Screenshot from "bodyfabric" by Octavia Rose Hingle
of our bodies, in time
by audrey johnnson
Today's writing explores the 2nd Annual Queering Dance Festival, presented by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, California. The 2020 iteration took place on September 19 and 20, 2020 on Twitch, with both live and pre-recorded pieces.
FROLIC this year takes place in the corner of my yellow room, on a Sunday evening, on a 6 x 10 inch display. My body remembers a feeling of arrival: the intention of sitting down to watch a performance, anticipation in the theater, yet missing that moment of a quieting aural gradient of pre-show murmurations hushed by dimming lights, amplifying anticipation. I remember this feeling among others from last fall performing in the first iteration of FROLIC in the tiny Waterfront Theater in Berkeley, a buzzing memory linked to a moment in my life layered in feelings of return and newness and excitement and bewilderment at the feeling of running towards intuitive wildness.
Here in this body now I reflect on the passing of one year. How time has both compressed and widened, true of FROLIC and my life. This time, while the size of my experience of FROLIC becomes contained to the borders of my bedroom, I am also in awe of the expansive possibilities that FROLIC appearing online brings. So many more folks from beyond the Bay Area able to witness an evening of queer magic, a deep expansion from the 30 or so capacity limit of last year's space - creating a truly multi-dimensional, multi-accessible online space. It is virtual but it is real, felt, and embodied.
The works Sunday evening are by artists: Bernard Brown; Aiano Nakagawa and Heather Stockton; Octavia Rose Hingle; Kevin Gaytan; and Chibueze Crouch. Each singular and specific, the works all consider embodiment as a queer project. I wonder: what of queerness, of the embodied experience of “being queer,” asks us to be fully and honestly IN and OF our bodies, and simultaneously proposes we be witnessed in our fullness. In watching, the line from poet Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves: finally telling the truth with every breath comes to mind to describe this sense of full embodied living. Breathing. The works in this evening’s FROLIC present an entryway into queerness that is deep to the body, a well that reaches out of the body and asks us to look back, to be witnessed, to tell the truth with every breath.
Bernard Brown/bb moves begins the evening with a live performance streaming from a blackbox studio. (What a delicious sight the studio brings me - I find myself craving to touch the marley on the screen.) Brown’s work “Anew” poses the question via a program note: “Can queerness make this world anew?”
I witness this work as an exploration of proximity, repetition, death, the body, personal to Brown’s liveness. Brown begins a procession towards the camera singing lines from “My Country Tis of Thee,” altering the lyrics at times, and belting at the greatest of volumes from the depths of both his belly and the earth the line “land where my father died.” The volume of that expression results in a repetitive collapse: his body falls to the floor. And then rises again to sing and repeat the action. Land where my father died. Collapse. Rise again. Stand. My country tisssss of theee….Land where my father died. Collapse. Rise. Again. My country...Land where my…. Collapse. Rise. my father...Collapse. Rise. died…...Collapse. Rise. Rise.
Brown performs this falling and rising repetition suggesting to me that there is a beingness to Blackness that repeatedly rises beyond, against, and after death. This land, America, my country, stained with the blood of fathers' fathers’ fathers - a land stained by the repetition of Black death - Brown refutes this blood stained land with the repetition of his rising. Blackness refuses death by this country -- survival by flight, joy, braiding patterns, movement...We rise. We live. We are live. Poet Akilah Oliver writes: Therefore when I say “now that I’m done with being dead” I have declared an alternate self. In “Anew,” Brown presents this anew, alternate, self.
In the next section Brown, “done with being dead,” in something of a break up with the United States, performs a slightly different type of rise, of life-ness. Brown dances a groove that is joyful, form driven, colorful, alive. “My country?” No: some place anew. At the end of the work, Brown closes up on to the camera, ending by covering it with his hand. In this proximity, we were lucky witnesses of this world he creates, offerings to a future world born anew.
