CROTCH - Keith Hennessy in NY

Here are links to reviews in the NY Times, Village Voice, and my buddy Don Shewey's blog. After too many tries, 2 of the links aren't working so you'll have to copy and paste. Sorry.

Claudia LaRocco, New York Times
Dance Review | Melanie Maar and Keith Hennessy: A Choreographer Creates Special Ties to the Crowd
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/arts/dance/04zero.html

Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-04-08/dance/no-mie-lafrance-melanie-maar-and-keith-hennessy-inscribe-the-body/


donshewey.com
http://donshewey.com/perfblog/2009/blog_10.html



Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal or trauma…)
April 2-4, 2009
Dance Theater Workshop, NY

Crotch references the images and actions of artist Joseph Beuys. On the surface the work is about art, its histories and heroes. Deeper, a sadness grows, a queer melancholy. A song, a dance, a lecture, an image. Talking to the dead. Chaos through Play becomes Form.

Performance & installation by Keith Hennessy
Music: Emmy Lou Harris, Craig Armstrong, Teddy Thompson, Down River, Nirvana
Crotch was developed at Ponderosa (Stolzenhagen Germany) in 2007 and was commissioned/presented at L’Arsenic (Lausanne Switz) in 2008.

Crotch was presented in San Francisco in January 2010 as part of A Queer 20th Anniversary celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hennessy's coming out solo performance Saliva. Additional performances include: Impulstanz (Vienna), The Southern (Minneapolis), Bluecoat (Liverpool), and Queer Zagreb.

Pichet Klunchun & Myself (Jerome Bêl)

Pichet Klunchun & Myself
By Jerome Bêl in collaboration with Pichet Klunchun
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 3/3/09
Co-presented by Dancers’ Group

“He’s full of contradictions,” comments Guillermo Gomez Peña as we leave the bar and say goodbye to French dance artist Jerome Bêl. More of a conceptualist than a choreographer, Bêl has achieved considerable international success with a series of anti-spectacles that interrogate dance performance and the Western theater.

In his first Bay Area performance, Bêl performed with Pichet Klunchun, a Thai dancer in the Kun tradition. Pichet Klunchun & Myself, which was warmly received in San Francisco, is smart, generous and delightful. Its provocations are its charms.

The performance is like a scripted talk show. Each artist questions the other about his work and gives brief yet evocative demonstrations. In common they share the struggle of finding or developing an audience that can understand their work. How they represent death in performance (or not) is one of many contrasts between their approaches to dance making. Despite Bêl’s almost coy distancing, they are both moved by the other’s work. That is to say, they were moved during their first meeting, of which this performance is a recreation. The performance is a documentary theater piece based on an actual meeting in which they introduced their work to each other. The mood is informal and anti-dramatic, and yet the fourth wall is firmly in place, as are the conventions of theatrical artifice and repetition.

In the lobby after the show, theater artist Kevin Clarke says, “It’s theater, not performance art. It’s a representation of their first encounter, a showing.” When I mention this to Bêl after the performance, he says, “Yes we are representing something. It’s a real fourth wall piece. I’m not proud of it. It’s what happened. We didn’t have time.”

The work has been performed around 100 times since it premiered at the Bangkok Fringe Festival in 2004 and is probably one of the most often presented and written about works of contemporary dance in the past five years. And yet the two men speak as if they’ve never met, and have no idea how the other will respond to their questions or demonstrations. In an interview with choreographer Jess Curtis, Bêl informs that there is no written text and that each performer is free to change the discourse at will. “Depends on our mood, our situation. For example, Pichet says different things if we perform in Thailand, Asia or in the West. I can say specific things if I know that somebody is in the theater and I want to make him/her understand a particular thing.”

After the show Bêl told me that the piece with Klunchun is his first popular success. He added, “The first time we performed it, I thought it was a failure, not to be repeated. We were convinced to remake it in Brussels.” Clearly, it snowballed from there. Previous works have been successful, he pointed out, but only with curators, presenters and a limited contemporary dance audience. The audience in San Francisco, for their Tuesday-night only performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, included more local choreographers and dance-performance people than at any other performance in the past few years. Explaining his work to Klunchun, Bêl describes the audience for his work as an audience interested in contemporary art. He says he doesn’t return money to dissatisfied patrons because contemporary art does not promise anything, so there is no contract with the audience to break.

The second half of the performance, in which Klunchun interviews Bêl, is a primer in contemporary art aesthetics, tactics, and tensions. Bêl articulates the primary role of research and experimentation, the importance of state funding, a critique of spectacle and representation, a resistance to virtuosity rooted in populism and democracy, and a deconstruction or appropriation of pop culture. Since the late 50s, there has been a genre of dance that investigates dance more than presents dancing. Central to this project is a critical inquiry of Western theatrical practice.

Bêl said that he could no longer find meaning in dance so he took two years off to read philosophy, art criticism, history and more. He cited Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”) as particularly influential. Explaining to Klunchun, Bêl said, “So there was a struggle, how to keep doing performances, which I love, but how to do spectacle without being the société du spectacle?” Since that time, Bêl’s work has been spacious and slow paced. If there is dancing to a pop song, movements generally respond to a single idea and play out for the length of the song. Minimal and conceptual describe his approach to choreography and performance. He said that the slow pace of his work gives the audience room to have a response. UC Davis professor Lynette Hunter notes that most anti-spectacle is not intended to provoke emotional affective response, and yet this one did. Not a communal catharsis, she notes, but instead the performance prompted a particular and open-ended emotional response.

Bêl is moved by Klunchun’s dance of a woman crying upon finding out that her husband has been killed in battle. With gestural precision he shows her hiding tears, and then hardening to anger.
When Klunchun adds the gesture for ‘raining’ to the slow funeral walk, Bêl says, “This is a funeral. It starts to rain. It is sad.” We feel not only the dance, but also Bêl’s feeling of the dance. He is learning to read Kun. Later, Bêl performs a dance in which he dies slowly, or softly, to the sounds of Roberta Flack singing, Killing Me Softly (with his song). Some in the audience laugh at this overly literal joke, but Klunchun is reminded of his mother dying. While the performance reveals the limitations to translation and mutual understanding, their simple gestures of grief seem to transcend cultural difference. The work suggests that cross-cultural respect and understanding require both patience and dancing.

