The Gay Science
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TONY SCHULTZ |
Photo by Erin Baiano for The New York Times
The rest of this week, Dance Theater Workshop continues its two week showing of Dance by Neil Greenberg. Closing out the spring season are two pieces, the 2006 Quartet with Three Gay Men and premiere of Really Queer Dance with Harps. The work has been well reviewed in the Times and TONY among others. Artforum published an interview with Greenberg and the DTW website has some great images and a clip from Quartet.
Opening night last Wednesday included a post-show talk with the DTW’s artistic director Carla Peterson, Neil Greenberg and the co-creators of the work. Performers: Colin Stilwell, Antonio Ramos, Luke Miller, Ellen Barnaby, Nicholas Duran, Christine Elmo, Paige Martin and the adorably disruptive Johnni Durango. Musicians: Shelley Burgon, Kristen Theriault and (composer) Zeena Parkins. Lighting designer Michael Stiller.
The talk, as most of the writing on the dance, focused on process. Over the past sixteen years Neil has been creating work through a process of taping improvisations, analyzing and remixing the movement, and attempting to reconstitute the captured/curated material “verbatim.” These pieces represent a development in his process as Neil, for the first time, is recording the movement of all of his dancers to generate the primordial vocabulary from which he fashions the final pieces. Neil and I have a common interest in remixing the dance graph.
The titles are curious as they intentionally provoke questions the asking of which only lead to more questions. As Sulcas points out in the Times, the dances have “an evenness of tone that can sometimes lead the mind to wander.” Perhaps this free space is given by Greenberg to interrogate the questions.
In Quartet with Three Gay Men the initial question is “who?” In a dance with four men, three of which are announced gay, who is the odd man out? And there is no easy answer. Immediately our reflexes fire with additional questions, “why can’t I identify the straight dancer?”, “how does one identify a straight dancer?” and “why does it matter?” Much like pulling loose thread on a garment, this train of thought unstitches itself, disrupting its own chain of signification. The question is brought into question.
Really Queer Dance with Harps presents its own matrix of questions, the first of which is, “what is queer dance?” Throughout the dance Neil teases us with seemingly stable landmarks for identifying this category. We might recognize flowers behind the ear, limp wristed bounding and and languid excursions into the hip as “queer”. But as this movement plays on both male and female bodies and intertwines with brisk, stiff wristed hetero-normative gestures the boundary terms begin to blur.
For Neil, queer dance is anti-censorship. “Dance is such a censored event for men,” Gia quotes Neil “We think of it as both an effeminate activity and a queer activity and, first of all, so what? Why would either of those things be bad?” If dance is, as Neil writes, “a space for living with the question of the body” and “for attending to the information living in the body” then what knowledge is the hetero-norm hiding? Inquiring minds want to know; I want to know.
Interrogating the question “what is queer dance?” elicits more questions/instabilities. Isnt all dance a little queer? What is it in dance, what is the ingredient that is queer? If dance is, according to the popular conception, a queer activity what is it that makes it so?
We owe something to Neil Greenberg for developing work that plays this beautifully while unasking so many important questions. Performances run tonight through Saturday.
