Contemporary Cruising

by Contemporary Cruising |March 11, 2021 1:01 pm

Open letter to Jerome Bel by Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez

Dear Jerome,

A while ago someone told me a story that went more or less like this:

A group of scientists were tracking the migratory route of a particular bird species. For some time they noticed an anomaly in the pattern: an important part of the flock would stop halfway, on an island, instead of finishing the whole journey. This stop implied a risk for the whole species.

The scientists were unaware of what caused this unusual behavior, until they realized that an oldwoman from the island used to feed the birds, and so they stayed. The group of scientists went to see the woman, explaining to her the situation and after asking her to stop feeding the birds, she agreed.

But during the following migration season, the birds stopped on the island again and the scientists noticed she was still giving them food. When they confronted the old woman, she confessed that her husband had Alzheimer’s, and that the birds’ presence was the only thing that brought him back to the present time, the only time of the year were they could still experience something together.

How do you convince someone that, sometimes, their personal interest cannot be placed above the greater good?

In the beginning was the word

When, more than a year ago, I heard about your campaigning against air travel in the performing arts field, I remembered that story. I felt implicated in the discussion and I found that your impulse to speak up on the issue was praiseworthy.

As time went by

Your ideas kept spinning in my head, and not in a peaceful way at all. There was quite an awkward feeling attached to them. I scribbled some notes in my diary and then forgot about it. During the next few months, every now and then Facebook’s algorithm would show me one of your posts and, with it, the thought of this campaign would come back, until one day a friend of mine asked me for my opinion on the matter, and so I decided to organize my ideas and share them with you.

Lost in translation

And so this text is a reaction to ideas you have shared on social media and in some articles and interviews I was able to find. Most of the time this information came to me in English, but sometimes I read you in Spanish via Google translator from French; so, although I get your main arguments, there could be nuances, details or colors I am missing.

My own private overview

What you propose deserves to be discussed thoroughly, and in order to do that we must consider the complexities it entails. It would seem as though what started as a personal decision—refusing to use air travel for your work—developed into a more general and ambitious call for the performance art field as a whole. Something like “the performance art field needs to drastically change its habits in order to reduce its carbon footprint. We need to stop airplane travel and look for other ways of sharing”.

Trump vs. Thunberg

At first, your proposal seems impeccable. What wretched soul wouldn’t acknowledge that the planet, our home, is at grave risk and that we must act now? What kind of person would oppose saving our planet for their own personal interest? Who wants to be that Donald Trump who stands against Greta Thunberg?

Asymmetry

No measure is ever applied in a vacuum. Measures are carried out by specific people within specific contexts. When you ask the performing arts field to proceed in a new way, it is clear that it would affect different people in different ways, and these effects should unfold asymmetrically.

You are one of the strongest voices in today’s international scene and you belong to the most privileged 1% of our art world. You also come from a country that allocates one of the greatest budgets for art production in the world.

Inverted Occupy Wall Street

I read in one of your interviews that you decided to stop travelling but had your assistants move from Lima to Hong Kong. At some point, you felt that this strategy was hypocritical and so you decided not to use air travel for your work at all. I think you made this decision out of consistency and I believe it came from a legitimate concern. Although I share this concern, I can’t help but wonder: how can a vast majority (of people, collectives and associations), with diverse working conditions, endorse this transformative proposal?

Important note

I don’t mean to reduce your proposal and arguments to your nationality or your position in the field. However, I think it is important to situate them and to point out that no proposition can be detached from its place of enunciation.

I would like to ask the same of you when you read this letter: that you keep in mind where is it written from, without limiting it to its origin.

Are we all equally responsible?

One of the issues we face in the climate crisis struggle is that we all are in the same boat, but we travel in different seats.

About his journey to America, Mayakovski once said that those in first-class throw up wherever they want, those in second-class throw up on those in third, and the later throw up on themselves.

Unaware

Just as I am familiar with your artistic career, I am unaware of your personal history in regard to activism. I have asked around and nobody knows much (please correct me if I’m wrong). Because of my context and because of the path I have walked, I am familiar with the overwhelming excitement that comes from finding a cause bigger than oneself, and how one ends up looking at the world through this lens alone. It is also important to remember that many other equally legitimate causes coexist with ours.

A view from the bridge

Since you are trying to modify a model that involves so many people, I think it is important to share with you the way I see things from here, from the other side of the bridge.

Our case

Cultural investment in Mexico is greater than the Latin American median, although it will always be minor compared to other countries; and people are rarely able to make a living out of theatre exclusively. I am not interested in presenting myself as a victim; we (Lagartijas tiradas al sol) belong to a privileged sector of the Mexican performing arts field. Throughout the past eighteen years of our group’s existence, we have built a relationship with rich countries that has allowed us to maintain an autonomous artistic project.

Currency 1 = 24.9

People chose to migrate and earn in euros because the exchange rate between the euro and other currencies is advantageous. Similarly, artists and companies are able to finance projects at home given these exchange rates, as many Latin American companies live of performing in countries with a stronger currency.

Form is content

When I read that you are rehearsing a piece in Taiwan with a dancer from your studio, I find it fascinating. But this project took place (I suppose) because someone commissioned it and paid you for it. For many companies it does not work this way. One usually produces their work however they can, brings it to the world and then waits for someone to be interested in programing it. Working on commission happens in a very reduced part of the world. I wonder: out of the more than 193 existing countries, how many have institutions that commission performing arts projects?

Planes and trains

Europe is a small continent with a significant railroad network. It is not necessary to explain this to you, because you know it rather well, but it is not the case in the rest of the world. There is not a single country in Latin America with a strong railroad system, and the distances are so long that even inside a country it can take several days to travel from one city to another, while travelling to another country could take weeks. Your proposal sounds good for and from Europe, but if we apply your standard to everybody else, it would condemn us to only work locally.

The pedagogy of theatre

Performing arts have the added pedagogical difficulty that they can only be experienced live. When a film student hears their professor stating something in class, they can always go and compare those thoughts with an Ackerman, a Kiarostami, or anyone else’s film, for that matter. This isn’t the case for performing arts. Students have to “believe” what professors affirm, in lack of factual verification. When one lives far from the art capitals, it’s harder to stop believing.

Festivals and artists

It is clear that performing arts festivals have a huge impact on artists who grow up being spectators. The proposal to cut flights implies leaving thousands of artists without the possibility of watching different kinds of work. Theatre festivals in Latin America are utterly important as an entry point to other ways of thinking performance.

