramos was practically onthe other side of the stage.
In addition, because of the dress, the corset, hiscarefully coifed dark hair, and his rather coy gaze, Marchán-Ramos’s gender readas ambiguous and mysterious. He’d glance over hisshoulder at spectators as he crossed the stage, but it wasn’t until the piece’ssecond part, when he gathered the dress in his arms and performed more athleticmovements, did a more familiar performance of masculinity emerge. The performance seemed to glowand practically shimmer with the richness and clarity of its images.
In her solo Walkingthe Line, excerpted from her longer piece SILO/SOLO, choreographer/videographer/performer Andee Scottaccomplished one simple, enormously provocative movement. Naked from the waist down, Scott slowly movedfrom center stage to downstage center, walking out of the stage's darkness into the light of a projectorthat made her bare torso, chest, and neck into a projection screen. The moving image reflected in sharp, bright lightand vivid color showed Scott wearing a full white dress, dancing alone in arural landscape between two low hills.
Although the projected image extended only fromone side of her body to the other, the vibrant scene seemed full of freedom andlight. Watching Scott’s video playacross her chest and collarbones made for a very vulnerable, tender moment ofperformance. Rather than narcissism,which could be expected from a dancer projecting herself onto herself, theimage conjured the sublime liberty of solitude, of nature, and ofself-expression.
Watching Scott use her skin, unfettered by modestyor convention, reminded me of Peggy Shaw performing To My Chagrin, in which she projects a video of her then-smallgrandson, Ian, playing by himself, across her bare breasts. As in Shaw’s piece, Scott’s represented notjust intimacy but heart, love, andcloseness that seemed wonderfully generative and physically and emotionallygenerous. That Scott stood quite stilland half naked in the moment of performance, and used her body to represent a momentof past or prior movement, also seemed to queer her dance.
Nudity appeared fairly frequently in these performances. The first evening began withdancer/choreographer Gina Kohler’s dream[factories]. Kohler was pre-set inthe Pease Studio, sitting naked on a drop cloth center stage, methodically pouringbeet juice meant to represent (I assume) blood over her white body.
As she emptied the deep red liquid from jarsover her head and across her limbs, Kohler slid her body across a shiny,slippery piece of Mylar or something that she’d placed in the middle of thecloth. The red liquid pooled around heras it ran off her skin, leaving rivulets of red across her face, torso, arms,and legs. As Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”played, Kohler spun around on her back, flipped to her stomach, looked out atthe audience, and twirled some more before she finally stood up.
The performance reminded me of Carolee Schneemann’sInterior Scroll. Although Kohler didn’t pull a text out of hervagina, as Schneemann did in the ‘70s, the evocation of blood beckoned to thesame kind of insistence on the difference of the female body that Schneemann performedin the 70s. Here, Kohler was joined onstage by another female performer, dressed in briefs and a bra in a bathing suitsort of costume, covered with gold paint and glitter and wearing a unicorn onher forehead that she caressed and pointed with throughout the piece.
Although the second dancer (Sara Procopio) never directlyinteracted with Kohler, she represented an onstage spectator for Kohler’sbodily acts, directing and refracting our gaze. A male collaborator (Eric Kohler) trained a video camera on Gina Kohlerthroughout this first part of the piece, projecting a live feed onto a screenupstage that focused on her face or body parts as she moved. His filming also seemed to both direct and tointerrupt our gaze, yet rather than representing “male” power over Kohler’s femalebody, his camera seemed to offer just another way for us to look at it.
In the second of the three-part piece, Kohlerstrapped on a harness and transparent acrylic dildo and danced to Leonard Cohen’s“I am Your Man.” The movement here wasboth more every day and more frontal, and necessarily more symbolic andabstract. Seeing a naked woman dancingwith a dildo on, regardless of what it’s supposed to mean, is pretty powerfulin performance and forestalled whatever claims of female essentialism might have been evoked by the blood and beet juice scene.
In the third part, Kohler executed jumping jacksnon-stop while Cohen’s “The Future” played. For the length of the song, she faced the audience and scissored herarms and legs together and apart while the unicorn-wearing dancer watched. The endurance test left her breathless.
Although dream[factories] didn’t necessarily cohere (these three moments wereextracted from a longer piece), each individual image was arresting. Kohler’s matter-of-fact stage personaundercut the sensationalism of her nakedness and of the dildo. She looked out at the audience throughout,engaging us with a kind of butch dare.
Because she wasn’t wearing clothes, I wondered how she performs hergender off stage, since so many of our cues for reading gender are determined bysartorial choices and the movement styles they dictate. But throughout the piece, her gaze back atspectators read to me as butch, which worked in a productive tension with hernaked female body.
Nakedness and gender and sexuality conjoined inKohler’s dream [factories], in Monsonand Dorvillier’s RMW, and in ThomasDeFrantz’s collaborative performance, Theory-ography4: We Queer Here! Generated with a group of six local Michiganstudents and DeFrantz’s own students, Theory-ographywas the most text-based and post-modern of the performances.
The performers collected index cards fromspectators before the piece began, on which they invited the audience to writean instruction or a description that the dancers were later asked toembody. Early in the piece, DeFrantzread out a card that commanded, “Disrobe.” Most of the performers stripped off a layer. When DeFrantz again commanded “disrobe,” JamesMorrow, the one man in the performance, went all the way. His nakedness was disarming and charming.
The dance here was improvisational andangular, much of it rooted into the floor in emphatic and erratic movements forwhich the performers hurried across the stage or threw themselves onto theground. Watching Morrow’s penis floppinghappily against his stomach, and watching him seem to feel liberated ratherthan embarrassed by his nakedness, was quite lovely. His naked presence also echoed Kohler dancingwhile wearing the harness and dildo from the evening before, and commentedprofitably on the construction of sex.
The woman of color performing in Theory-ography stripped down to her underwear when DeFrantzannounced the instruction to disrobe, revealing that her breasts were bound andthat she was wearing black “men’s” jockey shorts.
That they did take off their clothes provedthese two performers, in particular, generous and acquiescent, but somehow alsofull of agency. They inhabited a physicalsexual difference with élan, once again unruffled by the audience’s gaze. These performers gazing back, or invitingwhat performance theorist Dwight Conquergood called “co-presence” withspectators, felt rather happy and comfortable.
Theory-ographywas one of the more cerebral performances at the conference, but these twogender/sexuality representations warmed what might have otherwise been aplayful but “cool” piece. José Muñoz’stext about queer utopia didn’t sound particularly illuminating as theperformers took turns reading from his book into a microphone. But as they called out “Queer me” to signal theywere ready to switch narrators, passing the text among the performers made itmultivocal in interesting ways, and the factof reading it, in itself, seemed generative.
Likewise, that one of the performers alwaystrained a video camera with a live feed on the proceedings made the piece amulti-layered experience. And the text projectedover the feed—such as “where is queer,” “queer is here,” and other verbalinterrogatories and assertions—offered another level of wondering that made theperformance fun and self-reflexive.
Perhaps because the conference attendees were alsofor the most part participants (since most people presented papers orperformed) and perhaps because we saw two nights of performances after two daysof panels, workshops, and screenings, the audience for these pieces felt like acommunity of sorts, however “imagined.”
Watching performers whose nakedness seemed matter-of-fact andcomfortable; whose virtuosity, regardless of age or ability, seemed admirable;whose queerness (or not, since finally, who can tell just by looking at someonemoving?) seemed multiple and fluid; the richness of these experiences created atemporary public of people buoyed by witnessing, creating, and thinking aboutqueer dance. I appreciated every moment.
The Feminist Spectator
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