Screenshot from "I Only Eat for Pleasure" by Heather Stockton and Aiano Nakagawa
The next work, “I Only Eat for Pleasure” is a stunning film by Heather Stockton and Aiano Nakagawa. Described in the program as an exploration of Queer fat liberation, friendship, joy, and pleasure, the film portrays the two artists in various manifestations of being witnessed through the titled sections: Indulgence, Joy, Gaze. Opening on to a scene of Nakagawa and Stockton enjoying a spectacular spread of food (some otherworldly version of the last supper, one I definitely want to be at) we are primed by the title to witness this section as indulgence. Within a Western society steeped in diet culture, where self restraint and control echo puritanical values when it comes to enjoying food, Nakagawa and Stockton tease our own conceptions of “Indulgence.” Can we question how we view indulgence as a liberating and righteous experience of joy and pleasure? To enjoy a meal is to love, nourish, praise the body. To do so in sensuality, queers how we conceptualize the pleasure of eating, making pleasure and indulgence something actually irresistible (and incredibly liberating).
As the film progresses to the section “Joy,” we get to see some home videos of Stockton and Nakagawa dancing a Tik Tok dance and then special, grainy footage of them each dancing (and ice skating!) as young kids. How joyful! A gift again to witness these two makers in their joy across time in quirky, extrapolated moments of dancing.
In the third and last section, Gaze, we are back in something of the present day, sitting with the artists’ simple ask of “see me.” We witness a series of solo self-recorded clips of Stockton and Nakagawa dancing, from roadside to dance studio in the simple solitude and pleasure of moving. Invited into these personal moments, the film draws itself to a quieter, contemplative tone. “I Only Eat for Pleasure” activates queerness to expand how we live (in pleasure and liberation) in our bodies. The work, in an excellently smart mirroring effect, also reflects to us how we witness our own bodies. A powerful work, Nakagawa and Stockton ask viewers to witness their bodies moving, living, being in their wholeness. They invite us to interrogate how as a Western culture we are primed to project expectations onto dancing bodies and denounce indulgences of pleasure: in the work, (and then later in the Q&A) Nakagawa and Stockton remind us that those projections are white supremacist and colonial projects, that which we must fully and actively resist.
To be fully seen in wholeness, in joy, and in pleasure, is a beautiful and urgent antithesis to white supremacist, colonial, fatphobia in this country, and I am delighted and honored to witness Nakagawa and Stockton’s utter brilliance.
The next work, “bodyfabric,” is a film by artist Octavia Rose Hingle. The work is a stunning kaleidoscope of sound, gesture, body; a tumbling emergence of queer multiplicity depicting Octavia dancing in their bedroom. Overlaying the film, Octavia plays live improvisations on the piano, blending a choreographic visual with alive sound. Considering how their “physical impairment defines the contours of an aesthetic world,” “bodyfabric’s” visual choreography encloses in and expands out of the possibility of a body in motion in the domestic home space, and suggests an “other” space, where gravity and surfaces have different possibilities.
Propulsion against surfaces, leverage, a forward pedaling, a swinging cane extending the movement of the body’s limbs; joyful bouncing, an emerging booty twerk, the urge to bounce; to repeat; and the reaching piano imploding with emotion and depth pulling at something in my chest. This work is felt. The film's editing cinematically choreographs and layers their body as infinite motion, a multiplying self. This abstraction of image made possible by the eye of camera and editing paired with the setting of homespace, make possible an infinite rolling technique of swing, leverage, bounce, circle, joy. No longer relevant are the aesthetics of public space and the value on verticality. Here, Octavia writes their own rules of gravity; the domestic space re-writes access to surfaces on which dancing might occur, contouring an expansive movement practice.
The continuous motion of visuals, dancing, and sound elatedly employs repetition as a re-write of spatial possibilities: aesthetic and embodied. Again, queerness is made visible by how one is of and in their body. Octavia’s movement activates a kind of unapologetic queer divinity that comes with the fullness of their self-actualizing movement. The live piano sounds as another technology of body, of life. “bodyfabric” is a full expression of motion, a queering of contour to how a body can move against and with the surrounding space, and an explosion of visual and felt movement.