Won’t someone please think of the audience!

Who benefits from a foreign company’s performance?

If, as we say, performing arts have a value for those who experience them, the discussion cannot leave the audience out, nor the effect these modifications you propose would have on them. I strongly believe that performing arts do have value for those who experience them, that they do make our lives better, that they endow us with will to live.

We need to talk about Kevin

It would seem as if, when we talk about climate crisis, all of the other spheres of life should give in, and that, at least in this case, the ends justify the means. But it shouldn´t be like that, not always like that. Far from the legitimate (and urgent) concern to produce a performing arts field as clean as possible, it wouldn’t hurt to ponder whether we would want to cherish anything else.

Frie Leysen

In a Facebook post where you say goodbye to Frie, you thank her for her worthy legacy and for driving a system that, you conclude, is not sustainable anymore and needs to change.

No doubt she pushed for and created various international festivals (implying tons of flights) for the sake of supporting artists from different latitudes and making them part of an international performing arts circuit. Mobility was the consequence of that will to integrate other voices, not its cause. So we should be more careful when we talk about a model and what parts of it should be redesigned.

Do European festivals belong to Europeans?

Yes and no.

It would seem…

Without a larger program, your proposal would mean yet a greater concentration of resources and cultural capital in the richest cities of the world. It would mean that many of the decentralization and diversification efforts undertaken for many years now, would be threatened. It would mean that Europe would become, even more so, an island of harder and harder access, one that can barely listen to what happens away from its shores.

Please don’t get me wrong

I’m not trying to say that the current model must prevail, that we should preserve it without change. Not at all. I’m convinced, as far as you are, that we need to make multiple changes in the way performing arts are produced and shown. But there are many different kinds of changes, and if the one you propose attempts to establish an ethical standard, it should take into account the multiple realities we live in, and the degrees of attainability of the model for those realities.

Be realistic: demand the impossible

Causing an impression with a “radical” statement is a valid strategy, but a strong statement shouldn’t make us forget the material nature of the change we are proposing.

Symbols matter

I think it would be a mistake to overlook the symbolic character of the action you propose: if the performing arts world stopped flying, the problem would remain. In other words, in the face of this given problem, yours is a very valuable political statement but it is not an action plan to solve it.

No confusion

I am not saying that because the problem cannot be fixed from within our field we should do nothing. Nor am I minimizing the problem or the importance of the proposal; I am simply trying to put its possible scopes and consequences into perspective.

Beware the dog

And the ever-haunting threat of believing that change happens within oneself and that the important thing is to do our own little bit.

Contrary to the old woman who fed the birds, in whose case the problem would have been solved when she stopped putting her own interest ahead of everyone else’s; nothing is as simple in what you propose.

What things are and their consequences

Things are not only what they are; they are also the consequences they bring with them. Often enough, measures hide unthought-of consequences behind a virtuous façade. Red meat consumption is an important ecological problem. In the last years many people in Europe have stopped eating meat as a consequence of an ethical decision related to the environment. This has exponentially raised the demand for other products, quinoa, for example. The unrestrained exploitation of quinoa (mainly grown in Bolivia and Peru) for European consumption has brought profound consequences to the land and the communities that produce it. Some of them good and some of them bad, but what looks like something from one perspective, looks like something very different from another.

A little obvious

What I am telling you is a bit obvious and you know it. I am just trying to restate the importance of considering the correlation of forces in every conflict when proposing an action. Because when we don’t, those who pay the costs will always be the others. “Stop travelling by plane”, at the end, is like saying that everyone should stay where they are and, as it happens, you stay next to the water well.

Forgive my honesty

To be honest, I find it a bit cheap that those who ate more meat, who lived from feast to feast, whom we saw licking their fingers for years, now come and tell us that we should all stop eating meat… equally.

As my friend Juan sums it up

At the end of the day, solving an ecological problem without considering social inequality is just another way to reinforce the colonial structure.

Pandemic

The current pandemic has already faced us with a situation where flights were momentarily restricted. At the same time, the world’s inequalities have been reinforced. The crisis has shown us in a brutal way that not all lives seem to be worth the same.

What we know today is that 16% of the world’s population has hoarded 60% of the vaccines, and it is the same with everything else.

To sum up

By trying to solve one problem, we may end up adding to another as collateral damage, deepening the asymmetry gap in resource distribution and cultural access. These problems are not equivalent, but while your influence in one field is symbolic, it is quite real in the other.

Closing time

Your blunt proposal has brought the issue to the table in a way that I find very positive. Perhaps I am wrong and my geographical and artistic position prevent me from noticing certain things. Perhaps my needs drive me to consider the situation in relative terms and I shouldn’t. Perhaps, sometimes, one should act before thinking. Perhaps I can’t see the whole picture. Perhaps there is a price to pay and someone has to pay it. Perhaps you are right and festivals should only invite artists who do not fly. Perhaps, inadvertedly, I am the old woman who feeds the birds… perhaps.

But perhaps not.

Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez

(Co director Lagartijas tiradas al sol)English Version: Juan Francisco Maldonado

by Contemporary Cruising |June 28, 2020 1:01 am

RECOGNIZING SYSTEMIC RACISM IN DANCE
By Alicia Mullikin
As a first generation Mexican American woman of color in the dance world I have experienced microaggressions that have caused significant barriers to my progress as a dance artist and damaged my emotional health as a person of color—and yet, what I have endured is only a drop in the bucket. Through conversations and collaboration with other dancers of color and colleagues, we named some of our personal experiences in the dance world that reinforced systemic racism. Though this is not an exhaustive list, it sheds light on some problematic power structures that contribute to continued inequity in dance. Here are a few ways you may have participated in systemic racism in dance.

