What if the world ended in 1983 and George Orwell never got proved wrong and the last song anyone ever heard was Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” but it got stuck on repeat and “Time After Time” never came because we were stuck in “Time After Time” forever? 

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J Halberstam writes that failure is a queer art. 

Failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods…And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.[8] 

Indeed, in a system which is built to reward only success and the linear trajectory that is the apparent route to that conventional end, it does seem rebellious to strive for failure. In “Low Theory,” Halberstam dissects several instances of popular culture through the logics of high theory. In doing so, Halberstam arrives at the apparent understanding that this failure for which they are advocating arises unintentionally and pervasively. Perhaps, then, we imagine that “striving” for failure is indeed not the point.[9] Instead, the important takeaway is that the conditions of existence in this society implicitly instigate failure. How then, is that failure reconceived, reimagined, or redirected to counteract the oppressive expectations that produced it in the first place?

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In her article, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” theorist Sara Ahmed writes, “To become straight means not only that we have to turn toward the objects given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must turn away from objects that take us off this line.”[10]

 

I always remember finding it funny that Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye change out into their traveling clothes wearing undershirts and standing behind their traveling trunks in the 1954 White Christmas (go to 14:30) now I can hardly get through an episode of a 20 minute sit-com without seeing an almost-naked, Adonis-like man with an impossibly cut physique.

 

I ask you, how am I supposed to turn away from that? 

 

My friend, Kayt, in the course of showing a solo in an evening with friends, says “the first time I was memorably horny…” and I am cast back into the pool. Your smooth, tan chest. Mid-aughts, chestnut-colored, Zac Efron bowl cut. Your voice, I remember being quintessentially youthful and masculine. What was your name? Jason? My swim instructor. I have always swum diagonally. 

 

What if the world ends in 2020 and a global pandemic shuts down everything you understand to be and we never get to hear Lady Gaga’s new album?

 

The diagonal stretching from the Northwest corner of DRK to the Southeast pedestrian entrance has become very present.

 

In Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, 4 dancers slide in and out of the stage, performing exact perfect unison, shifting on and off the proscenium stage. They disappear and reappear seamlessly, bleeding into one collective conception of the “choreography”; like a viewfinder panning around and back to its original subject. This magic is accomplished with the structure of the proscenium stage and masking curtains positions just-so to block the audience’s viewing angle.  

 

I am curious about this use of “onstage” and “offstage” in relation to performance of self. Since reading Goffman’s The Performance of Self in Everyday Life, I have wondered about his considerations of “onstage” and “backstage” performances of self in relation to audience and self-conception. How might his metaphorical use of “theatre” of the performance of self be mobilized to understand live performance?

 

To understand this, we must understand some of his definitions. He first defines a “region” as “any place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception.”[11] Goffman defines the “offstage” or the “back region” of performance as “a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course.”[12] 

 

The performance begins with floor lights marking out the space of the dance. These lights remain positioned for the first two-thirds of the work even as the dance spills in and out of the rectangle which the lights contain. Onstage and offstage are glowing, visibly demarcated spaces. 

 

“Very commonly the back region of a performance is…cut off from [where the performance is presented] by a partition and guarded passageway…In general, of course, the back region will be the place where the performer can reliably expect that no member of the audience will intrude…Since the vital secrets of a show are visible backstage and since the performers behave out of character while there, it is natural to expect that the passage from the front region to the back region will be kept closed to members of the audience or that the entire back region will be kept hidden from them.”[13] [14] 

 

After designer run, I asked the dancers to chart their own trajectory through the dance as I attempted to entirely reconfigure the progression of the work. I additionally requested that they chronicle when they believed they were “offstage” (as distinct from “watching”) the dance from the periphery.[15] The presence of a sentinel, observing the dance, connects the dancers and the audience, rendering the spectacle of the moment legible when we become numb to seeing the audience sitting across the way from us. While, perhaps, reliably postmodern, the absence of a real “offstage” in DRK necessitates this mode of existing within the work. It clues the audience members into the constructed sense of separation from performers and viewers and slowly dissolves that binary.

 

At some point, the lights shift. They dim, and glow in a hyper-saturated blue, violet, and even ultra-violet hues. 8 dancers, previously members of a corps of 13 watching the performance unfold, lift the ropes of light from the floor and begin descending on a glowing Madeline, a solo dancer contained by a pen of lights. Michelle remains circling outside the lights, watching, waiting. Four more dancers maintain their position on the outer edges, watching everything. A sound shifts, the lights fall to the floor and snake their way through the hands of their carriers, finding the crevices of DRK—up the stairs, hooked through a pipe, behind the curtain, into the hall—illuminating the hinted impermanence of the “onstage/offstage” binary. 

 

In my first year of undergrad, I took a seminar course called “The Shape of Space.” Based on a textbook by Jeffrey Weeks, we spent the 12-week term debating possibilities for the exact size and shape of the universe. One of the earliest exercises we did in class was to create a Möbius band. 

