Hope Mohr Dance / Have we come a long way, baby?

The Bridge Project 2014:
Have We Come A Long Way, Baby?

Hope Mohr Dance in association with Joe Goode Annex
Sep 26, 2014

From the program:

“For its fifth anniversary, HMD's Bridge Project presents Have We Come A Long Way, Baby?, a program that celebrates and explores a West Coast post-modern dance lineage through an intergenerational lineup of female soloists.”

Anna Halprin

The Courtesan and the Crone (1999)

Anna Halprin, one of the most innovative, experimental and influential of dance artists, performed a mime piece; a five minute dance-theater work wearing a Venetian mask that was a gift from her daughter and a floor-length gold cloak that she previously wore to the White House. 94 years old. Fragile. Eager to make contact. To move. To move us. To touch. I felt lucky to share this moment that vastly transcended the actual choreography and yet of course was deeply implicated in its embodied narrative and mimicry, desire and nostalgia, power and loss. Halprin's courtesan was articulate and unabashed. She presented the mask of a younger woman and the body that still remembers her, at least in gestural fragments. Her crone fluctuated between grief – what have I become? – and a calm resolve or affirmation. We applauded. Anna smiled and bowed and exited carefully, each step significant.

Simone Forti

News Animation (1980-current)

An improvisation about water, Syria, cockroaches, a baby... is also an improvisation about Simone Forti, aging, improvisation, politics, and art. A way or reading and re-reading the news, News Animation, since 1980, has modeled a creative process for bridging the many gaps between Forti's (and perhaps y/our) lived experience and the political realities presented and framed as news. White haired and 70 plus, she knows her body, how it can get to the floor and back up without excessive effort, how it feels.

Meandering movement – she reveals an artist looking and finding – but then the mood shifts sharply as she walks directly toward us, speaking, “So we're bombing Syria. And we don't know why. And they tell us it's to protect the homeland. (pause) The homeland.” It's easy to say that of course we should be talking about Syria today and of course we don't know how, especially in public. Forti accepts this ethical challenge gracefully. “We want the borders that we established after WWI to hold.” Is it her age, her quivering gestures, the humbleness of the situation (a small studio theater, an audience of dance people) that help us to see the tragic absurdity in this statement? With her head gently bobbing beyond her control, she gestures, “If I'm the map, Iran is on this side (right thigh), and Saudi Arabia is on this side (left thigh), and Iraq is here (hands form a triangle over her crotch).” I'm reminded of Deena Metzger's late 70s or early 80s efforts to map the world onto the body, a feminist imaginary that recognizes the many resonances between one's body and one's world, between one's perception and one's projection. Considering her own body/mind/self, Metzger asked questions like, where are my borders open and where are they fortified? Where is there starvation or drought? Where are the rivers dammed and where are the war zones?

Forti emerges from a similar era of feminism and an art scene whose political critique of art and society led them to share creative process as “product” (Prioritizing “practice” as Arrington and Hewit might assert). For News Animation, Forti reads a newspaper and takes notes in the form of poetic journaling. In tonight's performance the notes were read live, an exposure of process but also a deepening of the material, revisiting it but from the past, rewinding time to reconsider the now. “Colonialism. I can never remember so I reach for my colon.” Her body grounds and recontextualizes language, perhaps patriarchy and its logic as well. Reading from a notebook, head bowed to the page, white hair vibrating with her shakes, she recounts a dream of power men and their penises and closed sexual circuits that exclude everyone else.

A dance with a white sweater and scarf shifts unexpectedly into a story of fish that know how to organize in solidarity and resistance. Forti is a gentle master. Using the tactics of innocent (or is it subversive) children's theater, she transforms the clothing into a snowy Montana horizon along her body (mountain), and then admits to failing to represent the milky way... Perfect and imperfect, her imagination always in process of both refinement and wilding, an ethical feminist artist researcher child whose failures are gateways to magic.

Lucinda Childs

Carnation (1964)

Performed by Hope Mohr

White chair. Black table. Red leotard. Blue jeans. Her right foot in a blue plastic bag. A kitchen sieve treated as an iconic or holy object. Carefully she constructs sandwiches from green sponges and pre-cut carrots that fit the width of the sponge. Color and form redux: Fluxus tasks, Dada disruptions, Judson deconstructions. Carrots ceremoniously inserted into sieve create an altar of orange radiance, then a crown when place delicately on her head. Many sponges are stacked vertically and one end inserted into her mouth. The mask is further manipulated by cramming the fanned gaps of the sponges with the carrots from her crown. The game ends by spitting everything into the blue bag removed from her foot.

At the back wall she does a headstand. In precarious balancing she performs a circus act with socks and a white sheet and she disappears. Ta da! It recalls certain actions/images in Xavier LeRoy's Self Unfinished, created 34 years later.

She captures air in the plastic bag and it stands unsupported. Another circus act with magic fully exposed and yet it's still magical, that is, whimsical, unexpected, and previously unimagined. She looks at it. Stomps it. Smiles. Proudly. The smile turns on and off. Then she cries. Steps away. She performs tasks with arbitrary rules that must be obeyed. If this isn't the essence of art, it's one of them.

I propose this work for an Izzy: best reconstruction of 2014!

Hope Mohr

s(oft is) hard (2014)

Performed by Peiling Kao
Sound by Ben Juodvalkis, Video by David Szlasa, Costume by Keriann Egeland

We hear the sound of writing, by hand. A mix of knocking and scratching. Peiling faces away from the audience but her face, in close up, is projected, large, as if staring back at us. She is wearing black tights and a blue crocheted top. A voice over, Hope I presume, tells of writing 89 journals in 20 years. She recites specific dates but not the entry that follows... After reading through the journals while making this piece, the voice tells us that she recycled all of them except the first and the last, numbers 1 and 89. I believe her and vow to hold on to my old journals even tighter.