Although their movement demonstrations are brief, each artist reveals an embodied virtuosity rooted in both reverence and concern for dance. It’s as if by limiting the actual dancing to short excerpts that punctuate a spoken conversation, the audience might appreciate dance even more. The work suggests that if you understand the meaning, with space to insert yourself and your concerns, then you’ll consider it “good.”


Klunchun states that western concert dance throws the energy away. He demonstrates a jeté, a leap from one foot to the other. The legs extend forward and back through space, the arms reaching up, as if thrown, releasing something from the hands. Bêl starts to analyze and maybe even to defend but then he agrees. What is not mentioned is that much dance of the past 30 years, even by people extending European classical or modern dance, practices recycling and circulating energy in the body, between bodies, between the body and its environment. This is evident in the influence of Aikido on Contact Improvisation, the dance practices describe as release technique or releasing, Simone Forti’s passages about flow, Alexander Technique in the work of Anne Bluethentahal or Augusta Moore, and William Forsythe’s approach to improvisation. David Zambrano teaches a technique that focuses on recycling energy, except that the ground, the earth, is the center or king, and the body is both indicator and energy itself, moving into and out of the floor. Klunchun’s description of the body as a literal metaphor for a Thai temple, with Buddha at the center and hands and feet continually redirecting energy back to Buddha, offered specific language for re-considering contemporary dance techniques.

We have seen anti-spectacular performance that is intentionally not enjoyable, not pleasing, but as Curtis points out, Bêl’s work is often witty and enjoyable. Bêl addresses this possible contradiction with, “I love that audiences enjoy the work, but not too much. If they just enjoy it, I am disappointed. I am more ambitious than that.”

The thought-provoking work is arguably most contradictory in its relationship to transnational and post-colonial debate. Despite Bêl’s intentions to avoid exploitation, the work simultaneously resists and complies with larger structures of neo-colonialist practice that would privilege a reading of Bêl’s contemporary European dance over Klunchun’s traditional Thai/Kun dance. Within the limited field of contemporary dance and performance, Bêl is famous and funded. Klunchun is neither. Even in their respective countries, their status is neither symmetrical nor comparable. Their performance is theorized, marketed, and presented in contemporary dance contexts, where contemporary is simply the most current, and globalized, version of European and American cultural developments. Klunchun’s work, both by being foreign and by going first, becomes the ground for re-viewing and re-valuing not only Bêl’s work, but our own; we, the white people in the audience, and we, the postmodern dance and performance people who are the most represented ‘community’ in the audience. Simultaneously the conversation reveals the complicated role of the western tourist. In Thailand, as consumers of “traditional” dance, tourists are the primary audience for Kun performance, albeit a performance adapted to tourist attention spans and hotel poolside schedules. Sitting in the audience, resonating with Bêl’s situated knowledge as a European dance artist, I wondered if I/Bêl was just another tourist using the Other as a mirror to see myself more clearly. It is a tribute to the work that it’s surface simplicity and generous spaciousness, provoke personal considerations of cultural shadow. A mirror, indeed.

Pichet Klunchun & Myself is an excellent failure. It paradoxically embodies all that it attempts to critique, in terms of spectacle, a democratic exchange, virtuosity, and the role of the European in global culture. Its contradictions are inspirational, evocative, encouraging, and generative.


Note:
If you're interested in Bêl's work, there is a website/archive/catalogue worth checking out.
http://www.catalogueraisonne-jeromebel.com/


PS.
My review of this work is more of a failure than the performance itself. When I sent this to my prof Lynette Hunter she told me that dance thinker Susan Foster suggested that gender was key to analyzing the piece. I feel dumb that I missed this. Duh, representations and memories of the female body are the primary reference in the work as well as its gateway to feeling, grief, and to bonding. Klunchun dances a woman crying. Bêl dies to the voice of a woman which reminds Klunchun of his own mother dying. Absent and present, woman is, throughout. I look forward to Foster's writing on this.

PPS.
July 2009, Oaxaca, The Prisma Forum
I just saw this piece for a second time. When Klunchun demonstrates Kun dance, he casts Bêl in the role of the King, counterpoint to Klunchun's role as Demon. Klunchun dances a sequence that illustrates the ineffectiveness of the King's magic arrow, concluding with a tiny yet forceful gesture of flicking his pinky at Bêl. The following conversation between them clarifies that the Demon is telling the King that he is a insignificant piece of shit. It's hard not to see the smirk in this colonial clowning.

Penny Arcade BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE!

Penny Arcade's
BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE!

Through March 8, 2009
Brava Theater Center, San Francisco
http://www.brava.org/
myspace page
http://www.pennyarcade.tv/press/

Queer underground survivor and superstar Penny Arcade has made a deliciously vibratory experience for all whores, feminists, fags, dykes, faghags, and the people who love (or pay) them. Appropriately the performance is titled, BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE! An ever-evolving vaudevillian ritual spectacle, the work was born during the sex and censorship wars of the 80’s, but is updated and adapted to today’s San Francisco.

Penny is backed by a chorus of ten saucy strippers and go go dancers who surround the audience on a series of platforms. Men and women, boys and girls, these young people are already masters of sleazy representation, coy flirtation, and camp erotica. Depending on your mood or preference you might find the burlesque seductive or provocative, titillating or even inappropriate. But whether it’s lust in your pants or morals on your mind, consider these scantily clad crotch hounds as temple dancers making the stage holy for Penny’s mythic storytelling, political ranting, and erotic preaching.

B!D!F!W! is about history and love and intimacy and the struggle to survive. It is about the importance of sexual energy liberated from hypocrisy and marketplace. The show is long and probably too much. But it's gay honey, and gay liberation is intended to be too much. In fact, it’s super gay, over the top, excessive, and even includes the very gay songs, "I will survive" and "We are family", with and without an ironic wink wink.

