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!

Keith Hennessy wins a Bessie!

2009 Bessie Award & Thank you speech
October 18, 2010
Symphony Space, NYC

After an intro by HT Chen and a short video of Crotch by Charles Dennis, Yvonne Rainer read this text written by Ishmael Houston-Jones:

For combining virtuosic improvisation, the history of Western art in seven minutes, and playful, sexy, shamanistic trickery that both enchanted and terrified at Dance Theater Workshop in 2009, a NY Dance and Performance Award goes to Keith Hennessy for his work Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal or trauma…)

Keith:

(unscripted)
Thanks everybody. It’s a funny decision you make. I grew up in Canada, I wanted to be a dancer, so I thought I had to move to New York and I accidentally hitchhiked across the country to San Francisco and never left. That was the right place for me to be but you always want to be at least a little bit in the New York dance family and this is really important to be seen here, so thank you.

For all those people who have been turned down as many times as I have for funding, I want you to know that I made this piece for fifty dollars in seven days.

It takes a million people to make a solo so I want to thank
(reading)
Stephanie Maher and Uli Kaiser who run Ponderosa a dance research site and summer camp in rural Germany where a draft of this work was first presented.

I want to thank Georg Kindler, the resident beekeeper, philosopher and Joseph Beuys scholar at Ponderosa for his lecture on Joseph Beuys on which the central text of the piece is based.

I want to thank the people at L’Arsenic in Lausanne who supported a short residency and the premiere of Crotch.

In New York at DTW, I want to thank Carla Peterson for trusting me and for following through, also to the staff who were super great to me and the people who were the best there were actually the interns, who make so little, do all the work and then run the show.
Big thanks to Ryan Eggensperger, who was my NY stage manager and onstage assistant.
To Don Shewey, my brother whose NY apartment is my home.
To Trajal Harrell, Timothy Murray and everyone who worked to feature my work in Movement Research Journal.
To Jonah Bokaer for doing the early bookings of improvs that Carla saw.
To Ishmael HJ who just inspires me and keeps me coming to NY.

In SF, I want to thank to my fiscal sponsor CounterPULSE and my assistant Julie Phelps.

To Joseph Beuys – you are my Andy Warhol.

And finally thanks to Seth Eisen because if he hadn’t loved me and left me I wouldn’t have felt the intensity of sadness, despair and shame that inspired the making of this piece.


Video of the award and thank you speech, posted by Don Shewey:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci4RZSvjSGw

To see a full list of 2009/2010 awardees:
http://www.dancenyc.org/dance-nyc/bessies/bessie-news.php?id=22

Beuys, Queer, Circus

The following text was written as part of expanded promotional materials or background stories for my solo performance

Crotch (all the Joseph Beuys references in the world...)

.

Because

Crotch

will soon be presented at Bluecoat Performance Space in Liverpool (Nov 12, 2010) and Shotgun's Ashby Stage in Berkeley (Nov 21, 2010), I'm posting these stories here.

Beuys, Queer, Circus

Blogging about Crotch and more

Keith Hennessy

BEUYS

What about Joseph Beuys interests you?

I dig Beuys because he talked to a dead rabbit, lived with a coyote in NYC,

planted 10,000 oaks, broke the rules at an art school by letting everyone

attend, co-founded the Green Party and then was rejected for being a

visionary freak, gave lectures as art, linked Dada to Fluxus to Performance

to Activism, had a persona as recognizable as Warhol (for a while), and used

honey to show life in action, flow, circulation, and magic.

Beuys is an art history giant in Europe and I wanted more of my friends to

know who he is. Even though I made this piece in Switzerland, if I lived in

Europe I would never have made it, because he's been exhibited too much,

written about too much and quoted too much. But I figured that if Matthew

Barney can quote him over and over and it's rarely or never mentioned, then

I can revisit Beuys' work and siphon his images for some fuel of my own.

QUEER

Is Queer Performance a genre?

Queer performance is not really a genre. It’s more of an attitude, an attitude towards the body, especially its sex and gender, and how that body is or is not resonant with social norms and rules.

Queer performance is also a historical marker, describing a wave of theatrical action, on stage and off, that emerged symbiotically to the massive action/visibility/struggle/celebration of queerness during the gay male AIDS times, from the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s. Queer is also a weave of historical performance legacy, with no beginning and no end.

Queer is an alchemical detournement of insult and slander, of violence and rejection. That means magical transformation and recycling of the master’s tools. To perform queer is to embody, shamelessly, the shadows of a culture so colonized, it can’t recognize it’s own losses and failures.