There is a more complicated relationship between text and movement, or language and embodiment, than in the previous works tonight's program. More dates. More sounds of writing. More silences. More shapes and gazes and self-touching gestures and other dancing movement. Minimal piano accompanies the continued chronological progression of dates...we're in the 90s...then 2000s. Video is intermittent. We switch from face cam to feet. Peiling's breath becomes the dominant text as her movement increases in vigor. Today's date. Tomorrow's date. She rolls and jumps repeatedly. A virtuosity that impresses, viscerally. On her back, the lights fade, slowly.

Resources:

Deena Metzger

I can't find the actual reference that was a radio piece from the 80s but here's her current work:

http://www.deenametzger.com/Home/home.html

Xavier LeRoy, Self Unfinished (1998)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3rv1TeVEPM

PS:

I am an enemy of the slow fade to black at the end of a dance. Also the device of the blackout to begin a piece, to tell the audience that it has begun, and to allow the dancers to enter the space unseen (or the suggestion of unseen since I can almost always see and hear them). The framing of the stage or the theatrical moment with darkness is a cliché, a trope emptied of any specific meaning that carries more ideological weight than dancers in the US are taught to consider. In San Francisco I witness these devices at almost every concert I attend. In the “contemporary” dance scenes I frequent in Europe or New York, they are extremely rare, and when they occur they are more likely to be conceptually integral to the work.

This Is The Girl / Funsch Dance Experience, Sep 2014

This Is The Girl
Funsch Dance Experience
Sep 12-14, 2014
Dance Mission, SF

Observations and opinions by Keith Hennessy
followed by a comment by Christy Funsch

Choreographer Christy Funsch enters to give the (now) compulsory pre-show announcement that unnecessarily frames dance performances in SF... but with a twist... when we realize that the announcement is (integrated into) the performance. Information about exits and cell phones erodes into awkward silences and unfinished statements, until finally Funsch states, “I am nothing” and exits as if lost... This opening action reveal's Christy's dry (or is it wry?) sense of humor that threads through and sometimes even structures her work.

A woman in a red dress plays electric guitar with five young, fit, multiculti, dancers. Christy and Nol (Simonse) are the seasoned performers in this work, sometimes exaggerating their “experience” by playing old farts who need help from the young whippersnappers. When they chat, the text and performance are so unforced. The audience relaxes. It's easy to laugh along and enjoy. Later Christy tells me that the conversation is improvised. I say it's like watching old friends play together. Super charming. Amid family tales of sisters and coming out, they talk about story versus nonlinearity and ponder the relationship between construction and imagination.

SF choreographers never got the memo that unison movement is “out” or at least should be questioned and not assumed as integral to dance making. But then I think about how many companies based in SF (at least 5, maybe 6...) employ photographer RJ Muna to make them look practically indistinguishable, their (wannabe) sexy lithe bodies revealing lots of bare skin, leaping. Add some flying fabric for extra drama. Neo-classical modernism thrives here. That's not what Christy's doing with her young dancers, but it's a meandering rant that follows my questioning of her use of synchronized ensemble movement. What is possible to communicate, invoke, or inspire with dancing and when is unison the best tool or sign for choreography?

The next section involved the Dance Brigade's Grrrl Brigade on Taiko drums, led by Bruce Ghent. I thought Bruce's role was perhaps too big for a young female empowerment project but my main experience was of the joyful power of the taiko, and the particularly feminist approach to taiko that the Dance Brigade, with Bruce's coaching, has brilliantly pioneered. I don't know whether it was the thrill of the precision drumming or the ubiquitousness of teen girls in daisy dukes but I didn't notice at first how short the girls' denim shorts were. But when I did, they distracted me. How does fashion happen? Can shorts be too short? And would I be a terrible parent of a teenage femme?

The young dancers help out the fake-old dancers and everyone plays together – electric guitar, taiko teens, big showy dancing. What does dancing do? It invites me to ponder issues of age and power, of gender and sexuality, of color and racism, of the relationship between individual and group, of the invisible exchanges and collaborations from which choreography emerges. Maybe a better question is, “what does dancing want?” or “what do dancers and dance makers want?” But maybe not.

Nol joined the quintet for encounters of touching and measuring. I'm writing this in Rome from notes I scribbled in the program's margins three weeks ago. And this note doesn't trigger any memories. I wonder how long I've been watching Nol perform... more than a decade I'm sure. He's a generous dancer who plays well with others in so many different contexts. I loved seeing him outside a sprawling warehouse in Oakland in the work of Mary Armentrout and I remember being provocatively surprised when I finally saw him in his own work.

My notes kinda fall apart. I noted three slow pods, cuddling but not ________ then simply “taiko + dance” and an observation about recurring cross generational themes that made me re-assess my earlier comment about Bruce and the Grrrl Brigade.

The emotional tone of the work coalesced with the entrance of a team of young girls from the SF Community Music Center's Children's Chorus. The vibe intensified – I don't know how to describe it but something was happening – to all of us it seemed – the energetic-emotional field intensified when Christy and Nol started dancing, fierce at first and then in unison. “Horses in my dreams...” the girls sang. Teens hung out in the back, looking out windows, and although the image was 'staged' it didn't feel fake. It just felt good, like how it's supposed to be, and I mean the whole thing, all of us, sitting there in the dark and light. The person beside me started to cry which simply seemed like part of the plan, or part of the potential of the plan, as if (Christy's) choreography is not a plan but an invitation for an experience to happen, inside and among us.