FOR EDUCATORS AND DIRECTORS:

Saying “ballet is the foundation of all dance.”
Saying ballet is the most important/difficult technique.
Refusing to cast someone in a role because of their race. (“Clara can’t be Filipino”…why?)
Refusing to acknowledge or teach that Balanchine was a privileged white man who profited from the appropriation of Africanist Aesthetics (jazz), the use of Black bodies for shock value, and the reduction of race to aesthetics by exoticising Black bodies. (Do your research and stop worshipping him.)
Putting up with, supporting, and participating in the racist B.S. in the Nutcracker (seriously, stop).
Saying someone doesn’t have a “ballet body” because their body doesn’t fit your image of the thin ballerina with no butt and no chest.
Not casting POC because most of your dancers are White, and you don’t want the image to be broken by Black/Brown bodies, claiming “symmetry” is more important.
Requiring Black & Brown girls to wear pink tights and pink ballet shoes.
Making Black girls “tame” their hair for ballet class and making statements like, “Well, I just don’t know what to do with your hair,” to Black dancers.
Making Black and Brown dancers dye their pointe shoes and accessories. (Production of pointe shoes in a variety of skin tones didn’t start until 2018 and colors other than pink/peach are STILL not easily accessible.)
Allowing cis White males to dominate the choreography world and leadership roles.
Talking about how far we’ve come but not recognizing how long it’s taken. (It took ABT 75 years to appoint their first Black female principal, Misty Copeland, in 2015. NYCB cast its first Black Marie, Charlotte Nebres, in 2019, after half a century of Nutcrackers. PNB just changed some of the choreography from the Chinese Tea variation to be less stereotypical.)
Teaching about the history of Ballet without its cultural context as a European ethnic/folk dance.
Saying/thinking that someone lacks “technique” because they don’t point their feet or straighten their legs.
Referring to ballet and modern as “technique” in a way that implies every other genre of dance does not require formal training, skill, or technique.
Rejecting a student from your program because they lack ballet training.
Making ballet and modern dance requirements for a dance degree but making hip hop, jazz, and other genres electives.
Offering multiple levels for ballet/modern and NOT offering advanced level courses in styles derivative of Black communities: jazz, hip hop/urban, etc…
Only hiring/featuring white-passing and/or light-skinned people of color in efforts to “diversify.”
Hiring token Black folks to teach ballet and modern. (That’s still putting significance on Euro-centric styles.)
Having White full-time faculty and adjunct POC teachers.
Refusing to hire a hip hop teacher at a university because they do not have a masters in dance when hip hop is not offered broadly at a collegiate level and certainly not at a masters level. This is a system set up to keep Black/Brown folks and their dance forms out of colleges and to continue to invalidate their contributions to the dance world. (Dance Departments need to demand change.)
Valuing lines over rhythm, poise over grit, or abstraction over substance.
Using the one Black or Brown person on your poster or recruitment literature.
Having classes called “Contemporary Issues in Dance,” “Dance History,” “Ballet History,” “Dance Appreciation,” or anything similar and never speaking DIRECTLY about race.
Not understanding that equity means giving POC dancers added support, not just allowing them to grace your school/company. (Equality is NOT sufficient to combat systemic racism.)
Teaching hip hop classes without knowing where the steps came from.
Calling all street styles “hip hop.”
Not teaching about the history of jazz and tap dance coming from Black communities.
Teaching that Bob Fosse is the father of jazz.
Making an assumption that the Black/Brown person walking into your dance studio is there to take hip hop.
Not teaching about the contributions of Black dancers/choreographers in ballet/modern. (There are more than just Alvin Ailey.)
Not teaching about the racist history and appropriation of African, Indigenous, and Asian cultures by white dancers/choreographers.
Not recognizing the intersections of race and class, or the implications of Black and Brown families having barriers to generating wealth, and then…
- Assuming all dancers have had the ability/funds to take intensives.
- Assuming all dancers have had the ability/funds to take formal classes.
- Assuming dancers who are not taking intensives or formal classes are not serious about dance.
- Assuming all dancers have access to transportation.
- Assuming all dancers can afford to buy the required uniform and costumes.
- Assuming that all dancers’ families speak English.
- Assuming all dancers’ families can afford to buy a ticket to watch the performance/show.
- Assuming the dancers’ families are used to watching concert dance.
- Assuming all dancers’ families are supportive in their decision to pursue a dance career.
Giving scholarships for talent, instead of potential (a practice that does not take into account access/barriers to formal classes).
Giving scholarships to students who have had the ability to take classes/intensives, rather than the student who studied dance at home/public school/community centers, (setting one up for success and the other up for a life of student loans, repeating the cycle of systemic poverty/racism).
Charging an astronomical amount for college, not offering scholarships to POC, and then being surprised when they drop out.
Giving feedback/tips/suggestions to POC folks without asking if it is wanted/necessary. (This includes your students.)
Assuming that POC choreographers are making the work for everyone.
Assuming that, because you don’t understand the work of a POC choreographer, it doesn’t have value.
Being upset when the lyrics to a song or poetry is in another language and offers no translation. (White folks have the privilege of having their message. understood/heard/listened to because it is the dominant culture/language. It isn’t our job to make sure you get it; if you care enough, you’ll do the work.)
Assuming that your POC friends/colleagues are not receiving grants because they need help with grant writing. (Nope. We write fine thanks. It’s just systemic-racism preventing us from getting grants.)
Asking Black and Brown dancers to “be a little more urban/street” (and more broadly, wanting POC dancers to fit within stereotypes).
Teaching all dance classes where the teacher is the authority and students are simply supposed to imitate, not considering how various dance forms were originally taught. (This assumes that all dance can be taught separate from culture.)

FOR ORGANIZATIONS & GRANTORS:

Funding/Granting/Producing/Promoting the same White folks over and over and over again.
Funding/Granting/Producing/Promoting folks that engage in cultural appropriation.
Funding/Granting/Producing/Promoting people just because they are Black/Brown without understanding their message/intent/purpose as an artist.
Funding/Granting/Producing/Promoting Black folks but not Black Trans folks.
Rejecting a grant application because you “didn’t get it” or “it’s not relatable.” (Sounds like you need to educate yourself.)
Paying White choreographers more than POC choreographers.
Using the excuse that you didn’t hire/fund/cast any Black or Brown folks because “there weren’t any.” (Sounds like you didn’t look hard enough, recruit in the right places, or build trust in those communities.)
Expecting Black/Brown folks to work/perform for free.
Only promoting your work as a company/organization in affluent communities or White communities.
Having an all/mostly White company or organization and then trying to make or create work on social issues. (Your lack of intersectionality isn’t cutting it.)
Having an all/mostly White board of directors.
Having staff/company members of color but providing no real opportunities for career advancement.
Institutional retaliation against staff/company members of color for speaking out on equity issues.
Having a high turnover rate in staff/company members of color.
Only offering training sessions on unconscious bias when called out and with no ongoing action items for changing organizational practices.
Having a budget that only allocates for one/select token “diverse” show/production, with no strategic plan to rework practices to diversify the repertoire/company regularly.
Allowing White folks to indulge in abstraction and meaninglessness within choreography, while holding POC to impossible standards of depth/intent (thereby allowing a space for White artists to experiment, while stifling POC artists).
Only recognizing and valuing POC that are “successful,” while allowing “up and coming” White choreographers to take up space.
Being loud and proud about the work you are doing for POC communities but not having hard conversations behind closed doors.
Not allowing more than one Black/Asian/Latinx choreographer in the festival line-up because their work has similar themes, while allowing 5+ White folks to noodle around saying nothing for 45 minutes.
A lack of understanding of the complexities of Black and Brown bodies in performance:
- Black and Brown dancers are almost automatically seen as political especially in modern dance spaces (so, if we create/say something political, our work is put into a box).
- Black and Brown folks are held to a different standard when it comes to post-modern and non-performative movement work in arts spaces that are run by white people.
- If we don’t say anything at all and try to create “abstract” work or noodle around, we are seen as less “progressive” than our white counterparts.
- Abstraction is unfortunately not a concept Black and Brown artmakers can freely access in most spaces and often have to choose between making the art they want or being respected/accepted as an artist.
- An overarching assumption from art institutions is that Black and Brown artists are automatically interested in creating work relating to our race/gender/class/other social issues.
- AND we are very often the only POC in a lineup, so whether we want to or not, we automatically become the representation for POC in those spaces, limiting what we are allowed to do and how we do it.

