DELINQUENT MUSINGS, a little about me

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

Fall 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Keith Hennessy
Winter Solstice, 2008


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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


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


3. Ostertag, ibid 2008.

Tracing the Roots of Contact Improvisation in the Bay Area 1972-1982

Contact Improvisation defies any specific definition or historical analysis. The dancer most often credited for CI’s development is ambivalent about his role and some of CI’s early participants have divergent stories about the development of the work. Following improvisational process and the intelligence of the dance itself, early practitioners resisted a suggestion to codify the form and certify the teachers. Telling a Bay Area history is further complicated by an attempt to counter-balance historical favoring of NY artists and histories. And most histories are reduced to narratives of single male heroes, dismissing or minimizing the significant contributions of women and collectives.

In Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, Cynthia Novack tracks CI’s roots to a variety of sources including: 1950’s and 60’s popular dance cultures, NY and SF avant garde dance-performance-theatre scenes, social movements for gender and sex liberation, somatics and new body therapies, and the influence of Japanese and Chinese martial arts forms, specifically aikido and tai chi.

Before CI’s unofficial naming in 1972 there were many experiments, exercises, performances and scores that engaged a new kind of touch and weight exchange; more engaged with gravity and less dependent on gender. Key American artists and events included Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, The Living Theatre, The Performance Group, Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton’s Lightfall, Nita Little’s Crawling Under/Over score, Simone Forti’s Huddle, Mary Fulkerson’s Anatomical Release, Robert Ellis Dunn’s composition class at the Cunningham studio and many more.

Brown, Rainer, Forti and many others who were central to dance’s evolution in the 60’s and 70’s spent time in the Bay Area working with Anna Halprin. A dance pioneer who moved to Marin County in the 50’s with her husband Lawrence Halprin, Anna merged influences as divergent as the Beats, Fluxus, Civil Rights, human anatomy, child developmental movement, landscape design, experimental film, physical comedy, and a deep commitment to being in and listening to nature. Until recently Halprin’s role in contemporary dance history has been under-reported. A major museum exhibit produced in France (presented in SF at Yerba Buena, 2008) and a wonderful new book, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, by Janice Ross recognize Halprin’s seminal contributions.

Contact Improv’s birth is most often attributed to a series of experiments in 1972-73 instigated by Steve Paxton. Paxton had been researching, teaching and performing new approaches to dance (and life) with Merce Cunningham/John Cage, Judson Church Dance Theatre (1961-64), and Grand Union (1970-76). The Judson performances, by an evolving collective that included over 40 artists, are recognized by many as a key ‘moment’ in the evolution and rupture called post-modern dance.

Paxton staged two pioneering events in 1972. Magnesium, a project created during a Grand Union residency at Oberlin College in January 1972. The performance involved Paxton and eleven male students on a large wrestling mat in a near wild series of falls, leaps and collisions followed by Paxton’s signature ‘stand’ or ‘small dance’. The small dance is the micro movement of the body’s balancing, adjusting, sensing and responding to gravity. The whole piece, documented on video by Steve Christiansen, lasted just over ten minutes. Local choreographer and dance advocate Brenda Way was working at Oberlin during this era and played a key role in nurturing early CI experiments.

Six months later there was a five-day performance installation, or open process performance, at the John Weber Gallery in New York. With a $2000 grant Steve invited 12-15 students and colleagues he’d met while teaching at Oberlin, Bennington, and Rochester to live and work together for two weeks. The performances, lasting five hours daily, were presented more as a visual art event-happening-installation rather than as a dance concert. Audiences were small, coming and going at their own pace. Christiansen videotaped daily providing immediate feedback to the impromptu company. In the video Chute, a ten-minute montage of clips from Weber, we can recognize the falling, spiraling, yielding and flying of two bodies that has become a transnational language called Contact Improvisation.