The song ended. A light, fast, repeating dance moved upstage, with one dancer downstage center focusing our gaze into a four-generational world of music and dancing, in the Mission, where many of us live(d) and work(ed). And this history of place and creativity, while delicate, seemed neither precarious nor exceptional but just right, just right now.

Response by Christy Funsch, choreographer of This Is The Girl

One of the most difficult decisions I made in my recent full-length work, This is the Girl, was how to costume the teenage women of the Grrrl Brigade (who accompanied several sections of the work on Taiko). I allowed the six 8-year old girls from San Francisco's Community Center (who sang to accompany the last section of the work) to dress as they wished-why wouldn't I offer the same freedom to the teeagers?

Perhaps because it isn't so simple. Questions of who is in charge and in control of their presentation in public beleaguered my wrangling. Do they realize that they stand on the brink of our culture's vapid insistence on objectifying them? They study dance and music (and some have for ten years or more), with Krissy Keefer's Dance Brigade, a crucial, strident collection of women who have pushed back against mainstream depictions of femininity for decades. Surely some of this counter-cultural politic has rubbed off? Why, then, when given the choice of costuming, did they all decide to wear revealing, tight-fitting clothing very similar to each other's and very much emphasizing their physiques?

Should I have asked them to wear pajamas? Or martial arts clothing?

Most disappointing to me is owning that when I was wrangling over this decision I did not set aside time to have this conversation with them. I should have made it as much of a priority as getting their music rehearsed. It also brings up for me a larger query which served as subtext for the work, subtext that was latent perhaps but nonetheless alive in my decision to assemble an age-diverse cast for the work. Is there a time when we realize our place in power's structure? Does this happen at different times depending on where you are in the structure? How does our confidence shift when we grow from young girls into teenagers? What happens when we come into sexual awareness and how can we cultivate autonomy in young women when it happens-not just inside the household but all of us, culturally? Is provocative dress a sign of empowerment or compliance with expectations and objectification? Is it the height of conformity or a bold act of rebellion and resistance?

I don't know and will now have to (sadly) file under "conversations that didn't happen." I was so focused on the power implicit in the choreography (what I call "who is lifting whom"), that I missed an opportunity to engage the extended cast in this troubling, rich discussion.

Deadly Disappointing Eonnagatta

Eonnagata
Conceived & performed by Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage, Russell Maliphont
Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances, UC Berkeley
Feb 10, 8pm

Two hours of folkloric performance – storytelling, shadow dancing, masks, dance, martial arts – appropriated in the service of hoity-toity art. Brook would have referred to this bourgeois exercise as deadly theater, meaning soulless or no longer relevant to today’s audiences and issues. But slapping this production with the label of deadly is a complicated move. The makers of this performance and the tactics they celebrate (with their considerable personal and financial investment) are heavily influenced by Brook’s generation of dance, theater, art, and social experimentation. What went wrong? I mean besides the gentrification of the world through a corporate takeover of government and society? It’s as if these students of the experimental dance and theater of the 60s and 70s forgot to attend the course on co-optation. Then they skipped the seminars with Chomsky (on how consent is manufactured), Lourde (the masters tools), Gramsci (revealing the workings of cultural hegemony), Debord (how spectacles participate in spectacular society), and any number of anarcha-feminist collective workshops that might have helped them to see how their project is much more invested in fame, status, neo-classical modernism and money than it is in art, communitas, experimentation or social change.

Discussing with artist friends and colleagues afterwards, it was easy to agree that there had been several lovely or curious moments. Guillem’s shadow dance, and especially her exit when lifting the curtain to reveal the light. Guillem’s dancing in the voluminous but feather-light and translucent white kimono. Guillem manipulated with long sticks and carried off. Guillem’s feet on almost every step, extension, slide, and kick. My favorite moment came within the first two minutes of the performance when Guillem messed up her rhyming text, stopped, apologized, attributed the mistake to jet lag, and then repeated her narrative from the beginning. L Cohen says: there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. After this illuminative slip we pretty much stayed in the dark.

$70 tickets for a performance at a public university is a kind of theft. Even if the average ticket price was $50 and the place wasn’t completely full at 2000 people, the door receipts for two nights was well over $100,000, probably $150,000. What was the fee for this trio of stars and their technical entourage? When we exited the theater, animated by our mutual critiques and frustrations, we saw a stretch limo waiting outside the artists’ door with Black driver a ‘waiting. This poetic image clarified the ruling class ambitions of the performers. For a brief moment I thought it could be kitsch. One person talked about his sibling’s central California friends getting a stretch Hummer limo as a peek experience. But no, sadly, these are the kind of artists for whom the limousine is an expectation, a right that they’ve earned and by the way, you haven’t.

Because this performance, or my experience of it, doesn’t deserve more attention, here is a list of my notes:

• poorly performed Asian theater and martial art appropriations

• a mostly synchronized dance on tables, like a cheap copy of something more risky and playful by Scott Wells. We got to say, look she’s 45 and still has her extension!

• an interesting telling of the indigenous ideas of the sun as father, the earth as mother, and the moon as middlesexed

• Guillem’s feet really are amazing

• this is some high art shit that if performed by lesser known artists would be laughed off the stage (and the grant panel.)

• Maliphont sings. One could imagine that this is his first time doing so on stage.

• after a stylized conversation between Guillem and Lepage, the performers repeat the scene without text, extending the gestures, lovely.