 

Rachel and Kayt slip offstage and reappear, amidst a section of the other 13 dancers moving about chaotically, clad in an evening gown and an oversized tux. 

 

Play along at home. Cut a 1” strip out of any normal sheet of paper. Note that it has 2 sides; we’ll call them A and B. Take your strip and twist it one half turn so that you’re holding A side up on one end and B side up on the other. Tape this twisted strip together. This is your Möbius strip. Place a pencil in the center of the paper at the corner of a desk. Without lifting your pencil, pull the paper through under the pencil, tracing down the center of the strip. Eventually, your pencil will end right where it began: You’ve traced the entire first “side” of the strip. Notice, every previously blank surface now has a line on it, meaning that you have also traced every side of the strip. The Möbius strip is a 1-sided, 3-dimensional surface. If we were to imagine that we are a 1-dimensional being—like the graphite trace—from a pencil, we could walk forward forever, never noticing a difference between what previously seemed like 2 distinct sides.

 

Rachel and Kayt slip offstage and reappear, amidst a section of the other 13 dancers moving about chaotically, clad in an evening gown and an oversized tux. 

 

Time Af-ter Time Af-ter Time Af-ter Time Af-ter Time Af-ter Time Af-ter Time Af-ter Time Af-ter

 

The clock on the east wall of DRK makes a continuous mechanical sound. Always turning, always grinding.

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Try this: Get a sheet of paper. Draw a circle. Is it a perfect circle? Definitely not, but imagine that it is. In 2-dimensions, you have created a circle. Now, pick up the paper, holding it parallel to the plane of your face. Slowly rotate the paper until it is perpendicular to your face, directly in line with your eyes. The two sides of the circle slowly converge until it appears that they merge, or disappear depending on the thickness of your paper and line. The eccentricity of the circle increases, becoming elliptical, and eventually, linear. 

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Rachel and Kayt slip offstage and reappear, amidst a section of the other 13 dancers moving about chaotically, clad in an evening gown and an oversized tux. 

 

I have always loved titling dances until graduate school. My first “modern” dance. Circadian, inspired by my introductory biology course on circadian rhythms. Did you know blue light triggers non-visual receptors in our eyes that are directly connected to the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain that is the switch that keeps us awake? This is probably why it is 2 am and I am still awake and writing this thesis document, with my blue rope lights lining the wall behind my computer. I like the way my clementine skin looks. Almost like a tomato...

 

I made the dance Circum- in 2018. I liked the possibility for multiplicity within the title. “Circumnavigate,” “Circumference,” “Circumfulgent.” “Circumcise,” Sara Hook says. Never thought of that one. (My voice slips up 2 octaves) “Um, I just, No, I just thought I. No. No. No.”

 

Back Quarter Time Turn, a dance inspired by 3 things: the word “fulgent,” the 9-12 quadrant of a clock, and Cher. After receiving the footage of the performances of Circum- in Brooklyn, I layered three takes on top of each other. The first, performance 1, the second, performance 1 flipped over the y-axis (1-1), the third, performance 2. 

 

The symmetry of 1 and 1-1 initially make them seem like complete opposites, and they are complete opposites. They are also identical spatially and temporally, only differing in direction. Performance 2, at times, diverts completely from performance 1. It still holds similar rhythmic and energetic qualities, but is organized distinctly differently from the other 2, seemingly opposite layers. This different reel shifts the perspective on the previously “opposite” material, placing them in closer proximity. I continued to layer, experimenting with the addition of thirds as a mode of disturbing a perception of existing “oppositeness.”[16] 

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“For despite the self-sameness of the object, I do not see it as the self-same. I never see it as such; what it is cannot be apprehended, as I cannot view the table from all points of view at once. The necessity of moving around the object, to capture more than its profile, shows that the other sides of the object are unavailable to me at the point from which it is viewed, which is why it must be intended.”[17] 

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Ahmed conjectures that Husserl’s claim that the table is the same and we conjure its background illuminates the mundaneness of its “sameness.” The real point of intrigue is how we, as subjects, invent our understanding of the background (the behind) of the table. This history unfolds in relation to our own history, our history with the table, with tables, with what we do with the table. In this way, our subjectivity informs and is informed by the object with which we are doing the doing.[18] 

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The work holds this queer phenomenology in its DNA, as an audience member perceives choreographic information from a new performer, a new angle, in a new spatial configuration, a new temporal pattern, a new location in the room. The infinitely complex relational field of the performance is constructed by each individual performer and audience member. I embed the tools for understanding this through structure, making legible (or at least, apparent) the choreographic rules at play in a given instant: telephone, triangulation, diagonals, add in one by one, parallel walking patterns...An audience member traces these chronicles through their cloudy and obfuscated journey in watching the dance, depth of field, density, texture work to augment that confusion while the logics of form and structure serve to propel the dance forward through time.