As White and non-black POC in the dance community, complacency with systemic racism prevents us from seeing all the ways we benefit and participate in it. We recognize that looking at this list can feel debilitating as an artist, director, or educator. Fully realizing an equitable dance community will not happen overnight. You WILL make mistakes and you WILL fall short because these structures run deep and are ingrained in the very fibers of our country, communities, and studios, BUT it is work that we must do dutifully. Hopefully shedding light on these things will help us put one foot in front of the other on the necessary walk to a more equitable dance community. The next generation of dance artists deserve better than the racist structures we had to put up with.

Linked are a few resources we found helpful for dance artists committed to Anti-Racism.

Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World: Culturally Relevant Teaching by Nyama McCarthy-Brown
https://bookshop.org/books/dance-pedagogy-for-a-diverse-world-culturally-relevant-teaching-in-theory-research-and-practice/9780786497027
Digging: the Africanist Presence in American Performance by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
https://bookshop.org/books/digging-the-africanist-presence-in-american-performance-dance-and-other-contexts/9780275963736
The Palgrave Handbook of Race and Arts in Education by (eds.) Amelia M. Kraehe, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, B. Stephen Carpenter II
https://bookshop.org/books/the-palgrave-handbook-of-race-and-the-arts-in-education/9783319652559
- “Tendus and tenancy: Black dancers and the White landscape of Dance Education” by C.U. Davis & J. Phillips-Fein
- “Counterstorying in Concert Dance History Pedagogy: Challenging the White dancing body” by Julie Kerr-Berry
“Beyond Hierarchy” by Takiyah Nur Amin https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119634
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics by (eds.) R.J. Kowall, G. Siegmund, & R. Martin.
https://bookshop.org/books/oxford-handbook-of-dance-and-politics/9780190052966
- “Queer social dance, political leadership, and Black popular culture” by Thomas F. DeFrantz
- “Racing in place: A meta-memoir on dance politics and practice” by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
“Decolonizing Dance Pedagogy: Application of Pedagogies of Ugandan Traditional Dances in Formal Dance Education” by Alfdaniels Mabingo https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2015.1023953
HuffPost: “How Ballerinas of Color are Changing the Palette of Dance” by Rohina Katoch Sehra
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ballet-dancers-of-color_l_5e14b343c5b66361cb5b6b5f?ncid=APPLENEWS00001&fbclid=IwAR3aGb6rkHHfDZa0gXMheYMBp6AkNNH-v2YML5C5otw30BphPRtotM2T0W8
Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology by M.M. Zamudio, C. Russell, F.A. Rios, & J.L. Bridgeman
https://bookshop.org/books/oxford-handbook-of-dance-and-politics/9780190052966
- Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a helpful framework to better understand some of the impacts of racism in everything. This book specifically looks at education, and provides an overview of CRT and then examples of how education can be understood through a CRT lens.
“Unpacking the Invisible White Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh – a good intro to White privilege
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf
Dance Magazine: “Are College Dance Curriculums Too White?” by J. Buoy
https://www.dancemagazine.com/are-college-curriculums-too-white-2645575057.html

Contribution Acknowledgement:
Albee Abigania (Lynnwood/Everett/North Seattle), DJ Baluyot (San Jose), Cheryl Delostrinos (Los Angeles/Seattle), Imana Gunawan (Seattle), Sue Ann Huang (Seattle), El Nyberg (Seattle), Noelle Price (Detroit/Seattle), Coral Taylor (Los Angeles)
Visual Artist:
Nalisha Rangel (Seattle)

by Contemporary Cruising |October 10, 2019 1:58 pm

INTERVIEW By Harry Burke
JIMMY ROBERT ON THE BODY, SPACE, AND POWER

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken,” wrote Marguerite Duras in her 1990 short novel, Summer Rain. The notion of the body as a vehicle of language permeates the inquisitive practice of Jimmy Robert. Born in Guadeloupe, and based in Berlin, Robert — who works in performance, photography, installation, and film — uses the body to ask questions about how spaces are constructed, and what it means to see and be seen. His artworks are often formed through processes of translation and transition, as he constructs meaning out of the differences that exist between various sites, texts, and media. A rigorous attention to collaboration runs throughout his oeuvre, and extends even to his relationship with his artistic godmothers: Duras, Yvonne Rainer, and other feminist figures who have brought visibility to issues of desire and movement while problematizing how power operates within the visual sphere. Earlier this year, Robert staged a performance titled Joie noire at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and is currently participating in the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial (until January 2020). To encounter Robert’s work is to understand that art can be judged as much for what it does as for what it is: viewership is a provocative and participatory process. Can you describe your work for the current Chicago Architecture Biennial?The title of the installation and performance, Descendances du nu, is a play on the French words for descending and legacy — its starting point is Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. I first performed the piece in a former synagogue in France. I was thinking about what it means to bring a body like mine into an art space with strong religious connotations while reflecting on Duchamp as a patriarchal figure — Sherrie Levine, Elaine Sturtevant, and Louise Lawler have all appropriated his work — and trying to locate myself between matriarchal and patriarchal figures. I wore a headpiece that looks like a staircase — I was like an architectural anomaly, or symbiosis. In Chicago, other performers are performing the piece on a staircase in a big cultural center from the late-19th century. It’s a neo-baroque extravaganza accompanied by a sound piece by Ain Bailey, and a text by Élisabeth Lebovici who writes about cabaret, Josephine Baker, camp, and the notion of the pedestal.