At the center of the experiment called Contact Improvisation is a (utopian?) proposal for democratic social relations reduced to its simplest form: an improvised encounter between two people. Referring to the usual choreographic process as a dictatorship of teachers and choreographers creating watered-down versions of themselves, Paxton attempted a less authoritarian form of leadership based on suggestion, invitation, improvisation, and collaboration (Novack, p. 54). CI reflects the counter-cultural context from which it emerged. Feminist and youth resistance to hierarchy and tradition responded to a harsh realization of the injustices of American ‘democracy’. Challenges to consumerism and capitalist recuperation of culture led some people to an anti-private property lifestyle, inspiring artists to make art beyond product or object. Live, immediate, collaborative encounters were prioritized: the Happening, the Action, the Collective. By 1972, the Vietnam War was ending in disaster. Nearly 60,000 Americans and over two million Vietnamese were dead (Numbers are contested, no official Viet count). The leadership of the Black Panthers had been mostly killed by police or were in prison for life. Four white students had been shot at Kent State and millions had heard of vibrant queer resistance to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a NY gay bar. Paxton, reflecting back on the era and considering CI’s development in Argentina and Israel during political crises in the 1990’s, suggests that CI might be a shock absorber for social trauma.

Soon after the John Weber shows, three of the dancers, Nita Little, Curt Siddall and Nancy Stark Smith, moved to the Bay Area. Home to the country’s most influential counter-culture, the Bay Area featured a vibrant experimental performance scene that included historically significant artists such as The SF Mime Troupe, Anna Halprin and the psychedelic drag family The Cockettes.

Theresa Dickenson moved to the Bay Area in 1969 after five years of dancing with Twyla Tharp and encounters with The Grand Union. Eager to work both collectively and experimentally she performed with the women’s collectives Freefly and Motion and co-founded Tumbleweed in 1973. Initially a vehicle for Dickenson’s choreography, the group became a collective in which all members created dances often using CI in both choreographic research and improvised performances. Consuelo Faust and Rhodessa Jones were among the dozen or so members. Dickenson recalled that, “Working collectively, intimately, and improvisationally turned out to be good preparation for Contact when it showed up.”

Contact Improv was first seen and practiced in the Bay Area in February 1973. Jani Novak, who had been a buddy of Dickenson’s at the Cunningham studio in NY, organized a series called “People Are Dancing” which included choreographed and improvisational work as well as jams. Dickenson notes that it was common for the audience to dance after or even during the show. In February the series hosted Steve Paxton and the Oberlin/Weber dancers who were touring the West Coast with a show called You Come We’ll Show You What We Do. The group included Paxton, Nita Little, Karen Radler, Nancy Stark Smith, and Curt Siddall. The performances and subsequent jams were presented at both the Natural Dance Studio (owned by Nina Wise and Susan Jackson) in Oakland and at the Firehouse Theatre (now the Lumiere) in San Francisco.

Little taught CI at the Natural Dance Studio in September of 1974, which was, to her knowledge, the first official on-going CI class in California. She remembers the studio hosting a number of events in the mid-70’s including a CI Dance Marathon. She, Smith and others organized a Contact Symposium in 1975 to discuss issues. Meanwhile they were still getting together with Steve Paxton and others to tour CI under the name (and variations) of ReUnion. Smith printed a couple Contact newsletters while living in Marin County and in 1975 the newsletter evolved to become Contact Quarterly. Based in Northampton MA, the biannual CQ continues to be a living archive for developments in the forms, communities, evolutions and reverberations of contact improv.

In 1976 two pioneering men’s collectives gave their first performances in San Francisco, The Gay Men’s Theatre Collective and Mangrove. The GMTC, influenced by feminist process and politics, created Crimes Against Nature, a dance-theatre hybrid fantasia of coming out stories, radical critique and queer visioning. Mangrove improvised performances that included spoken text and physical comedy as well as the intimate and playful touch and weight that was common to CI. After meeting at local jams, five men - Curt Siddall, Jim Tyler, John LeFan, Aaron Hemmen and Byron Brown - performed at five different venues around the Bay Area. They charged $2 a show. Prioritizing performance improvisations Mangrove became one of the most visible CI ensembles through local, national and international tours.