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I struggle with convincing 15 dancers to engage with the physical methodologies that I have constructed. Simple instructions litter my feedback as we perform each section of the work: “eyes,” “heels down and back,” “reach,” “fingers,” etc. I remember at the end of February I never wanted 15 of myself, and, while I hope that the somatic interventions open up new possibility for the dancers in IT-WP, I also understand that my expectations of material that I share will be failed. That failure, the loss of wholeness in the translation from me to you and to you in the audience, is conflict, friction, a queer reorientation of my queer body into another’s person. It is a degree of separation, of removal, a severance of authorship. The dance is created in the gaps between my performance and your witnessing of the seeds grown from that performance. This degree of difference also ensures the presence of several reorientations (in space and in dancers) of the same material. It occurs reiteratively through time, informed reflexively and proactively by each instance.  

 

I have had an interest in creating work in the round since my first year of grad school.[19] I believe that this spatial configuration embeds a certain degree of difference in the perception of the work. In dance performance, these differences are multiplicitous: an audience member to a dancer, another audience member to their neighbor, a dancer to a dancer, a dancer to a curtain. The dance is composed of an infinitely complex sequence of relations made impossibly more complex by the implication of dancers as object and subject. While the dance field and high theory and even undergarment advertisements refer to “bodies” existing in a space, it is potentially irresponsible to refute their subjectivity with that language. While an audience member views a dance, they are, certainly, engaging their own history with “bodies” to interpret the subjectivity of a performer. If even subconsciously, when asked after a performance, the average audience member will speak of a performer’s gender, race, technical ability, etc., all in relation to some assumption they constructed that often exists outside the purview of information that was given in a performance or even a program.  

 

“The objects that we direct our attention toward reveal the direction we have taken in life. If we face this way or that, then other things, and indeed spaces, are relegated to the background; they are only ever co-perceived…Perception involves such acts of relegation that are forgotten in the very preoccupation with what it is that we face.”[20] 

 

[8]J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3.

[9]Betsy Brandt, a dramaturg reading an early draft of this writing asks me, “What does it mean for the point of a score to be failure…? If it fails, did it really fail?”

[10]Sara Ahmed, “ORIENTATIONS: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12 no. 4, (January 2011), 554. 

[11]Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (New York: Anchor Books. 1959), 106.

[12]Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 112.

[13]Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 113.

[14]Has the onstage/offstage binary permeated the collective conscious of an average performance viewer so much that they understand a performer standing off to the side of a studio performance is “offstage”? What about an expert performance goer: Do they read this as a sloppy attempt at making the performance space something other than what it is? I attempt to address both extremes, I allow dancers to disappear from the studio, both using the black backdrop as a “wing” of sorts, and also utilizing the physical entrances of the space as entrances and exits into another world. After the “pre-show,” when the doors close, the space of the dance is restricted by a demarcation of the space via floor lights and chairs. This is revealed to be a coy acknowledgement that I have attempted to confine the performance to a specific location in a space that is not, in fact, “unmarked.” The empty, unusable crusts of the space lie unused, until they are used. By the end of the work, these seemingly ignored areas of the physical space—behind the dominating black curtain, up on the balcony, behind the rows of chairs, the piano area—are incorporated as components of the work. Additionally, the continuous entrance and exits and diagonal trajectory from “wing” to exit door are reintroduced to continually confront the “magic” of stage. Reminding me that there is always something outside the scale of the performance.

[15]“One of the most interesting times to observe impression management is the moment when a performer leaves the back region and enters the place where the audience is to be found…for at these moments one can detect a wonderful putting on and taking off of character. “ Goffman,Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 121. We attempted to blur this liminal space throughout the performance: choreographing the entrances and exits within the space, marking the boundaries of the “performance” space and continuing to perform outside of them, even as the boundaries expand.

[16]One of the movement threads through the work is a collection called “Trios.” It was created using what I call “generator” pieces—sections of material that sedimented into and through my improvisational choices. Five of the dancers know a phrase called “A”. Five of the dancers know what began as an exact symmetrical version of this phrase “A’”, but later devolved into floating back and for the between symmetry and unison. Five of the dancers know an entirely different phrase. We see the phrase 3 times, once as A, once as a duet for 8 dancers: A and A’. And lastly as three trios: A, A’, and 3rd. Actually, we see it 4 times. The first time, Michelle and Kayt attempt to recall the phrasing of their versions A and A’ while engaging with spatial and energetic scores, resulting in a confused, spiraling, rambling duet that circumscribes the space, both clearing away the confusion that came before and instilling a new logic into the space. Michelle is first pinned within the lights, circling and yet triangulating between Rachel and Kayt—the offstage defectors.

[17]Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” 548.

[18]Ahmed, "Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology," 551.

[19]I think partly there’s a logic to seeking a new mode of presenting when most of my work up to this point has been very traditionally proscenium.

[20]Sara Ahmed, "Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology," 546-547.