What’s your relationship to feminism?My works owe a lot to how feminist art has paved the way for questions of performance, the body, touch, the crossover of genres, and the ability to transport between different forms.Your body is often present in your artworks. I am reclaiming how I want this Black gay male body to be seen and represented. I feel that I have to do this myself, otherwise there’s a risk of misrepresentation. But, like in Chicago, I’m ready to open it up: to delegate, have other people perform. It’s taken time to understand what’s at the core of the work, in order to let this happen. To get to the point of not necessarily owning it, and knowing what the real questions are.So what are they?I work with various translations between object and image, image and text, text and performance. I materialize these transitions, and ask how they manifest themselves and make sense. I’m interested in site specificity, and what it means to bring one’s body into specific spaces. I also want to address art-historical questions, and those of what the audience is doing, and what they are looking at. They have to do some work in how they position themselves. I want people to feel like they have a role in interpreting and reading the work. Not everything is laid out for them. There needs to be an investigation.

In 2017, you presented Imitation of Lives (2017) at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. The piece responds to the building’s iconic architecture. It evolved in dialogue with Lucy McKenzie’s painting Loos / De Bruycker marble, as well as David Hammons’ In the Hood, texts by Jayne Cortez, Marguerite Duras, Audre Lorde, and Lorenzo Thomas, and other references. Intertextuality is very important to you. Why?It’s a way of opening things up, of layering, and of showing that things are complex and can’t be reduced. Whether it’s language, literature, or painting, these are different forms of collaboration. Collaboration is vital within your work.It stems from a desire to learn from others: what their work is, what their work is about. I once worked with (artist and choreographer) Maria Hassabi and found a shared interest in the body becoming an object. Collaboration is expansive and nourishing. It’s a bit like appropriation, which is about absorbing different practices and concerns.Perhaps collaboration is consensual appropriation?Ha! There needs to be a deeper sense of responsibility about how things are appropriated and borrowed. In appropriation, there’s an archaeology of knowledge, of how you construct yourself and your practice. My relationship to Marguerite Duras has been obsessive: watching and reading everything, knowing I needed to process ideas about masculinity, femininity, colonialism, and desire. Appropriating is a way of devouring. It is a cannibalistic approach to art: devour it to emit it back, transform yourself, and grow.

You recently presented Joie noire at KW, Berlin, within the context of a program dedicated to the late artist and performer Ian White. What was your relationship to Ian?We met when he showed some of my films at LUX in London. Once, we saw a Michael Clark piece at the Barbican, and thought, “Ah, we could do that!” So we found a way to do something together by learning Trio A by Yvonne Rainer. It’s meant to be a democratic dance that anyone can learn. We weren’t dancers, and we thought, “Can we really do this?”, but we figured it out, and performed it at Tate Britain and MoMA. Ian’s particular interest was in how to change the dynamic of the auditorium, and how people interact with films. Through him, I became interested in challenging relationships to institutions, art, and its interpretation. What did Joie noire consist of?We traveled through different spaces in the building, questioning time, and how long the audience would watch and listen. Choreographing the action of looking — that’s what I’m interested in. In the work, there was a recording of Ian talking about embalming, which he gave me before he passed away. It’s a meditation on death, and the nightclub. We went dancing a lot, and thought about art at cruising bars: these places are not about reflection, but that’s how we used them. There were seemingly disparate elements, but historically connected, through AIDS and activism in the 1990s. It was important that the work be staged in Berlin, the last city of decadence.Why performance?I’ve always found representation to be failing. I’m interested in analyzing what questions come from this failure. I started with photography, which produces a distance. I wanted to challenge this distance. The body became a transition between the moving image and the still image. Performance feels political because the body, a site of interference and resistance, is there. You have to face it.

by Contemporary Cruising |October 2, 2019 11:35 am

What Makes Performance the Required Medium of the Day?
Karen Archey on Ligia Lewis and Alex Baczynski-Jenkins

What is it about performance that makes it the required medium for any new art initiative today? Historically, performance has been unwieldy for institutions to exhibit and collect. It is incredibly resource-intensive, requiring time and space for rehearsal, audio-visual equipment hire and, most importantly, fair wages for performers. Staging a performance is notoriously expensive in comparison to, say, most painting shows, which don’t typically require continuous upkeep and financing once mounted. More challenging to stage, and thus less-frequently seen, the medium is one that museums and their publics have been slow to warm to.

Yet, recent years have seen institutions and art events making strides in giving performance pride of place, integrating time-based works within exhibition programmes, permanent collection displays and biennials. The last two Golden Lions at the Venice Biennale have gone to works of performance art: for Anne Imhof’s disinterested tableau vivant, Faust (2017), at the German Pavilion and, this year, to the Lithuanian Pavilion’s opera on climate change, Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019), by the collective Neon Realism (Rugile Barzdžiukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte). In April this year, the multimedia event and exhibition space The Shed opened in New York to equal amounts of fanfare and confusion surrounding the sheer spectacle of the art complex, with performance taking centre stage in a shiny new kinetic Hudson Yards building surrounded by skyscrapers of luxury condominiums.

This month marks the reopening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art after its absorption of the former American Folk Art Museum. The expanded MoMA is relaunching with The Studio, a space integrating time-based artworks within the permanent collection display. (However positive the project may be, the museum’s claim that ‘The Studio is the world’s first dedicated space for performance, process and time-based art to be centrally integrated within the galleries of a major international museum’ seems dubious, given the opening of Tate Modern’s Tanks in 2012.) Today, museums subsume entire buildings and real estate used for art springs out of the earth in Manhattan’s last underdeveloped parcel of land. Performance is a spark of life to these otherwise languid structures. It offers an immediacy and sheen of authenticity that counteracts the neo-liberal, tax break-funded initiatives in which the works are performed – pitting a sense of haptic touch against tempered glass and stainless steel.

Perhaps it’s precisely the soft science of working with and viewing other people that makes performance a refreshing counterpoint to an art industry that is increasingly commercialized and corporatized. Regardless of athleticism or ability, in dance traditionally made for the stage there’s a satisfaction – and, perhaps, seduction – in viewing the technique-driven, trained body of a performer. You could argue that the same holds true in contemporary performance. Artist Alicia Frankovich, for example, works almost exclusively with queer, crip or pregnant performers, and her improvised choreographic works come off as a celebration of community on stage.