I asked Mangrove dancer Byron Brown about favorite moments that seem to define the time. He mentioned several, including: “Jani Novak doing Boko Maru evenings at a warehouse in SOMA where you were blindfolded, brought upstairs in a freight elevator, ushered into a large space with classical music, had your shoes removed and had warm oil poured over your feet before you could see anything.” Mangrove collaborated with Tumbleweed (men and women’s collectives together) and with Ed Mock, a Black jazz dancer and virtuoso improviser. Brown also recounted a Mangrove performance at Terry Sendgraff’s annual birthday event in which they wore paper suits that tore until the men were naked.

Brown remembers, “There was an amazing alternative dance/theatre community in the 70's. It was alive and fluid with people collaborating in different ways as well as watching, visiting and supporting each other. There were many venues in the form of small and midsize studios where it was easy to work and perform and publicity was fairly easy and audiences were interested.”

Sara Shelton Mann, a protégé of Murray Louis and Alwin Nikolai, first danced Contact with Peter Bingham and Andrew Harwood in Canada. Illustrating the migratory lineage that makes dance history, Little reminded me that she was Harwood’s first CI teacher in the mid-70’s in Vancouver. Mann founded Contraband in 1979 and moved to the Bay Area soon after. Mangrove dissolved into a non-profit called Mixed Bag Productions which produced a series of seminal projects and eventually was transformed into the administrative home-base for Mann’s Contraband, a company that integrated CI in research and teaching, and became a leading proponent of contact improvisation in contemporary performance.

I asked Ernie Adams, who toured with Mangrove to Europe in 1980, how he would describe the Bay Area dance/performance scene during the 70's? Adams responded, “Experimental, collaborative, collective, youth oriented, sensual, sexual, artistically and spiritually driven, a quest for self, for an alternative to modern dance and ballet, a move away from abstract art, a move towards dance as life...” He concluded with, “It was a great time to be a dancer in San Francisco.”

Martin Keogh moved to the Bay Area in 1978 and started dancing CI in 1980. In his first year of study he worked with nineteen teachers. Keogh recalls, “I arrived doing contact at the first big apex of the form. In 1980 there were thirteen contact improv companies in the US and Canada. In 1980 Reagan was elected and things changed! By 1982 there was not one CI company still in existence.” For a few years Keogh ran the only jam in the Bay Area at the Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. Then the Harbin Jams started which brought people together for intensive retreats, and inspired Andrew Clibinoff to propose an annual festival. Founded as a collaborative venture by many of the local teachers The West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival (WCCIF) became an annual gathering for the local community as well as a model for CI events around the world. Despite the gaps between funded dance companies and those who perform CI, contact-based performances are still frequent in much of the world, primarily in the context of the growing number of CI-related festivals from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires, from Rome to Seattle.


Author’s note:
This is a first installment of a larger research project. Future work will include a discussion of Bay Area dialect or style. I apologize to any and all for errors and omissions. Your corrections and additions, personal stories and favorite events are very welcome. Thanks: keith@circozero.org

NOTES:
Paxton, Steve. CI Founders’ Talk facilitated by Keith Hennessy at CI36, Juniata College, June 2008.

Novack, Cynthia J. Sharing the Dance, Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Univ of Wisconsin: Madison. 1990.

Ross, Janice. Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance. UC Press. 2007.

All quotes are from email or telephone interviews with the author.

Grand Union (1970-1976): Evolved from Yvonne Rainer’s Continuous Project Altered Daily in which rehearsal process was integrated into the performance. Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglass Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer.

KEITH HENNESSY'S TOP 10 LOCAL DANCE EVENTS OF 2005

(In no particular order)

1. Cunning & Guile , Chris Black & Ken James, Cartoon Art Museum

2. House of LaBeija dancers, Jack Ya Body Dance Series, curated by Traci Bartlow for Hip Hop Theater Fest 2005, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

3. everything by Fauxnique aka Monique Jenkinson, at Trannyshack, Tuesdays at midnight at the Stud.