Calling for a new language that is neither politically nor academically correct, B!D!F!W! embodies the histories of the last 30 to 40 years of LGBT activism and queer theater/performance. Walking us through the 70s we visit the queens and queers of the avant-garde who adopted Penny as a wayward teen faghag. Then we visit a very late 70s militant separatist lesbian land where men can’t even touch a toe and gossip rides the winds of patchouli. We know the 80s are coming and still it’s a painful shock when Penny’s friends start to die. Three hundred of them. Her grief and rage are tempered with the wisdom of survival, even as her intense feelings extend from her body to awaken in our own. The stripper chorus, too young to have been there, become the queer kids at drag momma’s feet, still, attentive, grateful, and sad.

Penny can speak to loneliness and devastation, isolation and rejection, without drowning us (or herself). She's hilarious and occasionally dangerous. Prepping for a righteous finale state of the union address, Penny proudly strips and teases her hot aging body to a film of Wooster legend Ron Vawter being Lenny Bruce. The juxtaposition is punk, fierce. Queering the stage in many ways, she switches genres from 80's performance to Laugh-In standup to burlesque Happening. My favorite moment was when she held my hand in the dark, while bragging that her unique gift to performance history is simply turning all the lights out and hanging out with the audience. A long monologue by seven-year old Penny, chatting lesbian histories while her legs swing from a bench too high for her feet to touch the ground, was probably the only scene that I wished were shorter. B!D!F!W! is wildly imperfect, contradictory and eccentric which is exactly what allows all the love, intimacy, political liberation, and sexual healing to be available to any audience willing to receive.

My buddy Neil and I left the show sensing that our own intimacy had shifted, that we felt more comfortable and friendly with others in the audience on the way out. Maybe that doesn't turn you on. Maybe that won't happen. I felt more alive and more sexual; more inspired to take bold action and fondle more ass.

DRACUL: PRINCE OF FIRE, A BALLET! (short review)

Dracul: Prince of Fire

The Crucible’s 10th anniversary fire ballet was a re-telling of the Dracula story with circus, burlesque, ballet, heavy metal-ish blasts of actual fire, molten metal, and interventions by Rocky Horror’s Brad & Janet, Buffy the vampire slayer, and Michael Jackson’s zombies.
It was somewhat campy but not enough. They drained the radical potential from the Camp. They remade Rocky Horror but forgot the importance of Queer. The ballet took itself way too seriously. The music was bombastic orchestral drama and I didn’t like it. The moment where the undead performed the Thriller choreography was delightful genius. The acrobats were superb. The work was a fantastic, community-based spectacle featuring a large and joyous ensemble of aerialists, dancers and fire artists. The stage was literally on fire!
The performances benefited The Crucible, which is an inspired, populist school for fire and metal arts, based in West Oakland.

(If you want the long long review, read the next post)

DRACUL: PRINCE OF FIRE, A BALLET!

Dracul: Prince of Fire
January 9, 2009. The Crucible, West Oakland.

10th Anniversary Fire Ballet, directed and designed by The Crucible Executive Director, Michael Sturtz.

The performance began with a welcoming from Dracul’s director and primary designer, Michael Sturtz, who is also the founder and executive director of The Crucible. He wanted to answer the question, why a fire ballet? He answered with a series of questions. Who is here to see ballet? A smattering of applause. Who is here for the aerialists? More applause. Who is here for zombies and vampires? Even more applause. And then guiding our crescendo, he called out, who is here for fire? And the crowd roared. Point taken.

Dracul, the prince of fire, played magnificently by Brett Womack (Circo Zero, New Pickles, Vau de Vire) arrives on the balcony, carrying a torch and standing behind a circular scrim, which becomes a projection screen for the rest of the event. When he approaches a staircase, the banister is set aflame. When he descends to the stage he touches a tall pillar with his torch and ignites a fountain of fire, with flaming fluids tumbling down. Enter the massive robot dragon, stage left, spewing fire. Its articulated head, with flaming nostrils, lurches left and right, snapping its jaws. Dracul draws his sword and fights the dragon, slapping his weapon against the welded beast and pushing it offstage. The mimetic gestures and orchestral score are super dramatic. OMG! He’s injured. Dracul falls to the ground and starts to pull his armor off. A newfound strength starts coursing through his body. A cable descends from the ceiling. Dracul fixes his wrist to a strap at the bottom of the cable and he flies. A line of fire erupts along the downstage edge of the stage. He flies again, and then performs impressive circus moves while suspended from one arm.

The townsfolk arrive, walking in every direction. One at a time he grabs them in an embrace, they swoon, he bares his teeth, sinks them into their neck, feeds. They slump to the ground. It’s a world of grey and black. Everyone has ghoulish makeup, white faces, dark shadows for cheeks. The music is serious, but Dracul plays with us, referencing every vampire we’ve ever seen on TV. The stage is littered with corpses. When all are dead, he stands center and raises his arms, wide and open, and they rise. The zombies come to life and then it’s Thriller. For real. 20 plus dancers led by Drac give us the dance we know too well. Applause and cheers. If anyone needs a model of simulacra, a disappearance of the real in an endless series of copies and repetitions, this is it. It’s kinda genius. Unfortunately this distorted techno version of one of the most listened to songs of all time, is the only break we get from an overwhelming symphony of bombastic melodrama.

A pole dancer descends from the ceiling. Her first gesture, wearing shorty shorts, is a wide straddle crotch shot to the audience. Two more women emerge from white aerial pods. The mummies unravel and the trio of sexy vamp-fatales (Breonna Noack, Kerri Kresinski, Noel Dellofano) announce a zombie world safe for burlesque. Four women begin a dance below. A modern ballet chorus. Other performers arrive to spray sparks from the balcony. One zombie (Tom Sepe) spits and eats fire. Others weld, bend metal. The two fatales continue in the air, performing synchronized, aerial acrobatics on the white fabric. They’re having so much fun, it almost seems normal to be suspended, inverted, arching back to grab one’s foot and bringing it towards one’s head. They call it contortion for a reason. Dracula oversees his seedy empire. The scene is a complicated, multi-centered portrait of life in the blood and fire factory.