Like Frankovich, there are countless artists, performers and choreographers whose practices are being developed as an embodiment of their politics, relation to others and communal engagement. Given that performance utilizes the material of others’ bodies, the primary substance of the medium is relation, and consciousness of such relationality is a defining hallmark. While issues surrounding responsibility and consent are not without their hiccups, arguably they are at least a forerunning concern for practitioners of the medium. As such, many of the artists working in performance today take social responsibility as their core material, combining the representation of a constituency in their work with the care in the material world necessary to help their communities flourish. This is evident in the work of Ligia Lewis, who investigates the limits of empathy in popular and relational representations of black people, and Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, whose choreographic work celebrates the public display of queer desire.

Born in the Dominican Republic, raised in Florida and living for most of her adult life in Europe, Lewis works as a choreographer, director, dancer and performer. After training in dance at Virginia Commonwealth University, Lewis began performing in other artists’ works before embarking on her own career as a choreographer. Living for many years in Berlin, a city known for its support of theatre, Lewis attended countless stage plays and performances, particularly at the Volksbühne. Spending so much time around the stage prompted Lewis to use the theatrical black box as material and site for her works. Her recently completed trilogy began with a reflection on race and representation within theatre. The first work, Sorrow Swag (2014), is a choreography for one white male, themed around the colour blue, and approaches issues of embodiment, gender and grief. The second, themed red and titled minor matter (2016), is a choreography for three dancers – often performed by two black men as well as Lewis herself. This energetic piece pulls from both vernacular dance, such as black American high-school step routines, and well-known works from the history of modern dance, including Maurice Béjart’s renowned 1960 piece Boléro. The work’s opening scene, in which a ballerina seductively stretches out her spot-lit arms in parallel above her head, takes on a different meaning when enacted by a black man.

Lewis’s latest work, Water Will (in Melody) (2018), concludes her trilogy and is themed in white. Choreographed for a cast of four women, Water Will takes as its subject willfulness and its uneven application to us depending on social markers such as gender, class and race. Inspired by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects (2014) and the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale ‘The Willful Child’ (1815), the work breaks with the expectation that, because its creator is a woman of colour, it must bear biting, direct social commentary. Water Will explores the concept of interiority through metaphors relating to femininity: the set is cavernous, dark, affective and wet – in the last scenes, the stage actually rains, as if crying. While Lewis is keenly attuned to the continued racialized persecution faced by people of colour, she has focused her practice on creating other possibilities for viewing and sensing the world in order to reflect on relation and empathy. Although Lewis is working on a range of visual arts commissions, she is also planning a new stage-based work for 2021.

Alex Baczynski-Jenkins is a choreographer who explores queer desire. Based in London and Warsaw, and of English-Polish heritage, Baczynski-Jenkins comes from a less traditional dance education than Lewis, with a focus on somatics (a field of movement studies that emphasizes the dancer’s internal experience). However, similarly to Lewis’s, his work is focused upon caring for a community, both representationally and materially. In a 2019 interview with Eliel Jones in Mousse Magazine, he states of his collaborators and performers: ‘Who you want to work with is who you want to share your life with.’

In 2015, as Poland’s right-wing government ascended to power, Baczynski-Jenkins co-founded, with Marta Ziółek, the queer and feminist space KEM in Warsaw. Located in a former factory, KEM initially functioned as a rehearsal and studio space to support other choreographers’ work. When the building was demolished to make way for new real estate, KEM took up residence in other institutions such as MoMA Warsaw (itself housed in temporary quarters) and Zachęta. Most recently, for KEM’s residency at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Baczynski-Jenkins and his collaborators Krzysztof Baginski, Ola Knychalska and Ania Miczko threw a series of parties called Dragana Bar that functioned as an underground safe space in a city where homophobic sentiments are increasingly common and condoned by a far-right government.

Like KEM, Baczynski-Jenkins’s own choreographic work is created through structures of communal care and interdependence. His most recent work, Untitled (Holding Horizon) (2018), was developed as part of the Frieze Artist Award and performed at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Inspired by KEM’s Dragana Bar, this durational work is staged in a dark room and based on the box step, performed tirelessly by a large group of queer dancers.

Other works choreograph everyday queer life. Us Swerve (2014) is an orchestrated choreography of men on rollerblades, encircling each other like pendulums, with desire as the gravitational force. The two-hour work was inspired by the artist’s residency at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, where he watched men cruising on rollerblades at the waterfront. Baczynski-Jenkins’s choreography takes the normally private experience of yearning and celebrates its queering as a public act; his performers embody the jubilance, apprehension and vulnerability that comes with this transformation of private to public. One of the most enduring myths pervading our industry, from both within and without, is that art and its practitioners are disconnected from the material realities of labour. This toxic misconception serves to disconnect ethics from our practices, despite the art industry feeling the material consequences of real estate run amuck, the economic effects of forcibly flexibilized working structures and the socio-political effects of government-condoned racism and homophobia. That practitioners such as Lewis and Baczynski-Jenkins place representation and social responsibility so centrally in their art is an essential and invigorating rejoinder.

KAREN ARCHEY
Karen Archey is an independent curator and art critic based in Berlin.

by Contemporary Cruising |August 25, 2019 8:50 pm

Excerpt from a conversation between Tarren Johnson and Wojciech Kosma at The Performance
Agency Studio, Berlin, July 8, 2019
[…]
W: The only thing I thought about when driving here, was how wonderful it would be if the Settlers Lounge didn’t have any context. I could see it in a theater, a musical venue or in the street. So-mehow it felt like the content was preceding the context, because it didn’t rely too heavily on where it was happening.