• the whole thing is so precious despite the bawdy jokes and techniques of poor and popular performance

• it’s a kind of mimicry or representation of the popular, so we barely laugh and we definitely don’t cry, and when it’s over the triumph is all theirs and not ours

• I’m not the only one here who started working at 8am and is now falling asleep. (This was verified when chatted afterwards.) Who else can stay awake through this drowsy sad music?

• Costumes by Alexander McQueen. Really excellent tights that they each wore as a kind of base layer for all the more extravagant costumes. Sexy, design-y, useful and revealing. The extra padding at Guillem’s crotch was a delightful detail. The couture doctor’s gowns during the autopsy scene seemed more like a fashion joke, like, “Oh look there’s still another $1500 in the costume budget. Can we have a couple of futuristic doctor’s gowns? Cool. Thanks.”

• Too bad the whole thing wasn’t campy – same performers, text, costumes – but a really different relationship to the audience and to the story. Then we could have laughed along with the limo. Instead we had nothing to say but a weak fuck you.

PS.

In an email response to this review, Monique Jenkinson wrote, “and the myth of sun, earth & intersex moon, while lovely, was so much better done in Hedwig,” referring to the Plato-inspired song and animation in the brilliant film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2000) by John Cameron Mitchell & Stephen Trask. I agree. Hedwig was better than Eonnagata in a hundred ways, but most importantly in seducing or convincing us to give a shit about gender, desire, difference, theater and the ways that citizenship, art, sexuality and gender construct each other.

Top 10 Youtubes, Jan 2011

Pop minstrels, corporate domination, and teenage puppets:
A quick look at the top 10 youtube hits of all time (as of Jan 1, 2011)

I just watched the top ten youtubes of all time so that you wouldn't have to. There's still DIY content available on youtube but the top ten is mostly a story of domination by pop cult machinery constructing and exploiting nearly every teenage click of global computer access.

Here's the link if you want to watch while you read:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_youtube_videos_of_all_time.php

1. Justin Bieber – Baby featuring Ludacris

Over 400 million hits for this pop puppet’s banal reproductions of heteronormative corn syrup (of course from GMO corn). Who teaches kids to repeat such ludicrous crap as, I thought you’d be forever mine? And isn’t it embarrassing each time a white pop star gets so famous that they can ask almost any (of course not Prince or Mary…) black artist to appear in their videos? And what about the pushing between baby J and his love interest, the lightly mixed race yet still exotic (of course!) rising teen star Jasmine V? The dance battle of the sexes is both banal and archetypal and though it’s a non-representative moment I really appreciated the one b-girl’s throw down. But the pushing is totally unnecessary, annoying really, in its implications that a little physical struggle is all cool in this new rainbow world where all the colors go bowling together and dance hip hop together. And where sexual difference is both erased (boys and girls are equal and not that different really) while structurally reinforced (girls are still really not equal and very very different from boys). A similar dynamic of hegemony/erasure (where we can’t recognize the power inequity because everyone seems so nice and friendly) explains the simultaneous racial unity and white supremacy encoded in almost each moment of the video. Why anyone puts up with Bieber’s bad dancing is kinda stupefying. Oh yeah it makes his cuteness seem even cuter cuz he’s like fragile and sensitive and white and shit. Bieber’s best friend status goes of course to a young black man, which is then reinforced by the big brother carnival of domination by Ludacris (who’s got whom in a headlock?). The closing images of hip street handshakes with Ludacris and exit-stage-left-arm-in-arm with the suddenly forgiving and giving Jasmine V complete the poor little straight white boy fantasia.

Question: Are Bieber’s minstrelsy and wannabe black(face) appropriations any worse than early Beatles? If not, is there any chance he’ll take acid, spend time in India, and come up with something like Revolution #9 or John’s Working Class Hero?

(Like Justin, I’m Canadian and we’re not supposed to crit our own people in front of Americans. It’s a Canadian thing, you wouldn’t…)

2. Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

Over 300 million views. This video is a lot harder to hate than the machinery disguised by the mask of Justin Bieber, although it’s no less formulaic. Gaga enjoys playing with her social construction and even occasionally enjoys fighting against it; either way she lets us know that she’s in on it. Lady G does everything Madonna took 10 years to do in about 2 minutes, shamelessly pilfering and referencing at a dizzying speed. During the 5-minute spectacle I was reminded of Julia Kristeva (woman as monster), Leigh Bowery (the shoes and some of the masked head pieces), Madonna, ball culture (bath haus of gaga), Marilyn Manson, Michael Jackson (Thriller’s zombies emerge from the tanning beds/graves), UK latex/rubber SM fashion, Damian Hirst (excess of diamonds), RuPaul (walk walk baby – repeat)

Points off for all the synchronized frontal dancing which really locates the dancing in a reactionary pop aesthetic, anachronistic when situated in context with her more contemporary visual and fashion arts. And further points off for the Nemiroff & other product placements, although the sheer cynicism of this promotional crap is a kind of radical hubris that might delight some pomo perspectives.

3. Shakira – Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)

Over 270 million hits for the official song of the 2010 World Cup – the most popular sports event in the world. Another embarrassing white-looking person dancing themselves into an Africanist context. Stuart Derdeyn from The Province referred to Waka Waka as “sonic vomit” (which could also describe Bieber’s upchucked purging of music capitalism’s relentless over-consumption.)

Born in Columbia, of Euro and Lebanese descent, Shakira performs the universal (white-ish) citizen in a peaceful harmonious world that somehow respects and reflects an Africa that the spectacles of world economics have long dismissed as a toilet for their toxic shit.

"People are raising their expectations. Today’s your day, I feel it. You paved the way, believe it. If you get down, get up."