4. ButterFLEE , Jose Navarette, performed at ManiFestival, Dance Mission Theatre.

5. Solo , Amara Tabor-Smith, excerpt from Urban Bush Women directed by Jawole Willa Jo Zolar, performed at Greening New Orleans Benefit, Brava Theatre.

6. Limerance , Twincest (aka Jez Kuono'ono Lee & Shawn Tamaribuchi), performed at Passing - Less Than Satisfactory, CounterPULSE.

7. Dear Fidel , The Dance Brigade, Dance Mission Theatre.

8. Flyaway Productions/ Jo Kreiter 's retrospective, Zaccho Studio.

9. Susan Voyticky on aerial hoop and Emily Leap on trapeze, various sites.

10. Touched , Jess Curtis/Gravity, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

*BONUS And the best dance of the year was by Keriac (RIP March 17, 2005) dancing in her bed a few days before she died.

ONLY IN SAN FRANCISCO? Homegrown trends and traditions (2005)

Observations and projections by Keith Hennessy, guest performance curator Bay Area Now 2005.
Written for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 2005 catalogue

• Burlesque, sideshow, circus, fire arts and a return to artists who entertain.

For the past decade there’s been a steady increase in aerial acrobats, fire spinning and sculpting, nostalgic & campy burlesque, and the word circus being used to describe just about everything from the entire genre of Tom Waits meets gypsy/Roma music to the Schwartznegger election. After years of deconstructing the spectacle, entertainment is back. For a few years anyone who could spin fire or climb 25 feet of fabric earned respect but that moment is over and for a few dancers, aerialists, contortionists, fire sculptors and spinners, and even hula-hoopists, it’s all about quality now, pushing craft and performance and obsessive training to the next level. It used to be that half of the adventurous contemporary dancers in SF were working as strippers and erotic masseuses, dividing their time between sex work and art. Now the sex work is art, whores R us, and all the straight people are talking publicly about butt sex and SM.
(Harlem Shake, Velocity, Vau de Vire, Devilettes, Xeno, Mystic Family Circus, Jade-blue Eclipse, The Lollies, Flaming Lotus Girls, Diamond Daggers, SF Circus Center, Odeon Bar, Frank Olivier, Fairy Butch, Va Va Voom, Big Burlesque/Fat Bottom Revue, Circo Zero)

Then there’s the almost high art cousin of all this entertainment: Aerial Dance. From annual festivals in SF, Boulder, and Boston to a plethora of suspended dancers everywhere from Vegas (Soleil) to off-Broadway (de la Guarda), from Half Dome (Bandaloop) to Islais Creek (Flyaway), aerial dance may be on the rise in the US and beyond but the Bay will always be seen as the source (Motivity, Zaccho...)

• Youth Speaks-inspired slam and spoken word.

Yes the hip hop generation has been around for years and slams are almost as ancient, but until you’ve been to the Living Word Fest or an event organized by Youth Speaks you haven’t seen the dynamo future of the word performed. Youth Speaks has mentored, inspired, incited and reclaimed urban youth voices that dare to break social taboos of hip coolness with intensity, intimacy, and wild honesty.
Of course we’ve still got the world’s most abundantly queer and kinky lit scene with half the authors in pervy anthologies around the English world coming from our libertine Bay. Performance venues range from bathhouse (Smegma at Eros) to STD testing site (Smack Dab at Magnet), with specialty events for any and all kinds of erotica (Blacksheets, Good Vibes, SF in Exile, Center for Sex & Culture).

• Trannybois and gender queers of the Mission-based dyke/post-dyke world.

SF has always been among the gayest, the queerest, the most feminist of art and performance communities, participating in a homegrown, Wild West meeting of art and politics, experimentation and evolution of art practices that’s as old as the first Gold Rush brothels. Today’s tranny fags, drag kings, and gender queer rappers, strippers, choreographers, writers and actors are appearing in many of the clubs, galleries, theaters, and art spaces around the Bay.
And then there are the new faces and voices of Hip Hop, which seem to branch into and out of both gender queer and progressive spoken word scenes. The folks in this list don’t even know each other, but they’re all pulling and pushing the squarest tendencies of hip hop mass culture where the kids just know it has to go. (Katastrophe, Bamuthi, Deep Dick Collective, Aya de Leon, Sisterz of the Underground, JenRO, Skorpio, New Style Motherlode, and Micaya’s annual Hip Hop Fest)

• Burning Man-inspired participatory art happenings.