T: The original structure of the Settlers Lounge was going to be a box of two way mirrors instead of the final steel framed structure. The atmosphere was shaped by the original design. Even though you could see through the partitions of the space, there was an indication of separation. For me it was really important to find the core and now I will build on it as the performance series continues and moves to different spaces. I really enjoy working in store fronts. I think there is an interesting engagement with the people that are walking by and watching us rehearse over a period of time. And a lot of people ended up coming by for the show with the speaker outside as an invitation.

by Contemporary Cruising |May 5, 2019 5:20 am

BY Elizabeth Fullerton with/about Anne Imhof, 2019

Anne Imhof presents seductive, melancholy performance populated by beautiful, androgynous, sullen youths. Over six nights in March, the German artist staged Sex, her latest epic composition, in the Tanks at Tate Modern, cylinders that stored oil when the building was a power station and that were converted into performance galleries in 2012. Sex shared some similarities with Imhof’s powerful, angst-ridden Faust, which earned her the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Like that work, Sex featured dancers, musicians, and models in club gear singing, headbanging, and wrestling across different spaces over four hours. But Sex, shaped by Tate Modern’s three subterranean spaces and incorporating Imhof’s paintings and sculptures, was more elaborate and ambitious in scale than Faust. The South and East tanks were each dominated by a pierlike structure, one for audience members to stand on and the other accessible only to performers. The adjacent Transformer Galleries were lined with Imhof’s large-scale yellow and black paintings (“Gradients”), graffito works (“Scratches”), and silkscreen prints portraying her partner and collaborator Eliza Douglas with her mouth open in a silent scream. In this third area, which evoked the intimacy of the bedroom, performers sprawled on high plinths or crouched on shabby mattresses surrounded by smashed iPhones, beer cans, bongs, sex toys, and S/M gear. A mesmerized audience trailed the performers as Imhof coordinated her team’s movements by text message.

Imhof, who graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2012, enjoys the polyvalence of single-word titles. Sex can refer to gender and intercourse, and evokes a range of associated behaviors such as tenderness, aggression, and cruelty. These semantic possibilities were amplified by the variety of genres represented in the soundtrack for the performance: against a musical backdrop combining metal, industrial, and grunge with baroque and classical, recurrent waltz and tango motifs collided with slam dance and pogo. Professional dancers electrified the spaces with balletic lunging, while other performers lounged about vaping. As the performance approached its feverish finale, the mood intensified. Imhof’s expressionless cast burnt bunches of dead roses, poured beer down a glass partition and over the floor, slammed into viewers, and slapped padded columns that were part of the set. The rock-chic aesthetic of Imhof’s work has spawned accusations of cryptofascism, and her lithe, athletic performers undeniably exude a certain elitism. However, a more optimistic reading might see evidence of a tolerant nonconformism in the mix of her performers’ ethnicities and gender identities, and in their resolute lugubriousness a refusal to sugarcoat reality. The overriding gothic gloom can feel adolescent yet somehow terribly pertinent to the current divided social and political climate. At a time when the supposed grown-ups in governments worldwide are fomenting turmoil and bigotry, Imhof’s fluid and effortlessly cool world offers an alternative idyll.

Sex is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from May 30 to July 7 and travels to the Castello di Rivoli in Turin in 2020. I met with Imhof between rehearsals for a discussion of the production and her process.

ELIZABETH FULLERTON How did the Tanks’ industrial ambience and scale chime with your vision for Sex?

ANNE IMHOF I was interested in having multiple layers. The Tanks allowed me to make three overlapping pieces in one. I wanted them to bleed into each other, blurring all the time, so I was thinking how the different tempos could work together.

There’s a painting of a rotated sunset on the wall of the South tank, which was one of the initial images in the show. This vertical horizon line for me stands for an ending, for annihilation or death. In that Tank you’re looking into a landscape from an overlook platform, but actually you’re indoors.

By contrast, in the Transformer Galleriesthe kind of images I wanted to create resemble portraits. There is an element of cruelty when viewers can stare at an intimate moment unfolding that close up for as long as they want to. One of the choreographic sequences in this space involves frantically putting in order things that are lying around—a beer can, patent leather shoes, my bronze head sculpture. They are placed in a row with bongs and toothpicks. It was Eliza’s choice to use the Golden Lion as a prop. The lion ended up among the rest of the objects with a Stella Artois can on top of its wings. The idea was to make all the objects seem equal, and to use them as attributes to suggest a narrative about a person. The performance shifts from individual characters to a shared persona that is distributed over multiple people.

FULLERTON What is the relationship between your paintings and the performance in Sex?

IMHOF I chose these black and yellow works to be the predominant paintings in the show and this line that blurs in the middle has to do with a fluidity that I wanted the production to have. There’s something very violent in these two colors coming together. The way I work with painting and performance is very much the same. In the studio I execute some things myself and then hand over control to somebody else, as I do in my performances. I determined where the line and shadow go in the paintings, but they were made by a car painter. When I draw and paint there’s a moment of accident that I almost look for as a way of discovering what might come next. But it also gives me a feeling of panic because it’s not planned.

FULLERTON Were these paintings a response to the performance or vice versa?

IMHOF They were made at the same time and they influence each other. From the very beginning I worked closely with some performers, most significantly Eliza Douglas. Many of the movements and images were influenced by her art, as were the costumes and large parts of the music that we wrote in collaboration with Billy Bultheel.

FULLERTON Do the performers embody specific characters?

IMHOF Everybody brings their own personality and expertise with them, which you see in the improvisation. There are no particular roles assigned to performers but certain character attributes and gestures that are almost shared by everybody. People take them on at various points in the performance.

For example, there’s the character of the flaneur, who repeatedly enters the space simply for the sake of entering it, without performing a grand gesture that the others seem to be waiting for. Sometimes a gesture is introduced, then copied. You see a person turning with their hands held up, making a shadow on their face. Then another person copies them, so the gesture becomes an image that has a certain symmetry. I worked a lot with the motif of the doppelgänger.

FULLERTON You’ve said you regard your performances as sequences of images. Do these thread together a loose narrative or explore themes and moods?

IMHOF It’s nonlinear and quite loose. There are scenes, songs, sequences, and images that are fixed as well as unchoreographed “in-betweens.” These “in-betweens” are very important for the overall mood and aesthetics of the piece on a particular day. In general everyone brings in their own images and a lot is decided in the moment. It is a shared process of decision-making. Sometimes almost nothing is happening, which is an important aspect of the work for me. Sometimes it’s the opposite, and the piece suddenly peaks. It’s not just me who’s in control.

FULLERTON What draws you to that blankness, which also prevails in previous works such as Faust and Angst? It’s quite confrontational when the performers stare at you for minutes on end.

IMHOF I’m interested in the moment of uncanniness that comes from being looked at, when you discover something inside you that is maybe the thing you’re most in conflict with. Holding the gaze can also feel empowering

FULLERTON The zombielike performers enact the violence, pain, and discomfort of sex without the joy.