Waka Waka, based on a Cameroonian song, includes elements of Columbian and Afro-Caribbean music, supported by a South African band in a big happy pablum of liberal humanist world music. The title means ‘do it’ and has all the empty meaning of a Nike slogan. This video/song/advertisement is banal, cheap, and repetitive, demonstrating less than half the effort of Paul Simon’s problematic projects in South Africa. It’s fitting that the last line is delivered with the volume fading to nothing: We’re all Africa. We’re all Africa…

4. Charlie bit my finger – again!

Watching this video gives me hope that some kind of revolutionary values and inspiration are possible with youtube and the mass marketing of free (alienated, exploited) consumer-provided content. Truly. Watch the underdog delight in biting the hand that feeds. Watch the lion tamer reveal that he doesn’t actually control the jaws of the lion in which he has placed his stupid head. Charlie bit his finger and he will do it again. Dumb by the standards of the ruling class, Charlie’s grunts and giggles articulately expose the monster behind his infantilized façade. A one-minute parable of the British Empire, still trying to hold on to decorum while the savages are sitting in their lap.

5. Eminem Love the Way You Lie featuring Rihanna

This is Bieber’s adolescent pushing match all grown up. The pushing enhanced to frustrated violence complete with the woman spitting into the man’s face, of course followed by lusty macking, and peace keeping offers of cute stuffed animals.

Now I know we said things / Did things / That we didn't mean
And we fall back / Into the same patterns / Same routine
But your temper's just as bad / As mine is / You're the same as me

Eminem has written this story before. I love you. I hate you. If you try to leave I’ll tie you to the bed and set the house on fire. I know I’m prone to violence and will always end up lying. But it seems like he’s on automatic pilot here, lacking the dangerous fragility he performed before he was so muscular in body and bank account.

It's worth praising that the characters in this video aren’t rich. They don’t live in an idealized world of rainbow children united. There is no reference to the ruling class fashion runway. And there’s no stupid dancing. Favorite performance moment is Eminem in the background of Rihanna as she sings the chorus, and Rihanna dancing alone behind Eminem as he raps.

I got a soft spot for this angry sensitive fucked up lower class boy-man. I do. I think it could work out between us. I’d calm his fist and still give him space to rage. And he knows it. That’s why he flirts with and defends faggotry/Elton/Bruno, just to show us that he can, that he’s man enough. There’s something dramatic, talented, and trashy about both Rihanna and Eminem and I think it’s hot that their PR people have them standing right next to each other without any effort to fake a relationship. That’s the most honest connection I’ve seen so far in these first 5 super-viewed videos.

6. Justin Bieber – One Time

Two little white boys playing video games interrupted when JB gets a call from Usher. What? Then some stupid sucky singing happens with images of a crowded tweener party and some silly-string. I jump ahead, a girl in shorty shorts kisses JB on the cheek. Usher shows up, surveys the scene like he’s a chaperone. The little rich boy looks at us, raises arms waist high to say yup, this shit is for real, that’s Usher and I’m on top of the world. This song and video might be syrupy treacle but it doesn’t offend like Baby.

7. Miley Cyrus – Party in the U.S.A.

Cowboy boots, American cars, a rainbow coalition of hot girls, a reference to a Jay-Z song. Yup it’s a party in the U.S.A. This is country pop music, once-removed, under the influence of Britney and formula pop. The massive stars and stripes unfurl to remind the red state homeboys that all’s OK despite the contagions of multiracial socializing and acrobatic b-boys. Miley Ray Cyrus was born Destiny Hope Cyrus in 1992. Somehow that says a lot.

8. Eminem – Not Afraid

170 million views for the newly remade face of Eminem. What the fuck? The same chin sculpture that MJ tragically tried to wear. I really miss his boyishly round face. He looks in mirrors and touches his face, and wonders what the hell is going on. Right. Then he crashes through the mirror but there is no Tommy liberation/transformation despite the CGI flying sequence that follows. Eminem is all alone here, no woman to blame or to be shamed by, no poverty or lack of power to flail against.

Sounding more like Bieber or Cyrus than Eminem the chorus spews nicely: “I’m not afraid to take a stand. Come take my hand. You’re not alone.” This bullshit pop insults the poem that once was a rage worth acknowledging.

9. The Evolution of Dance by Judson Laipply

And while I’m being nostalgic, I miss the days when the top viewed youtubes were almost all single-take vids of dancers. Laipply is an original youtube star and I’m glad to see him still in the top 10 with 160 million views. I’d bet that more people have seen The Evolution of Dance than have seen the previous vids, watched repeatedly by conformist tween consumers aware that every time they hit repeat they’re boosting the numbers.

Laipply’s dancing is a delight. We’re surprised by a balding white dude, just chunky enough to make us think that he won’t have loose hips, let alone a fab sense of humor and shameless style. He’s a white everyman approaching pop culture with an irony that is too lacking in the rest of the videos in this list. it’s important that he refuses to dance the Macarena but he lets the music play long enough to remind us that we were not immune to its contagion. In his playful embodiment, imitation is less minstrel and appropriation, and more of a lite critical citation. I mean it’s not incredible comedy or dancing, it’s just not bullshit and somehow that makes it great, contextually speaking.

10. Pitbull – I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)

Biggest boobs in the top 10. And probably the vid least viewed by white suburban US American girls. Calle Ocho is a bilingual and repetitive dance hit (chorus: I know you want me, you know I wancha) with gansta rap sylings (boobs, luxury bed, boobs, cool daddy). Mixing a few successful formulae and samples from various sources, the hook of this song is bouncy and fun. I’d dance to it at a party and I bet most of you would, also. Other than boobs and cool daddy, this video doesn’t have much happening. Occasionally a graphic of a Cuban flag passes across the screen.