Queer embraces social disruption in favor of sexual liberation, and that includes in the theater, as well as in the streets, the family, the school and beyond.

OK, if genre is how a work of art relates to audience (comedy, noir, cartoon, camp), then queer is a qualifier of genre, or an affect on genre. For example, one could be macho or sissy (or a sissy macho!) and still identify as male. Queer is that kind of description.

My work is queer because I found my performance voice in the 80s and was deeply influenced and inspired by the cultural explosion of that gay old time. My work continues to be queer because it celebrates &/or investigates faggotry, lesbian theory, camp, desire, shame, abjection, loss, LGBTIQ solidarity, and is always on the lookout to eradicate images of misogyny, heterosexism, white supremacy, and other deeply embedded and embodied shit that makes us less free.

Queer performance is a utopian phantasia. It fails, but it fails fabulously.

CIRCUS

How does your circus training influence your work?

Circus is about putting on a show, entertaining, all in the family. Most

performance art either challenges the spectacle, or ironically works with

the idea of putting on a show to draw attention to the manipulation and

falseness and pretentiousness of the spectacle, i.e., its ideological

agendas in service of the dreadful hegemony! And performance tends towards

celebrations of the abject or queer or taboo, and therefore is not for kids

of all ages. My work tends to hover in the inbetweeny spaces where spectacle

and anti-spectacle are debated, where children's theater and conceptual

installation rub together. Also, circus training helps me look young but

makes me feel old. And it reminds me of why I play with risk and danger in

the face of a culture obsessed with safety and comfort while obliterating

any recognition of the dreadful hegemony at work in the manufactured consent of comfort and safety. That is, security makes us stupid and weak and racist. This response is starting to feel more like a circus performance

than a promo blog.

The Mission School (of Painting)

I was asked to respond to the question, "Was there ever a Mission School?" for an upcoming catalogue accompanying Barry McGee's retrospective at Brooklyn Art Museum. When I told a few friends about my attempt to document some other Mission 'schools' it seemed that most of them were not aware of any aesthetic or market phenomenon called The Mission School, which was first named by art writer Glen Helfand to identify a certain 'neo-folk' 'urban rustic' hybrid under the influence of graffiti, comics, mural traditions, skate and zine cultures, recycled wood, sign painting, and SFAI art school painting concerns, that emerged in the mid-90s as a kind of Bay Area style, centered in the Mission neighborhood. The style, or collection of resonanting styles, is linked to many artists including the following: Barry McGee (Twist), Alicia McCarthy, Chris Johanson, Andrew Schoultz, Ruby Neri (Reminisce), Margaret Kilgallen (Meta), Rigo 23, Aaron Noble, Clare Rojas.

Work shown above: Clare Rojas (top) and Margaret Kilgallen (lower). Kilgallen demonstrates one of the Mission school exhibition tactics, a group of tightly bunched paintings that accumulate to mural-scale.

A few of the schools I know in the Mission (in-process draft)

Keith Hennessy

For those of us who were in the Mission before the mid-90s and are still here, the idea of a Mission School (of painting) is an odd joke. The work that blossomed here at that time can’t be separated from the vibrant and complex scenes – artistic & political, migrant & resident – that have made this neighborhood noteworthy for generations. Naming a Mission School in the 90s masks the problematic complexity of the School’s roots in both SF indigeneity and gentrification. San Francisco and Oakland in the 90s were vibrant and engaging sites for artists and activists. Pre 9/11, pre-dot-com boom and bust, street artists around the Bay were mostly ignoring the gentrification of the world. We watched the rents get higher as more and more of us moved to Oakland (or LA, Portland, Tennessee, Berlin…). We flooded the streets in ’91 to protest the first Gulf War and whether we were queer or not, we were somehow moved by both the devastation of AIDS and the queer cultural tsunami that crashed against the hetero shores. Many of us, but not all, blossomed in this fast-paced and turbulent time. But the art structures that supported us (or not) and the aesthetics that inspired us (or not) had been evolving since at least the early 70s, since the cultural revolutions of Chicanos, feminists, gays and lesbians rewrote the text of San Francisco streets, especially in the Mission and Castro and the evershifting borders between them.

Mission High School

– the visual focus and community center. A big underfunded vibrant public highschool that frames the south end of Dolores Park, where Latino teens and SF Mime Troupe audiences and gay guys in speedos and hella hipsters and dog walkers and babysitters and tennis players and pot/smack dealers and the homeless have been getting schooled for generations. Doloroes Park is also home to both the Dyke and Trans marches and countless other gatherings of folk that make up the other America of Mission School ethics and aesthetics, which in DC are referred to as San Francisco values.