IMHOF There is a bit of zombie inside there for sure, when they dance the waltz as if they are undead, but I also think there’s a lot of mindless action around us, so why not take it as an image and put it in.

For me that moment may seem painful, but there is a joyful aspect in falling on the floor with somebody and then holding them, even if the embrace is almost violent. There’s something in it that’s very tender and real.

FULLERTON When you discuss the visual aesthetic with the team, do you instruct them not to smile?

IMHOF Yeah, we might jokingly say “don’t smile” if somebody new comes! This affect is also part of the exaggerated quality of the performance. In Sex I use lighting to create shadows behind people that are like a weird exaggeration of their own size. And then there is a moment where someone whips that massive shadow or where Eliza walks slowly toward the audience but the bouncing light makes it look like her shadow is going away. A huge shadow can look like an uncanny blackness from the neighboring tank.

FULLERTON How do you see the work evolving as it moves to Chicago and Turin?

IMHOF One of the piers is going to Chicago, where it will become something else—the only large-scale sculpture alongside paintings and drawings. I liked thinking of the objects and works having many lives, from hanging on the Tanks’ rough walls to being in a white cube space in Chicago. I’m interested in what art is and if it still has any vitality. With Sex I wanted to celebrate art as something undead.

by Contemporary Cruising |March 2, 2019 11:10 am

STANTON TAYLOR on MICHELE RIZZO

Choreographer Michele Rizzo Reveals the Ecstasy and Unredeemed Power of the Nightclub
At Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Rizzo’s performance ‘Higher.xtn’ unpicks the communal politics of the dance floor

4/4, a siren calls. We wait. Slow-steady, young ravers descend upon the lobby: from the left, then the right, then behind. Clad in second-hand sports brands, well-worn workwear and sundry leatherettes, they serve the leftovers of last night’s looks. Yet their movements are introverted, their gazes downcast. Once onstage, they shuffle about aimlessly as they sync up to Lorenzo Senni’s haunting synths. Casually self-absorbed, they seem oblivious to anyone but themselves. By the time the music shifts gears towards a slower beat, the dancers have settled into rows facing each other and move in perfect unison.

Slowly but surely the pace of Michele Rizzo’s Higher.xtn (2018) picks up. Even as they begin striding boldly across the stage and swapping positions, their synchrony never falters. They hardly even glance at each other. Eventually, the chills hit. It feels impossible to describe the visceral effect given by these endlessly repeated movements in tandem. Yet this is precisely the appeal – because it is something that anyone who has ever danced innately understands; because it is like sex. As the dance hurdles towards its climax, those timid small-town steps yield wholeheartedly to the self-assured abandon of big-city queens: knees bent deep, arms flung wide, all drenched in sweat. They leave in fours or pairs, then one by one. When the music’s gone, piercing whistles and the occasional scream are the only sounds you can make out through the applause.

Higher.xtn comes as the latest instalment in an ongoing movement research project that choreographer and artist Michele Rizzo initiated in 2015. After studying at the School for New Dance Development and the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, Rizzo went on to produce the first version of Higher in collaboration with the Frascati Theatre and ICK Amsterdam. Originally developed for a classic black box theatre, the earliest version featured an extended light show and only three dancers – Rizzo himself alongside Juan Pablo Camara and Max Goran. Later on, the project came to encompass a series of large public workshops. These workshops in turn helped Rizzo refine the techniques he would use to drill the cadre of dancers at the Stedelijk into ecstatic unison. One exercise, for example, involved pairing the dancers off and having them improvise over extended periods while staring into their partner’s eyes. This was designed to help the dancers lose their bodily self-consciousness in the face of the other. Only then would another exercise start introducing the piece’s short yet precise phrases into these durational improvisations, step by step. And though some dancers understandably described the marathon rehearsals as rewarding but exhausting, the characteristically authorial Rizzo was more reserved: ‘…you know, it was only two weeks.’

Performed twice a week over the course of a month as part of the exhibition Freedom of Movement, Higher.xtn quickly grew into considerable social media success. It now seems that Rizzo is well poised to join the growing number of choreographers working as frequently in museums as they do in theatres and festivals. But compared to the languidly immersive performance environments of Maria Hassabi, Anne Imhof or Adam Linder, Highert.xtn stands out for its assertive theatricality: an unambiguous stage, a clearly defined beginning and end, relentless synchronisation, and a rejection of all things ‘participatory.’ On the phone, however, Rizzo conceded that this sense of theatricality was partly an unintended consequence of the piece’s runaway success. During the first performances, visitors were somewhat confused when they initially encountered the dancers awkwardly shuffling to themselves in the stairwells and halls; some even wanted to join. This ambiguity, Rizzo suggests, would probably have been more in line with the way people perceive things with their bodies as they wander through an exhibition space. By the last performance, even visitors who’d come half an hour early found themselves jostling for a place to stand, let alone sit, in the Stedelijk’s crowded lobby, and you could feel the anticipation swell with every minute the stage was empty. The audience had arrived and they wanted a show.

But beyond these translations between museum and theatre, there is something more sacred at work: the translation between the experience of clubbing and its representation. The image offered is, paradoxically, one of private transcendence in the midst of complete social determination. In the pursuit of ecstasy, the dancers submit wholeheartedly to each other and more importantly, to the rhythm that holds them in step.

In an early statement on the piece, Rizzo speaks of trusting in dance as ‘the practice that compensate[s] for the fact that we can never be each other,’ and thus ‘we attempt in becoming one.’ What Rizzo shows us is an inverted technology of the self: one where discipline does not serve to cultivate the individual, but rather dissolves it altogether. He shows us the individual body ventriloquised in the service of something greater than itself. But the question remains: in service of what? Here, the vision of transcendence doubles as a vision of community. Much like protests, night clubs and festivals are one of the few forms of IRL assembly still tolerated as a pressure valve to daily life under capital. Unlike protests, though, these assemblies are meticulously guarded spaces, blissfully free of social conflict and subsequently dialogue: bouncers over barricades, community over class. At its most powerful, Rizzo’s Higher.xtn not only shows us the ecstasy of social communion, but also its glaringly unredeemed potential. Being together is beautiful, just as long as it’s not with everyone.

Michele Rizzo’s Higher.xtn was performed in January and February at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, as part of the exhibition ‘Freedom of Movement’, which runs until 17 March 2019. His new piece Deposition premiered at Kunstencentrum Buda, Kortrijk, Belgium, on 20 February. On 1 March, Rizzo will hold a workshop at the Stedelijk Museum.