Brad and Janet arrive through the audience. They’re people, not zombies, i.e., no ghoulish goth makeup. Brad’s glasses announce geek. Janet’s wardrobe announces prude. They’re both prudish geeks. Janet texts her friend Lucy and the txt msg is projected onto the round screen. An acrobat (Simon Chabon) spinning a long staff burning at both ends dance-tumbles across the stage and pulls the couple into the scene. Chabon gives them a thrill/scare. He’s very good. A graceful tumbler with excellent timing, sustained flight, and controlled gestures. Now add fire and a charming presence. Brad and Janet are entranced, and thus delivered into the hands of the evil Dracul. Bwa ha ha.

This is fairy tale so Drac immediately falls in love with Janet. While one fatale distracts Brad, the other two strip Janet to her chaste, white undies. Then they strip him too. He gets to keep his black garters and socks as well as his tighty whities. Meanwhile Drac steals Janet away, which allows for a comic sexy dance with the three fatales and Brad. OK this is all pretend, mime, representation, citation, reference, cliché, archetype, i.e., Bad Acting. I remind myself that this is melodrama, a po-mo B movie horror. It’s not as self-conscious as Scream, and that’s too bad. Suddenly the sex play is over. Now the girls have fire. Brad is bound to a rack and tortured. Of course this is also an excuse for a sexy ballet. The music must be read as Camp overkill, otherwise it hurts like a cheap manipulative sound score. No worse, it hurts like hell, as in Dante, or Heart of Darkness hell. O the horror, the horror.

Buffy the vampire slayer arrives. Brad has collapsed and the fatale trio are dancing and sniffing his shirt. Jealousy is woven into their solidarity. The fatales confront Buffy, who is not afraid. She pulls out two wooden stakes. Dracul enters with sword. Thanks to a stage combat coach, they fight. It’s too bad they don’t disrupt their own representations. The relentless music continues. The projection of whirling gears continues. Buffy starts to win. They flip. They “struggle”. She throws garlic but he bathes himself in it, taunting her, then throws it aside. She flicks holy water in his face. Drac is undaunted. Things are looking bad for grrrl power hero. When she holds up a cross, he sets it on fire. Before I can think KKK twice, she drops it. Buffy wins this round with a forceful blast from a fire extinguisher which makes even more fire and smoke. The fatales escape, exiting vertically, up. The projection is black birds racing across the sky.

Brad and Janet dance a lovely ballet pas de deux in white underwear. The projections show blue sky, wafting white clouds. They reach, they extend, he lifts, she floats. Three to four minutes of ballet with flutes and violins. He tries to kiss, she pulls away. More pas de deux, slower perhaps, more serious, but not dark. It’s way too much. When they spin off, she is in his arms. Applause.

Here’s where the production’s lack of irony is most obvious. Ballet in a melodrama? Why not? Joan Holden (SF Mime Troupe) wrote an excellent defense of melodrama as a people’s art linking it to commedia dell’arte’s archetypal figures and struggles (e.g., good vs. evil). Holden’s melodrama is popular art, intentionally lowbrow, not elite. Ballet, outside of the seasonal fundraiser in the guise of a costume spectacle called The Nutcracker, is hardly lowbrow. The only Nutcrackers worth seeing are the Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie by Dance Brigade’s Grrrl Brigade and Mark Morris’ queer camp sensation The Hard Nut. The 40 year old Rocky Horror Picture Show is, among other things, subversively queer. This Dracul misses its opportunities for popular uprising via the liberatory potential of lowbrow spectacle. Think Brad and Dr. Frankenfurter, Lucille Ball, Buffy, hyphy or crumping, John Waters, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart or Culture Clash. They realize that low brow is permission to satirize highbrow. In this way, it’s always time for melodrama or B movies or camp, because it’s always relevant to confront the absurdity of everyday life. Dracul avoids the social commentaries of the works it quotes (Buffy, Rocky Horror, MJ’s Thriller). How much better, funnier, more thrilling to have Drac make out with male zombies, Janet getting near seduced (or gang banged) by the sexy girls, or just townsfolk humping inappropriately during the super-normal lovers duet. It’s a let down to combine all of this and then deliver a fated story of true love in which boy gets girl.

And while I’m on the much maligned topic of political correctness and the role of art to subvert dominant cultures, do I have to remind everyone that we’re in West Oakland and have been treated to a 45 minute pre-show of documentary video clips showcasing the many Black youth who enjoy classes at The Crucible? Why is any production of this scale so White? Especially when hosted by a community building, all people’s access, educational non-profit located in a historic African American neighborhood, in a White minority city. Without trying to white wash any of the cast, it appeared to me that all lead roles, all or most directors and designers, all tech people, and most of the secondary roles were played by people with ethnic roots in Northern Europe, from Great Britain to Russia. Two of the dance chorus quartet were visibly non-White. Apologies to anyone I missed due to mixed-ethnic backgrounds and ghoulish make-up. This kind of counting suggests a more simplistic perspective than I am trying to provoke, and yet statistics are one of the best ways we can measure cultural progress or paralysis.

Back to the show. Brad & Janet have just danced off in their pristine yet coy underwear. Lucy, Janet’s buddy, the lithe powerhouse Alyssa Marx, appears, repeatedly trying to reach Janet on her cell. Silence at the end of the phone. Somber strings and a follow spot accompany her descent down the stairs as she searches for her lost friends. I take a moment to check out the set, a near classical balcony and staircase built around a central doorway. It has a goth-industrial style (and quality) that resembles digital gaming with pillars and bas-relief dragons that spew actually flames. It’s part southern or Transylvanian mansion and part abandoned factory. It screams Theatah.