Mission Mural School

– since way before the mid-90s, thousands have come here, and even more have grown up here, getting schooled in the art of public wall painting. From Muralistas Feministas to Galeria de la Raza’s digital murals, from Precita Eyes ongoing schooling and public touring to Clarion Alley Mural Project and all the alleys where Mexican/Mission style murals meet the latest trends of art school kids and the anarcho politics of everyday life in the activist Mission.

Mission School of Public Performance

– From weekly low-rider processions on Mission Street in the 70s to Contraband’s dance rituals in the Gartland Pit at 16th & Valencia (site of a landlord arson that killed elderly and disabled tenants) to Jo Kreiter’s 2010 performance with dancers flying along the epic muraled walls of the Women’s Building on 18th Street. The Aztec dancers are probably the most ongoing phenomenon of Mission School performance. They always lead the annual dia de low muertos procession and can be seen blessing many events, from the anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium to marking the site of a recent murder at the corner of 24th & Shotwell.

New College of California

– Now a dead and defunct school but its legacy lives on in the visions and labors of the many of us who studied and/or taught here when no other university wanted us. From 1971 to 2008, NCOC was a site for leftist schooling, community organizing, political fundraisers, feminist psychology, socially-engaged conferencing, and three generations of activist artists and lawyers.

The book stores of the Mission

– For many of us, this is where we really went to school, I mean in the traditional sense, of (re)learning how to read books and the world. Modern Times is the flagship of leftist bookstores but it has always thrived in relationship to a social and spatial eco-system that includes so many other independent (say what!) bookstores and zineshops including Adobe, Dog Eared, Borderlands, Needles and Pins, Goteblüd, Bolerium, Forest… And most of these bookstores exhibit local art, and talks about local art.

The Roxie

– This is where Mission residents and tourists go to get schooled in independent film, specially the low-budget, the local, the weird, the queer, and the dissident.

Dance will never be sold like art, so there will never be a noted

Mission school of dance

that is written about in the NY Times. But there is and has been for 30+ years a Mission school of dance that is marked by some of the same hybridities and tendencies of what is referred to as Mission school painting. Thousands of dancers live here and come here to take class and rehearse. Mission dance schools include Dance Mission (home of the world’s longest running feminist dance company, The Dance Brigade), ODC, Capoiera Abada (now renting the former site of Dancers’ Group/Footwork, site of an occupation in 2000 when the dot-com era landlords raised the rent 400%, forcing eviction), and the many smaller studios in Project Artaud and the Sears building. Dancers in the Mission rehearse all year long for Carnival which showcases dances of the entire world, with a particular focus on dances of the Americas.

The Mission (like any complicated, dense, and historically rich neighborhood) has a diverse and rich eco-system of schools, that share and/or compete for, limited architectural, social, and fiscal resources. If we scratch the surface of Mission School painting to reveal the values, ethics, aesthetics of the movement, we find the same things taught at

Meadows-Livingston School

, a 30-student elementary school for African-Americans looking for any alternative to education systems that will always expect them to fail. Meadows-Livingston operates out of a converted farmhouse under a massive freeway vortex at Cesar Chavez & Potrero. Called

The Farm

when it was reclaimed in the 70s, the building has been host to punk shows, Mime Troupe performances, countless exhibits, artist housing, the Pickle Family circus, and Survival Research Laboratories, while also operating as an actual urban farm for Mission youth. Clearly this scene is a significant tap root for Mission School painters who hybridize high and low, folk and pop, legal and illegal, cartoon and fresco, white dude and everyone else.

The Burrito School

– If you are what you eat then the Mission School is about 50% burrito, the SF indigenous hybrid of Mexican fast food. Without El Toro, Cancun, El Farolito, La Taqueria, Papalote, Mission Villa, La Rondella, El Tonayense, El Mariachi, and the margaritas at Puerto Allegre the Mission painters would have starved or made some other kind of art. The late night crowd is also well-fed on Salvadoreña and now Oaxacan food, especially pupusas.

PS

about nationalism and capitalism

The visual and conceptual tendencies of the Mission School can be spotted in trendy art scenes all over the world. That is to say, that globalism with its inescapable hegemonic tendencies, is always in effect. What makes a dollar in San Francisco will inspire and influence the work that gets made elsewhere. And vice versa. We used to call it co-optation or selling out.

Keith Hennessy is one of tens of thousands of queer and dance refugees in the Bay Area. He has been working (studying, teaching, performing indoors and out, protesting, altering billboards) in the Mission since 1982 and lives on Folsom near 24th.