The American Dance Festival is one of the most important festivals and summer training programs in the United States. 2015 marks the 82nd year of ADF. Please join us on the blog this summer as Leah Cox, Associate Dean, offers a window into the festival through her lens as artist, teacher, administrator, and audience member. To read Leah's artist profile, click here.
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Photo: Grant Halverson © ADF
This post is fueled by a panel discussion we had late last night, titled Dancing Queer. I was on the panel along with several other great folks—Jesse Zaritt (who led the discussion), Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Jack Ferver. It was an amazing night of students and faculty coming together to talk about queerness and how it relates to dance
Thinking queerly. I’m inspired by queerness. This course is, in part, inspired by queerness. Queer as identity, as theory, as an activity that can be “done” to things, is useful for all of us, regardless of how we “identify" or “present." Queerness is a way to evade the normative, to resist the fixed.
I’m interested in unproductivity, non-productivity. How do those differ? It’s subtle. I like both—they are different tones of a similar sentiment. In that same vein, I’m interested in failure--the un-sexy version. Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s book, The Queer Art of Failure, can be seen as a call to analyzing failure in a way that incites excitement, energy for the idea. This can be seen as productive. However, I’m interested in the negative side of failure. (I think Halberstam is interested in this idea, too.) I’m not interested in selling failure as a trick to paradoxically emerge at success (whatever success might mean). I’m interested in the genuine impulse of getting lost, messing up, going nowhere, and being frustrated. These “negative" emotions are worth stewing in and doing nothing with, or stewing in with the intention of understanding them. To understand them does not mean to get out of them, nor to embrace them. Such a moving-beyond is too-quickly resorted to as a possibility. I’m also not interested in using the banner of “I’m failing and that’s queer” as a way to feel good about feeling bad. I’m not interested in glamorizing it and I’m not partial to holding onto it. It. That feeling of failure.
Making performance, dances, whatever-you-may-that-builds-upon-body(ies)-in-real-time-coming-together: for me, this practice is essentially about the queer art of failure. It’s about getting lost, not knowing where you're going, not knowing if your work or ideas will matter to anyone else. I propose that the practice of going into the studio is about figuring things out that may or may not have any product in the conventional sense of a dance performance. It means rejecting the capitalist structure and embracing your life—your own daily practice of being alive—as the primary thing you're making. Sometimes you make a mess. Sometimes you make a dance. Sometimes you make a whole new sense of selfhood, of self reliance. Self reliance that acknowledges self as inseparable from the world while still possessing agency. Maybe the act of making dances is the radical practice of being self reliant and realizing that there’s something in you that might come out that’s completely queer, defiant of all dominant structures.
I’m not sure I’m succeeding or failing by working from this proposal in Choreolab, via the practices we do and choose not to do. I am not comfortable with the idea that perhaps I am wasting everyone’s time. In ten years, will I look back and think I should’ve packaged things more concretely, made students feel like they were being given some dependable information, skills, knowledge? We continue. I keep trying to save the idea that only we can determine our life for ourselves. That’s real-life composition.
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