Dracul creeps out from his tomb room, opening the central portal which is angled as if he is emerging from a ship or from within the earth itself. Lucy is still on the phone. Drac carries two lengths of black fabric which he rigs to a descending cable. As they ascend the fabrics become veil and cape, building the tension before the inevitable strike on the innocent woman. Moving like a breeze, he removes her jacket before she senses his presence. All the better to perform an aerial duet in the guise of a fight. The vertical pas de deux starts off pretty and symmetrical but each set of movements increases in risk and virtuosity. There is an awesome moment, when Lucy, fabrics crossed at her back, is held in the tension caused by Dracul pulling from the ground. She spins deliriously. It gets even better. Lucy proves to be a match for Drac, and in the only gender role reversal of the whole performance, she lifts him off the ground. He climbs up her body (trust me this takes a bunch of strength from both people and it usually hurts the porteur, usually a brawny guy, but in this case, a fierce yet small woman). Appropriating her strength, he aims his teeth for her neck and bites. Game over. A long red fabric spills from the ceiling. Lucy performs a mid-air transfer, wraps herself in the symbolic blood and plunges in a triple spiral to her death. Unexpectedly, the red fabric that has just held Lucy 15 feet in the air is released and it drops to the ground beside her. The projections are weird colorful liquids dropping into water. Dracula departs wrapped in the fabrics, the black and the red, the darkness and blood. Lucy, dead, is alone on stage.

Janet and Brad return, clothed, to find poor dead Lucy. More pained faces - o no! O no! - Bad acting that might be campy fun but is only a hint of what camp might be. A more serious ballet pas de deux follows. I leave to pee, thanks to the beer they were serving before the show. But I’m fast so I have a couple of minutes to wonder why oh why a melodrama with camp punctuation? Why no queer anything? Why no theatrical risks or disruptions? Isn’t fire a destroyer, cleanser, purifier? I return and Buffy enters the scene, seemingly invisible to the couple dancing. It’s neither silly nor mournful, but all the indicators of serious ballet are well performed: arabesques, developpés and smooth lifts.

Lucy starts to move, her back arching from the ground, her chest reaching for the sky. The couple think this is a good sign, but scary. The music swells, seriously. The projections of dripping ink or color continue. Yes Lucy rises, but not for good, she’s evil! The aerial cable descends. She wraps her wrist and is lifted into the air. She flies and does a cool move that requires much strength and flexibility. Then she descends, releases the wrist strap, and leaps about the stage. Evil circus vampire girl Lucy goes after prudish geek guy Brad. Wooden stake handler Buffy intervenes and the two women engage in an acrobatic fight. Janet pathetically approaches vampire Lucy with a small torch. We laugh. Lucy smirks, grasps the flame, extinguishes it in her mouth, and goes after Janet. Buffy, just in time, stabs Lucy with the stake. Add very weird screams to the bombastic symphonic blasts. Applause. Darkness.

Janet dances a solo. She’s a lovely dancer but I have no idea what she’s doing, what her motivation might be, what direction she might have received. Fires are burning everywhere. The projection is a night sky with moon and moving clouds. Dracul soars overhead in an overhead crane that traverses the entire building. Wow. Janet is still dancing. Long reaches, legs extending, toes pointing. Pathos on the dance floor. Dracul is delivered to the balcony where he grabs a rope rigged to the ceiling. She spins. He flies over the stage. A choreography of rope maneuvers begins. (That’s cored lisse or web to you circus fans). He grabs the rope, quickly wraps himself and then tumbles in the air, or flings himself upside down and releases his hands. Dracul/Womack is so clear, impressive without effort. Top of his game. He draws Janet to him. Who wouldn’t fall under his spell? He pulls her off the ground, but no bite yet. He releases her for more ballet, more rope act. Suspended up high, with the rope securing his pelvis, he makes a loop of the dangling cord. She falls into the seductive trap. As he pulls her to him, she seems to roll within the loop (think DV8’s Enter Achilles). As she spirals towards him, he grabs her for a mid-air bite, suck, and drain. Now they descend and do ballet. The moon is red and full. Night clouds waft. He wraps her in the rope, which is stained red. She too wears a dress of dirty reds. Lights out.

The follow spot finds Brad entering from the balcony. He descends the stairs looking for Janet, Concern. Fear. Follow spot. When Brad finds zombie Janet there are quick scary fire blasts upstage. (Think Led Zepplin.) He realizes that she is lost to the vampires. Janet goes after Brad. Super strong, she tosses him about. OK this is the 2nd gender role reversal. He tries to hold her. She breaks free. Throws him to the ground. (She never loved him!) They struggle. And then he stakes her! More recorded screams and the symphony swells again again again.

Brad dances the dance that says, o shit! I killed my girlfriend! What now? He leaps, dives, slides, and throws his arms to the heavens. Then he does these crazy knee jumps, spinning 360 degrees to land on his again on his knees. Again and again, three aerial pirouettes to and from the knees. More screaming. Running. Looking everywhere. Darkness. Applause.

In the dark a heartbeat is heard. Then a chorus of operatic women’s voices, oooh ooooh. The fire pillar pulses a flame. Cool. More operatic ooooh-ing. Dracul arrives; walking the pace I call International Slow Motion. It’s not Butoh slow, or filmic slow, but it’s just slow enough to read as serious or ritualistic. With much drama he discovers the staked Janet. The entire edge of the elevated stage bursts into flames. He lifts her onto a metal table that two of the undead wheel towards center stage. Recalling Frankenstein/Frankenfurter but with the aesthetics of Mad Max/Burning Man, a postindustrial transparent half-dome lowers to cover her. All the zombies arrive. Opera voices continue. Big singing, men and women. Now a dance with everyone. Ballet, contortion, fire and blacksmithing. Projection of church stained glass, spinning. More opera, serious opera. Welding, contortion, fire. A zombie fire sculptor pours molten metal from the balcony as voices crescendo and music goes (classical) crazy. Big timpani, horns, strings, everything. Voices, fire spinning, leaping dancers. Janet comes alive in the plexi bubble. Dracul raises his fists to the air. The bubble rises. Zombies spin the table, fire spinners spin fire, and everyone circles the table. Janet lurches as her body circuitry re-boots into life. Dracul and Janet find each other, embrace. All music drops to a single violin, but no, that was only momentary, timpani and everything roar back.