Calle Ocho is a landmark street in Little Havana, Miami. Pitbull is an American rapper of Cuban parents who allegedly exposed the little 'bull (Armando) to the revolutionary poetry of José Martí. Pit’s non-middle class cred includes time in foster care and teen drug dealing. He says that a pit bull is too stupid to lose, and is outlawed in Dade County, just like he is.

I didn’t know this artist before going through this list. I had heard of Bieber, Cyrus and Shakira but had never heard/seen them. A little wiki goes a long way. It took me 3 hours to watch these videos and write these nearly 2000 words.

Dance.Eats.Money. - Ishmael Houston-Jones on The A.W.A.R.D. Show

Originally written for Issue 2 of the Salt Lake City journal LEARNING TO loveDANCEmore: MANIFESTO.

Dance. Eats. Money.
by Ishmael Houston-Jones

“Imagine So You Think You Can Dance without the flashing lights, screaming fans and millions of TV viewers, and voilà: The A.W.A.R.D. (Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance) Show,” wrote Apollinaire Scherr in the Financial Times. From the first time I heard about the A.W.A.R.D. Show I have been uneasy with the idea. A young choreographer whom I had mentored called me one afternoon and asked if I were free that evening. He had purchased tickets to something called the Award Show being held at the Joyce SoHo in New York and one person for whom he’d bought a ticket couldn’t attend. Not knowing what it was, I said I’d go. When I got there it was clear that I had been invited expressly to vote for his piece. This illustrates just one of the flaws I see in the concept of the A.W.A.R.D. Show and its Salt Lake City spin-off, Sugar Show.

First, anything that gets money into the pockets of dance makers so that they can create their art cannot be dismissed as a bad thing at the outset, right? Then, why does the notion of these shows leave me with such mixed feelings? Obviously the concept chafes against my latent socialistic principles of equitable distribution of the goods. But other means of funding artists such as grants and fellowships are not 100% impartial and unbiased. However I’ve sat on many choreographers’ panels for both foundations and government agencies, and I’ve always observed an almost neurotic need for them to be fair at every step of the processes. And although the audience of voters at the Sugar / A.W.A.R.D. Shows is given P.O.E.M., (Potential, Originality, Execution, Merit), as criteria, it’s hard to believe that most people will come to the show and not vote for either their friends or for those choreographers whose work is most aligned with their own aesthetics. Over the years I’ve been solicited to come and “vote for my piece” by more than one fretful choreographer.

But assuming that people are able to put their familial and artistic allegiances aside, there is another issue – does one’s immediate visceral response to work always point to work that is good? From my own experience I would have to say probably not. Often the better work is the work I didn’t get instantaneously; work that I had to go home and actually think about; debate with my friends; let it hit me days/weeks/months after. Work that entertains me right away can be superficially funny or poignant, but it can be just that – superficial. I admit that I can be incredibly shallow and sucked in by cheap sentiment. In another art form, Latter Days, a 2003 tearjerker movie about a relationship between a closeted Mormon missionary and his openly gay neighbor made me well up and reach for the tissues. Clearly it could win my vote in some indie film Award-type Show. But is this great, or even good, filmmaking? I don’t think so.

Last fall I attended the A.W.A.R.D. Show in NYC with Lindsey Drury who had competed with the SLC originated improv group GoGoVertigoat; they had been eliminated on a previous evening. We had our little pencils and were to help choose a $10,000 winner from among 3 very similar, well-executed pieces. It seemed so arbitrary that one piece got the big prize, the other two got one thousand dollars apiece, and the nine “losers” from the preliminary nights got zilch. The work that won, a piece by Helen Simoneau, was a finely crafted solo for the choreographer; I’ve seen other work by Helen so I know she has choreographic chops. But was this quiet unassuming solo really worth 10 times more cash than the other two pieces? I can’t honestly find the justification. It would have been just as fair, and more honest, to draw her name from a fish bowl and admit that the Show was the Lottery that it is. Paradoxically, in my opinion, one advantage the SLC Sugar Show has over the other A.W.A.R.D. Shows is that it bestows a lot less money to the “winning work.” But it also gives technical support toward mounting a performance of the piece. So the disparity between “winner” and “losers” isn’t so great and the “winner” definitely gets a show out of the deal.

Another complaint I have with the Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance Show concept is the basic disingenuousness that feedback is the rationale for its existence. All the advertisements and the preshow lecture stressed the value of the audience feedback ad nauseum. We were told how much our thoughts and opinions meant to the choreographers in the development of their work. Now, I curate a works-in-progress series in NYC, (DraftWork at Danspace Project), and there is a talkback session after work is shown there, so it is my turn to be a little hypocritical and admit that I think that this form of feedback is of little value to most choreographers. As a choreographer myself I’ve found this to be true. (I think of DraftWork as an audience education activity.) This was borne out by the panel of experts the night I attended the A.W.A.R.D. Show. As much as the moderator tried to get them to say the opposite, the four panelists were pretty much in agreement that there first needs to be trust built between a critic and an artist before the artist can accept feedback. The artist needs to know the critic’s prejudices and preferences. Getting indiscriminate comments, (positive, negative, or neutral), from random strangers immediately after performing must be taken with a gargantuan grain of salt. This was most strongly voiced by panelist Kate Weare, A.W.A.R.D. Show winner, 2007. The value of performing work-in-progress before a public is simply “performing work-in-progress before a public;” a good artist can take the temperature of the room and feel if the piece is effective or not. This is the usefulness of series like Mudson/Judson; there is no public feedback, just the act of dancing in front of an interested audience. But I can’t see how when performing knowing that you are being judged, and there is a large amount of cash at the end of that judgment, cannot muddy both one’s artistic intent and the point of view of those judging.

