Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainlsey e. tharp. Photo by Hillary Goidell.
Barbeque Bacchanal: forever failing and the Perversion of America
By Marlena Gittleman
It started with hot dogs, grilled outside the performance venue and served for free. As the audience licked ketchup and mustard off their fingers, Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp came onstage in classic americana but oh-so-gay uniforms: denim jackets, baggy denim jeans and Carhartt work pants over American flag string bikini and deep V-cut one-piece bathing suits. It started again underwater, maybe in a womb, with muffled currents playing over the speakers. tharp and Dyas took turns shining a flashlight towards one another, more an imperfect source of illumination than a spotlight.
Over the course of about 70 minutes, forever failing unfolded into a wild romp through (American) genres and everyday performance sites: the game show, the political speech, the beauty pageant, the military exercise, the strip club, the western, the music video, the open field, the karaoke room. As the duo traversed these spaces through overlapping movement vignettes, they also pushed them to their limits, teased out, exaggerated, and perverted them.
From the outset, the two showed their dynamism and versatility as dancers, moving from off-axis tilts and inversions into athletic lifts and backbends. They stood on opposite ends of the stage and sprinted towards each other, sometimes colliding and falling. They breathed heavy. They embodied a startling range of figures and affects. And, simply, they were two friends putting on a show to an audience seated right on the edges of the stage, an un-elevated wooden dance floor in the middle of an old power plant. There were slow, grotesque, obscene facial expressions with tongues lolling and licking, there was orgasmic grappling and silly yelps of pleasure.
ainsley e. tharp and Clarissa Rivera Dyas. Photo by Hillary Goidell.
tharp and Dyas played with iconography, willfully profaning a sense of “everything we hold dear,” and it was delightful. The two stood side-by-side in the corner against flowery and gold glittery backdrops, and they quickly cycled through a series of arm and hand gestures: military salute, hands in prayer, hands in vulvar triangle, sign of the cross, waacking arms, finger guns. After a few repetitions, one slipped a tongue through fingers in a V-shape—you know the one.
These types of quick shifts drove the work, like when tharp stood so closely behind Dyas that they became nearly one body (a recurring motif): comic vaudevillian arms through the other’s arms behind their back. Then something else: tharp pulled out a thin woven American flag scarf and started to lasso it around Dyas’s head. Dyas grabbed it, knotted it on as a headscarf, the tail past their knees. tharp glanced over, then dropped to her hands and knees in submission. Dyas put the end of the scarf in tharp’s mouth, a kinky gag and perhaps a re-configuration of racialized power dynamics. Then they became—yes—cows, crawling across the length of the stage, Dyas chewing cud and tharp’s eyes dazed and glassy.
Throughout, I found myself laughing: at the absurdity, at the parody, at my own bewilderment, at their gall. And I found myself surprised and amused: how did we even get here? Like when the duo moved from sexily vying for the attention of red and blue strobe lights at the foot of the stage to sleeping to leading a dance party line where the audience was invited up to step-touch around the stage. Peeled-back curtains revealed a tropical projection with karaoke lyrics for (that other all-American duo) Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’s “Islands in the Stream.” Dyas and tharp once again became almost one being as they tied the American flag scarf over each other’s heads, covering faces entirely. The music sped up faster and faster until it sounded nasal and buggy. Dyas and tharp made a limbo bar with the knotted scarf stretched taut between their necks, and audience members arched lower and lower. The two held each other and spun fast, and audience members followed suit. I thought it was over, an ecstatic culmination, but forever failing continued, eschewing an easy reading of democratic participation in favor of more delightful, remarkable chaos.
As Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” (the rendition that caused a sensation at Woodstock) played, the pair cradled a bedraggled blond babydoll, wrapping it in the American flag scarf. Red roses fell down from somewhere. The two ran over to the bar area, jumped up on top of it, and performed what I can only call a Fourth-of-July-barbeque-girls-gone-wild routine. Dyas, still holding the doll, twerked into a whipped cream-frosted strawberry layer cake, while tharp, on her knees, nicked open the side of a beer can and shotgun sucked. She licked frosting off of Dyas’s star-spangled ass and sultrily off of her own fingers. Not long after, on the other side of the space, tharp shrieked and shrieked and blasted bills out of a money gun and tucked them into Dyas’s string bikini bottom.
forever failing continuously tested the limits of the representation of “America” in pop culture and media. It didn’t do this through heavy-handed symbolism or urgent political messaging, but rather through much more interesting means: experimentation and play. Throughout the performance, the American flag becomes a wedgie you pick out of your ass, a majestic headwrap, a saliva-soaked gag, a threadbare blanket. It reminds us: things have been fucked for a long while in this country. My girlfriend said, “it’s as much about the founding fathers as it is about Trump,” and it’s also about all the cultural and social ways that concepts of “America” circulate.
Dyas and tharp moved from performing a conservative’s nightmare of queer parenting—gasp, they are indoctrinating this blond American baby!—to stripped-down questions of queer temporality. Covered in clear plastic tarps that suggested prophylactics, wedding veils, or childhood sleepover forts, each hobbling in one high Pleaser heel, they spoke into microphones from the mezzanine balcony. They asked each other, “how do you feel about babies?”. Dyas spoke about “pre-grieving” milestones they may or may not reach: a partner, a child, a long life. I’m tempted to read this final scene as a callback to the opening womb/underwater moment: they’d in fact made a kind of baby together throughout the performance, and so on. But that would be too straightforward, and too singular, for a work that seems more interested in trying on and trying out than in giving us a neat takeaway. “forever failing” includes the mess: strewn dollar bills, sweat-soaked hair, cake frosting on skin, beer dripping down chin. And all those feelings reflections thoughts desires drives that don’t take neat pathways or timelines—in short, all the unruly excess that gets sanitized out of normative American “success.” No better ending, then, than Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” coming to a crescendo and tharp brightly announcing, “Okay, that’s it, you’re free!”
Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp. Photo by Hillary Goidell.
Marlena Gittleman (she/they) is a dancer (recently: NACHMO SF) and freelance writer (recently: In Dance) and translator (recently: Critical Times, The Common) based in Oakland, CA on Ohlone land. @mar_glitterman
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Related articles and PDFs:
improvising with ghosts past/present/future: the remaking, reshaping, recentering of FRESH/ROT By Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley e. tharp
Clarissa Rivera Dyas and ainsley tharp press release 2025