Buffy, stakes ready, arrives to defeat the vampire ghouls. Lots of stage combat including escapes climbing up and plunging down the pole (Chinese mast). Brad cheers from the sidelines, go stake girl go! Dracul arrives to fight Buffy. She loses one stake but in a quick pirouette she thrusts the remaining stake into Dracul. He falls. She turns away. He stands, pulls out the stake, and then stabs her in the back. Hey that’s not fair! It’s not right that Buffy dies so unjustly. Buffy’s grrrl power is based on the fact that she always gets her vampire. After all the stage combat and acrobatics, Buffy stabs Drac but it doesn’t work and then he kills her. Stabs her in the back! That’s the only way he gets his girl. He should be falling for dead Buffy. Now that’s hot! But this is no morality play.

Meanwhile, stage left, super power Janet destroys Brad. Timing her attack to percussive symphonic blasts she snaps his neck and then sends him to his grave. Ummm why didn’t she bite his neck to join her in the infinite life of the undead bloodsuckers? Oh yeah, Dracul and Janet meet center stage. (Forever) young lovers walking among their beloved flames. They walk downstage, and turn from their lover gaze to us. They lick lips. We’re next. We giggle. Hand in hand they exit through the tomb portal. Projection of red and yellow sky, a new day dawning. We applaud. Music resolves with a final chord.

The air is thick with the malodor of burnt fuel. Then big rock music blasts for the bows. The dance quartet chorus does as staccato spazz dance that’s better than anything they’ve done tonight. We respond as if at a commedia, cheering and jeering with each actor as they vamp in character. The crescendo of applause peaks with Brett Womack’s bow. (To think I first worked with him as a 19 year old boyman.) Kerri K and Tom S are non-stop fun. All the tech guys come out, and the dragon too. Lots and lots of applause.


Dracul: Prince of Fire was a massive undertaking by hordes of talented people. Imagine a DIY Cirque du Soleil. It was also a show that couldn't really exist anywhere else on earth. The Crucible has not only ridden the wave of Burning Man culture, it has been a primary instigator in the communities, aesthetics and resources that make Burning Man possible. And the Bay Area, thanks to a legacy of DIY circus, vaudville and burlesque has an impressive talent pool for aerialists and acrobats of all kinds. Kuddos to everyone involved.

Check them out: http://thecrucible.org

DELINQUENT MUSINGS, a little about me

While working on Delinquent, a collaborative performance-confrontation with the juvenile justice system, I was asked to write a personal essay about becoming an artist.
Fall 2008

At the age of 40 I wrote my first honest artist statement. “I am a political animal. My primary sense seems to be an attention to power, equality, justice, betrayal, cooperation, and consensus. I am passionate about the choreographies of protest and dissent, of uprising and resistance.”

Justice was a big issue in our house. We called it fairness. Fairness meant that all six kids got the same rules, resources, and treatment. Except that we didn’t. The rules of fairness were trumped by the hierarchies of both age and gender. From my perspective as child number five, and son number three, I developed an acute eye for equality, power, and its abuses.

I have rarely fit the images or behaviors that were expected of me. I have either felt limited or alienated. I almost consider this to be my natural state, either feeling constrained by external pressures or rejected entirely and living outside the walls. I’ve been ambivalently masculine since before I knew the word masculine. I felt drawn to dance and artistic expression long before I understood how foreign that was to my father, and to the majority of people in my hometown, especially as a profession.

I’m looking at a school photo from the mid-70’s. My bangs are overgrown. I’m wearing a red sweater. Underneath is a white, button-up shirt, with the large collars extending over the sweater’s neck. Around my neck, tucked between the collars and into the sweater, is an ascot made from a blue bandana, my attempt at dissident fashion. When all the other guys wore t-shirts and jeans I would wear a white shirt with tie or an improvised ascot and carry my books in a black brief case. A precocious queer with no actual identity yet to claim, neither aesthetic nor sexual. Not yet.

In our house we didn’t cry very often. The most common form of punishment was a thin bread board slapped hard onto our outstretched hands. Ten times. Five hits per hand. If we cried we were threatened with double the number of hits. Same threat if we retracted our hand. Mostly we did not express emotions around adults. And mostly they did not express emotions around us. Anger was the exception to the rule. The cultures of children and adults were pretty firmly divided, and our parents were infamous in our neighbourhood for being stricter than others.

It was all very Catholic and old school. Punishments included standing or kneeling in a corner, missing dinner, breadboard to the hands (mom), and in severe cases a belt to the bum (dad). Until Grade 8 we all went to Catholic school (which was public) where the nuns had similar standards and practices. Their corporal punishment including a short leather strap to the hands. A similar threat of further strapping if we pulled back our hand to avoid the hit. Excellent unintentional training to not respond to fear. None of this was very frequent because the threat of corporal punishment was enough to keep us “good” within eye and ear range of adults. It also helped us to develop a kind of subversive youth solidarity, which included elaborate lying, protecting each other, and giving misleading information. I don’t recall ever confessing these lies or subversions.

When upset I tended to disappear. My surface remained calm regardless of turbulence or confusion. I spent a lot of time alone, reading. And I spent a lot of time out of the house. After school projects, sports, drama, dancing, there was always a reason to not come home. Basically I separated emotionally from my parents before Grade 8. I didn’t ever speak to them about my feelings or thoughts, wishes or fears. I didn’t really have honest conversation with them until my late 20’s and even then there was always withheld information, skirting of issues and, when possible, avoiding conflict. Nonetheless there were plenty of arguments, willful attempts at independence, and tense battles for power. By my late teens these battles included political debate, an area where passion was expected but not encouraged.

By the age of 12, I was an accomplished shoplifter. Once with a few older boys that included my brother Neil, son number two, I won a contest to see who could steal the biggest object from a hardware store. I think I coiled a six-foot length of bicycle brake cable and hid it under my jacket. I was already identified as a performer and was praised for being able to lie under pressure. We called it acting. Neil couldn’t do it. He always felt guilty and thought that he would get caught no matter what. He said his face gave him away.