In a mini-manifesto Lindsey Drury warns against:

The problem with teaching artists to please.
The problem with teaching audiences to be pleased.
The problem with the tyranny of liking.

A final flaw, but a significant one, is the potential for these kinds of competitions to have a negative impact on the fragile ecology of a dance community. In a field where there are far too few resources compared to the need, do we really want to institutionalize a Darwinist environment in which choreographers are pitted against choreographers in a gladiatorial fight to the finish? An environment where the audience is subtly encouraged to respond more like the fans at a Utah Jazz game than supporters of an art form? In our post post-show emails Lindsey wrote to me, “If (the audience gets) what they want – and the A.W.A.R.D. Show seeks to do just that – dance will end up resembling a floral arrangement; it will be unobtrusive and frictionless.”

The late choreographer Arnie Zane once said, “Dance eats money.” So what to do with the thousands of dollars that organizers in several cities across the country have raised to support the work of (winning) choreographers? Surely I don’t think that that money should not go to deserving artists. Of course not. But in my world-view, I favor a more equitable sharing of funds. If, for example, in the NYC show could the allocation of the $12K have been 6 to the “winner” and 3 each to the other finalists? But this would still leave the “losers” with nothing which Claudia Lo Roco in the NY Times reminds us is the “ugly downside to this contest, especially given that dancers and choreographers are rarely adequately compensated for their labor…” Perhaps the Sugar Show model could be used and improved upon so that more than one “winning” piece could get full production and administrative support. Maybe we need to think of more and better paradigms. Dance provocateur Keith Hennessy posits:

“Do we make our own celebrity judge events that mimic - however poorly - the televised spectacle with its star making machinery or do we queer the forms to privilege creation, community, collaboration, and long term sustainability of the dance ecologies?”

One existing new model is SQUART – short for Spontaneous Queer Art. It takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area and was originally conceived by Laura Arrignton out of the desire “to foster community and to create work without preciousness.” SQUART’s format is simple— people who have RSVPed show up at 6 pm and split into four teams; they are given a list of criteria or themes and two hours to make a piece. The four teams create new works from 6 – 8 pm; their process of creation is transparent to the audience, meaning the public is invited to come early and watch them compose their pieces. At 8 pm whatever has been produced is performed. There aren't directors / choreographers / performers in delineated roles; the performers don’t even know who they'll be working with until they get to the theater that night. A panel of judges then comments on the work. There’s a $200 prize for the winning team. According to the event website “It’s usually incredible, creative, inspiring, fun, and always bizarre.” Admission at the door is typically $5 – $20, sliding scale. The idea of a competition is still present, but it’s the act of creation that is forefront. It happens several times a year so the wealth gets spread. But Laura admits that, “big problems are ones of resources. The Award Shows are built around heaping resources on a singular spot, and not just $, but (the idea of) ‘bests’ … work gets boring when everything is structured towards being the best... I'd imagine if SQUART had $10,000 attached to it, it would quickly turn into something that resembles the A.W.A.R.D. Show.”

What other examples can we imagine? I just feel in my gut, that emulating So You Think You Can Dance, America’s Best Dance Crew, Dance Your Ass Off, etc. is not the healthiest path for our community to take.


Ishmael Houston-Jones is a dancer, teacher, and writer whose intensely physical improvisations have been a staple of New York's contemporary dance scene for over three decades.

Tiara Sensation - avant-drag pageant

Tiara Sensation
Dec 5, 2010
@ Temple (in San Francisco)

The 1st annual Tiara Sensation avant-drag pageant was birthed into the world by the SomeThing team of VivvyAnne ForeverMore, dj down-E, and Mr. David aka Glamamore (pictured above). It was an only-in-San Francisco, queer-freaks-do-it-better, oh-no-she-didn’t, genius night out. As co-host Mr. David stated just before the pageant winner was announced, all the queens were gorgeous and gave fabulous performances. That wasn’t just generous, it was necessary. Experimental, messy, and postmodern drag in San Francisco (since the Cockettes, since Klubstitute, since Jerome Caja and Phatima at Uranus, since Kiki and Herb, since the early days of Trannyshack…) means that almost every queen or king invents her own genre of performance. That makes pageant judging either ridiculous, impossible, or ummm intuitive. How to compare Alotta Bouté’s sophisticated and super confident Harlem renaissance approach to burlesque with Phatima’s minimalist reciting of Journey’s Don’t’ Stop Believing? Bouté is a high-femme diva with massively voluptuous and real T & A whose wig and costume owe as much to Patti Labelle, Josephine Baker and the un-named black femmes of history as to anything that drag queens (of any race) have originated. Phatima is a gender-queer life artist famous for legendary go-go dancing at Uranus in the 90s. Neither of these performers would ever be included in most drag contests, especially outside of San Francisco. Of course with today’s post/feminist queer eye, Patti is a faux queen and Baker is recognized as pioneering the re-appropriation of minstrel that contemporary SF queens now take for granted.