These ubiquitous events (Bunny Jam anyone?) defy boundaries between club cultures and street arts, folk arts and Situationist interventions, kitsch and eco-art, mixing money with arte povera, from East Oakland and Hunters’ Point warehouses to the Commonwealth Club. Burning man is all kinds of things to all kinds of people but despite the way too many rowdy drunks hooting at bare flesh while showing none of their own, it remains one of the world’s biggest participatory art festivals, with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on making interactive sculpture, installation, architecture, vehicles and performances. Even the biggest gossip and political debate re: B’man is about the quality & control of the art. (borg2.org)

• The ladyboys, faux queens, drag & genderfuck superstars of Trannyshack

Nine years ago, just when we thought avant-drag had atrophied or calcified, long before the Cockettes movie reminded us that SF is all about genderfuck and glam anarchy, Hecklina started Trannyshack, SF’s best and cheapest site for weekly performance art. Yes I miss some of the crazy shit that happened there in the early years (now you’ll start reminiscing about Uranus and Fiend) but where else can a bio-girl named Fauxnique play a man playing a girl and win a drag queen contest with a conceptually fierce lipsynch performance and a chorus of modern dancers? Only in SF. Go now cuz Hecklina’s thinking to shut down the T’shack when it hits 10. Queens still hate to age!

• A fierce renewal of DIY anarcho culture

From the activist runway of excess (Gay Shame) to pay-what-you-can warehouse events in Oakland (it’s been too long since Studio Four, Diesel Cathedral, and other SF warehomes!), from anti-capitalist fashion recycling in the middle of Ellis Street (In the Streets/Luggage Store) to daytime punk shows and late-night open mics at 16th & 24th St. BART, the newest breed of activist artists continues a long tradition of enriching the abandoned sites of city, body and imagination. (Kudos to whoever wraps/knits the dead bikes and locks of the Mission)

• Art about torture and war at home and around the world

From Ferlinghetti to Mattilda, from Extra Action to Brass Liberation Orchestra, from Dance Brigade to Campo Santo, the dance studios, theaters, bookstores, house parties and streets of the Bay are alive with political inquiry, protest art, community fundraisers, strategic mobilizations and poetic terrorism. Whether it’s the air we breathe, the ground we march & skate on, or the waves we surf on, San Francisco, & it’s Nor Cal surrounds, flaunt an unbroken lineage of weaving art with politics and spirituality that’s tough to recognize anywhere else.

PS.
The best next thing: a return to body art & body-based performance. Part of an international renewal from China to art school kids studying Ana Mendieta, Karen Finley, and others as the new canon. Maybe it’s part of the same late 70’s/early 80’s revival that brings us disco-inspired electro. I don’t care. Just keep finding new ways to get naked, push limits of belief and comprehension, obsessively leak or contain body fluids, and use your body to reframe alarming social contexts.

PPS.
There’s a missing paragraph about dance, the work that’s closest to my own trends and traditions. When I get to it, I’ll mention Leslie Seiters’ little known dance company, Scott Wells, Erika Shuck Performance Project, Navarette x Kajiyama, Jess Curtis/Gravity, Lauren Steiner/Eat Cake, Lizz Roman taking over the ceiling of Cellspace, the weekly contact jams at 848 (soon to be CounterPULSE) in SF and 8th St in Berkeley, Inkboat and the East Bay scene that weaves butoh, art punk rock, Action Theater, and more...
And probably something about how Dance Brigade, Joe Goode, Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Zaccho, and others continue to be relevant, even from an ‘underground’ point of view... something about the inability for 99% of dance to remain outside of mainstream cultures.