On the way home from elementary school we took a path through a small forest that linked two neighbourhoods. Neil and I, with John who lived next door, would light small fires and then stomp them out. Once the fire grew too fast, and we burned down an acre of grass and trees. From a distance some people saw us running from the fire. When the police arrived at our house, Neil and I agreed that he should hide in the basement and I should speak to the police. With my mom standing behind me, sternly demanding my obedience, I told them that indeed we had been at the fire, but only to try to put that darn fire out, and that we gave up only after our school books had been lost to the flames.

Somewhere around that time, I was caught shoplifting. While babysitting Bruce, brother number four, age six, I stole a few books for him from Woolworth’s. I really wanted him to enjoy reading as much as I. When we got home my mom asked him where he got the books. He innocently replied and the next thing I knew we were in the car driving back to Woolworth’s. My mom handed me off to the manager who took me to the back of the store near the freight elevator. It was an unfamiliar and scary location. He told me that I was lucky to have such good parents, and that he had the right to take me to the police where I would have to spend time in jail. Something in his mask cracked, and I knew he was bluffing, trying to scare me. The authority that he and my mom represented suddenly seemed fake and manipulative, a power that existed only to justify itself.

Twelve years later I was still drawing inspiration from that experience. In handcuffs in the Berkeley jail, I stared down a cop as he yelled and threatened me. The more intense he became the more I knew that he was simply frustrated and had no real power over me. I was scared, in uncertain territory, being threatened with both violence and prison, and yet the whole scenario seemed like an exposé of power and its abuse. What the cop didn’t know was that I was an illegal alien using a false name. He also didn’t know that I was studying his performance and responding with a manipulation of my own. A few hours later, after he had sent my friends home, he dropped my charge from felony to misdemeanor. I was able to lie to a bail bondsman about both my name and where I worked and I got out. A number of years later I got a green card (now that was a performance!) and have been arrested several times since. Now it’s more of a civic duty than an anti-authoritarian thrill, as much a result of an early Jesuit influence as a later anarchist affinity.

We grew up politely Irish and Catholic in a mining town in Northern Ontario. As far as I knew, gay people did not exist. That included me. Decades after I left, my hometown still struggles with the closet. AIDS deaths were not publicly acknowledged until nearly 10 years into the epidemic and the first gay pride picnic occurred in 2000. In our family it wasn’t just queer sexuality that was ignored. No one talked about sex, let alone intimacy or love. There were no jokes, no acknowledgement, no questions, no shaming. My sexual life was an inarticulate interior experience with no public outlet. I remember practicing making out with girls on van rides to diving competitions when I was 13 or 14. We were serious athletes who trained every day. Why not practice kissing? Somehow we worked together to keep the driver, our coach, from ever seeing or knowing what was going on. Another case of solidarity, subversion, and secret.


I was called a fag on a regular basis for the entirety of high school. Often I ignored the comment. But sometimes, and especially if there was an audience, I would retort with some smart remark like, you’re just angry because I came in your hair last night. Then I would run. I don't think most guys who tried to hurt me with this label actually thought that I would grow up to love having sex with men. To be a fag was to be cursed as weak and unimportant. It took years to realize that my avoidance of gay community was caught up with a resistance to the negative traits that homophobic society projected onto us. I didn’t identify with the abject outcast that others called gay. A few weeks ago some young Latino guys in my neighborhood yelled faggot as I rode by on my bicycle. It must have been my silly pants. Too colorful, too gay. They weren’t expecting a response. I yelled back calling them cowards, sexually ashamed cowards.

In high school I was often in trouble. Fortunately I was also a good student and active in student affairs. Unfortunately I didn’t want to be there. I hung out with a small crew of alienated geeks and freaks. Visibly fat, invisibly queer, too smart or just too sensitive to assimilate into any of the other cliques, we ate lunch on the stairs. Despite, or maybe because of, our social disenfranchisement we felt entitled to confront authority at whim. I remember a ridiculous power struggle with a particular math teacher. After an argument I walked out of his class and then ran as fast as I could to the office. I tried to report him for delinquent teaching before he could report me for disruptive behaviour. I claimed that his teaching, or lack of it, did not justify our obligation to be in school. Thirty years later, in grad school, I refused to take a compulsory class and wrote a sharp letter detailing the inadequacies of a professor coasting on her tenure. She no longer teaches that class.

A sexual attraction to boys and men wasn’t the only unacknowledged latency in my life before leaving home. I danced all the time and never realized that I was a dancer. I remember two albums belonging to older siblings: the theatrical sound track to Jesus Christ Superstar, and Sly & The Family Stone’s Greatest Hits. I played them so often that I can still recall most songs in detail. I danced to Sly and sang along with JC Superstar and somehow no one noticed. In late high school I danced several days a week, at the bottom of ‘our’ stairs, with the girl I referred to as my dance partner. Marie-Hélène was French, from France, and therefore sophisticated and worldly. We entered numerous dance contests, both jitterbug and disco. We were underage, but I was the only one who couldn’t hide it so we would practice in the parking lot outside of a bar and then enter just before the contest began. Our little gang would try to hide me from bartenders and servers and somehow I never got thrown out. I danced with Marie-Hélène for three years. I barely mentioned it at home, and no one in my family every saw me dance. I lied about going to bars and couldn’t tell my parents about the contests, which we occasionally won. When I left the house I usually had my club clothes in a bag and would change in the car. My parents and I would sometimes argue about being out late. If I lost the argument, I had to crawl out of my bedroom window and meet my friends a block away. My first trip to New York was a disco dance contest prize that we won the year after high school. I saved the prize until I went to college and then went to NY without telling anyone. Dancing was underground activity, both disobedient and unconscious.