We’ve seen a faux queen win a major drag title in San Francisco. At Trannyshack we weren’t surprised when drag kings were included in the performance line-up, and we grew to expect all manner of queens with diversely gendered back-up dancers. But when Fauxnique won Miss Trannyshack 2003, she cleared a path not just for other women-who-dress-like-men-who-dress-like-women but she participated in a movement of RG’s (real girls to some, cisgender females to others) queering gay male spaces and stages. Female roles at the drag bar expanded from butch drag king and adoring fan fag-hag to include femme dyke fashionistas, faux queen dignitaries (incl. Scissor Sister Ana Matronic), transwomen, and the new gen of women – queer and hetero, with their boyfriends or boi friends – who feel at home in gay spaces, some who have been bff with queer boys since middle school. It feels awfully suburban to try to describe this scene or give some historical context to explain how a drag pageant in SF could have among it’s four judges, a faux-queen called Hoku Mama Swamp who said she was looking for performances that were retarded or offensive (in a good way), Gina LaDivina, an icon of late night queer San Francisco and celebrated as the $65,000 silicone wonder, and Sister Roma, a local drag celebrity, journalist and community organizer with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters are simultaneously a real holy order, a camp political satire and an international community.

All this attempt at context, but how to describe the performances? Co-hostess VivvyAnne ForeverMore opened the show with an insane number. She and Mona G. Hawd appeared on giant stilts extending from both arms and legs, like lady insects with massive thorax/abdomens. They looked fucking weird, or fucking great. The audience screamed. Cross-species drag. Snap. The red veil and plastic wig kept falling to obscure Vivvyanne’s face. In this kind of poor theater drag show, we expect this kind of home-made craft disaster. In fact we love it. And the only thing better is when the queen figures out how to fix or destroy the failing headdress without fucking up the lipsynch. Snap snap snap.

Contestants were judged in two categories, presentation and talent. For presentation, ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess arrived in gold lamé spandex lyotard and tights with a light bulb on her head and an 8 foot plank of lightbulbs held across her shoulders. A gold six-pointed star made of craftily painted cardboard was attached at her crotch. Nodding her head to the music, the lights came on sequentially, one for each day of Chanukah. Drag as living menorah. She was only the 2nd queen on the stage but many of us felt that we were already looking at the winner.

Political critique flourished at Tiara Sensation. Phatima’s presentation outfit involved a one-of-a-kind, DIY couture, plaid jacket. On the back was a quilted swastika of American flag stars. ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess and Monistat both cited queer protest history in their background videos. ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess took the ‘It gets better’ campaign and flipped it furiously, seizing the youtube airwaves from the insincere politicians and popstars and giving it back to the fierce actions of those who took the streets from MLK Jr to ActUp. With a gospel choir in rainbow-colored robes, ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess led the full congregation in an ecstatic church revival of revolutionary gay pride, lipsynching ecstatically “everything's gonna be all right. It's gonna be okay,” from Dolly Parton’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning. And somehow she used camp to trump irony (just like Dolly!) and we clapped along, healing ourselves and honoring the ancestors by raising energy in the queer Temple. Elijah Minnelli and two backup queens wore full drag face and long wigs with giant six-armed cockroach costumes. After a video of Minnelli crying over spilled milk, the roach queens emerged from behind giant replicas of the milk, cereal and sugar in the video. When Destiny Child’s Survivor burst from the speakers the crowd roared. The cockroach as survivor; the queer as cockroach. The adamant repetitions of “I’m a surviver, I’m not gonna give up, I’m gonna make it” speak as much to a showgirl’s efforts to triumph as to the every-queer in the audience knowing that we have to fight just to survive. Like the cockroach we have always been here and always will be. (Of course the Destiny’s Child video of this song is noted for its silly blacksploitation and sexploitation, a neo-minstrel of black female exotica so problematic that it survives as a cult classic and therefore a drag classic.) As for every queen inventing her own genre, I recognize that there were two numbers in one evening where interspecies drag resulted in glam lady insects.

I’m tired. It’s 3am. The buzz has worn off but I haven’t finished telling you about all the crazy wonderful surprising performances that happened. Mercedes Monroe performed a virtuosic lipsynch (Ella Fitzgerald perhaps?) that seemed it might be too-classic-drag-for-this-pageant. I didn’t pay attention for a couple of minutes but when I returned my gaze to the stage it was clear that something extraordinary was happening. This number was like a work of endurance art, a slow burn that grew in importance to those patient enough to focus. Try to imagine memorizing and replicating an extended vocal jazz scat improvisation of hums and oohs, growls and moans, eees and ayayays. This bitch (as in superstar diva showing us all that we don’t work hard enough) hit every note, every slurred syllable. This was cirque du soleil, you’ve never seen this before, kinda shit. The longer she endured, the closer we gathered together to focus on her mouth’s mimetic acrobatics. At about the 6 minute mark she pulled the mic from its stand and raised the energetic stakes. We went with her, twitching to every perfectly timed pelvic thrust and shoulder punctuation, continuing to marvel that she was still perfectly aligned with the vocals. When the song finished, she was triumphant, and we made a lot of noise in gratitude.

By the way, ‘Lil Miss Hot Mess was crowned Miss Tiara Sensation, and she deserved it. And yah, the whole event was near perfect thanks to the outrageous dedication and vision of all contestants, hosts, judges, and crew. People who think they need to win grants to make art (or community or revolution) really need to visit a weekly drag bar or annual pageant. The audience at Tiara Sensation was really cute and well-dressed despite their sometimes trendy conformity but they were too few in number and I blame that on the too-expensive tickets not on the rain.

PS.

The expensive tickets hopefully generated some profits that will be shared with The Offcenter, a burgeoning crew of queer artists working to establish a venue for queer performance in the wake of the demise of Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory. The Offcenter’s next project is a co-production with my own Zero Performance, a 10-hour marathon of queered performance called Too Much! Jan 23 2011 at Dance Mission, SF. Last year’s Too Much! was legendary by its 5th or 6th hour. Don’t miss it.

Photo of the SomeThing team by Cabure, retouched by Juanita MORE!