My current performance project is called Delinquent. I describe the work as a poetic intervention of juvenile justice, crime and punishment. I’m directing a diverse team of young artists aged 16-24: poets, dancers, circus artists. Some of the cast have been incarcerated and several of them have parents who have been in jail or prison. One of them hangs out and sells drugs a couple blocks from my house. It is likely that he is friends with the guys who called me faggot. We collect stories, make lists, watch West Side Story, and choreograph images with eight-foot high walls. I intend to stage not just their stories, but more importantly their struggle to speak.

I’m charmed to see so many parallels between my life as a kid and my career as a dissident artist. Confronting fear is a strategy in all of my artistic work, whether it’s embodying risk and trust or speaking the kind of truth that makes one sweat and lose breath. I still aim to unmask authority, including my own. I want things to be fair.

ANOTHER QUEER, CRITICAL OF THE EXPENSIVE AND MISGUIDED FIGHT FOR GAY MARRIAGE

By Keith Hennessy
Winter Solstice, 2008


LOVE, BLESSING, COMMUNITY
I’m middle-aged, white, male and gay. I tend towards long-term, mostly monogamous relationships that leave a little room for occasional, unashamed sex with others. My last gay partnership lasted nearly 7 years, involved sharing a bed in a fabulous apartment we renovated together, and we twice lined up to get married during Gavin Newsom’s renegade Valentine’s campaign. I’m also a legal, non-denominational priest who has married several couples, straight and gay. I love weddings and I think that everyone who wants one ought to have one. I don’t think that the state or government or any church should stand in the way of any 2 (or more) people who choose to celebrate a loving commitment. Love and blessing and community need each other.

JUST DO IT
Like many people I am a fan of equal rights for all couples yet think that the battle for gay marriage should be fought in whichever religious institutions one wants to be married in. (1) There is no stopping any couple from inviting their friends and families to their wedding. If you want to get married, get married. Andrew Sullivan writes, “My own marriage exists and is real without the approval of others.” (2) There are many churches, parks, mountaintops, country clubs, backyards, dance studios, temples, dojos, street corners and rented halls where your marriage would be very welcome. If you can get your family, friends and co-workers to come to your wedding, the healing of queer wounds will happen faster than by any court-ordered mandate. If you can’t, then it’s tough to imagine that the pains of being queer and abject will be abated. Either way, the struggle for justice will continue. And for many of us, this struggle is easier when our families recognize and celebrate our loving.

THE FIGHT FOR GAY MARRIAGE
When I think of the fight for gay marriage I think:
• wasted money
• misdirected passion and effort
• a small clique known as the gay leadership
• reactionary assimilation
• a lack of awareness and/or strategy
• oh how much I miss the pre-Clinton days of ACTUP, Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers...

THE MONEY
Proposition 8, funded mostly by Christian and Mormon political conservatives, attempted to outlaw gay marriage by limiting the legal definition of marriage to include only marriage between a man and a woman. The electoral battle was one of the most expensive in US history; in 2008 it was exceeded in spending only by the presidential contest. Imagine if the pro-gay marriage forces had spent $27 of their $37 million supporting queer resource and drop-in centers throughout central California, and opening storefront LGBTQ centers in places where they don’t already exist, and then spent another $10 million investing in a better future through a fund for LGBTQ artists, scholars, and organizers. Or imagine if the $35 million was spent only on securing equal rights for gay and lesbian couples nationwide.

In California the difference between marriage rights and domestic partnership rights are legally insignificant for most couples. Did over $70 million dollars just get spent fighting over a word? It sometimes seems that way. Immigration rights, which are federal, would be denied California gay couples regardless of state laws. This injustice is rarely mentioned in gay marriage campaigns and needs to be addressed at all levels of struggle for equal rights.

MORE ROOM IN CAGES
When Prop 8 won, there were immediate protests throughout California, then throughout the US, with additional protests internationally. Mostly I was embarrassed that no one, especially those motivated to take the streets for social justice, protested the failure of Proposition 5, which would have reduced jail terms and increased treatment options for non-violent drug offenders. Signs referencing Prop 2, which called for increased cage space for farm animals, read, “Chickens 1, Gays 0” and “Chickens have more rights than me.” Yes it’s true that more people voted for chickens to have more room in their cages than for gays and lesbians to have the right to marry. But it’s even more tragic and ironic that more people voted for chickens to have more room in their cages than for PEOPLE to have more room in their cages.

OUT OF TOUCH
California has the biggest prison industrial complex in the world. A growing cancer that eats up more people and resources every year. Think about this: Prop 5 could have made a huge impact on the men and women in jail for non-violent drug offenses by decreasing punative jail time, depopulating the racist prisons, exposing the failures of the war on drugs, re-uniting people with families and communities while increasing their chance of survival and success by increasing their treatment options. Are the supporters of gay marriage who filled the streets after Prop 8’s win out of touch with the political issues facing California prisoners and the communities they come from. Sadly, yes, drastically out of touch. So when too many gay people jumped to blame Black and Latino voters in the wake of Prop 8’s win, that out-of-touch-ness was ignorantly flaunted.


JUST PLAIN SAD
I can’t conclude this better than Bob Ostertag, so here’s the intro to his recent piece:

It's just plain sad what the gay and lesbian movement has come to. November 4 was so extraordinary, so magical. The whole world seemed to come together. Except for gays and lesbians in California. We were supposed to feel crushed over Proposition 8. And now the whole scenario is gearing up to repeat itself on January 20: the whole world will celebrate the inauguration of the first black American president and the end of the George Bush insanity - the whole world except gays and lesbians who will be protesting Rick Warren's presence at the inaugural.

How is it that queers became the odd ones out at such a momentous turning point in history? By pushing an agenda of stupid issues like gay marriage.

"Gay marriage" turns the real issues of equal rights for sexual minorities upside down and paints us into a reactionary little corner of our own making. (3)


NOTES
1.Bob Ostertag, Why Gay Marriage is The Wrong Issue, Dec 21 2008, The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ostertag/why-gay-marriage-is-the-w_b_152717.html
PACS, pacte civile de solidarité, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacte_civil_de_solidarit%C3%A9


2. Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic, The Daily Dish, Nov 5 2008, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/11/stripped-of-the.html


3. Ostertag, ibid 2008.