Part movement poem, part lecture, part meditation on liberation, “Undocu-queer” by Kevin Gaytan takes us outside of the domestic and into public space. Gaytan beautifully pairs spoken word, dance, wardrobe, color, and “badbitchery” into a moving journey witnessing intersecting identities and the embodiment of fully living in truth. (Fun note: I met Kevin in a choreography class with Juliana May at the American Dance Festival in 2016, so I was extra delighted to witness his work here!)
Gaytan’s poetry anchors the work with context, imagery, and imagination. His self-described identities, undocu-queer, as a Gay man of color, is a moving meditation on oneself in deep relationship with land.
Gaytan intelligently positions queerness as an intersectional identity that meets gender expression, love, ancestry, land, and living. As I watch, I wonder about how queerness almost becomes a lens that proposes another way to view one's relationship to land outside of a binary of documented and undocumented. In a nation with a nasty history of colonialism that now attempts to further displace people indigenous to this continent via racist and violent policies that I don’t need to call in by name here, the binary thinking of this or that replicates in both gender and the social concept of citizenship. Gaytan proposes we expand alongside him outside of the colonial binary, and reminds us of the truth that comes with being one's whole self. While a pre-recorded dance film, Gaytan performs towards the camera, which feels like a generous offering for us to really see, witness, him.
Professing “to be visible and unafraid,” Gaytan’s work declares his queerness as a path towards unapologetic, liberated, living. Gaytan’s work is full of clear simplicity, colorful nuance, and an offering of embodied liberation.
The last work, “you give good love” by Chibueze Crouch, is an excerpt-in-progress of Crouch’s larger work in development mouf. Appearing live on screen from her home, Crouch introduces the project, which considers the lives and work of Prince and Whitney Houston as two of her queer Black ancestors.
The work is an ethereal experience of hyper/multi-layered embodiment through sound, visual, and intersecting time. On the screen, we see a looping recording of Prince appearing live in 1982 singing "Do Me Baby;" overlaid is the sound of Whitney Houston singing “You Give Good Love,” appearing on the Johnny Carson show also in the 80s. On top of this, Crouch appears as a small Zoom window at the bottom of the screen reading aloud a piece of her writing that reflects upon these chosen ancestors.
The layered experience of “you give good love” composes an “other” space where body, voice, and image intersect across time and space. Crouch positions Whitney Houston and Prince as intersecting beings - sharing digital space, voice overlaying image, suggesting an “other” hovering shared body. Stacked with Crouch’s voice and text, this body is further contextualized with Crouch’s present day reflections, feeling, and wonderings.
The layered location of the work, arriving from the bodies and voice of Prince, Whitney Houston, and Crouch seem to assemble in “otherwhere,” a location in time and memory that poet June Jordan speaks to about “where we come from.” This other space arrives at the scale of Black time; voice and feeling coming from multiple directions of ancestors at once, past and present coagulate into an other time and space. The work itself is in the assemblage and layering of time, as well as an invitation into what I suspect is Crouch’s sense of time and practice with chosen queer ancestors. The agency of choosing our ancestors, and the people who we call on to witness and guide us forward, is a constant, queer, conversation with time.
“you give good love” closes FROLIC with a richness that supposes the location of embodiment might expand across and beyond the present. Amplified by the digital capability of layering sound, image, and context, Crouch’s work further explores a queer relationship to embodiment that insists on multi-layered time.
The evening of FROLIC presented multitudes of entryways for queerness as an experience of liberated embodiment. With some works live, some pre-recorded, and others a combination of both live and recorded elements, there was an expansiveness to the timescale (and access) to which we could witness dance and performance, this embodied practice of living. The artists lead me to consider how queerness asks us to be with our bodies. To be seen of and through and beyond our bodies, bodies not as a container for life but a place we might fully exalt a felt, liberated, life. See me fully in and of and enjoying my body, allowing myself to fully feel through life, is the question that being queer seems to pose.
The world I want to keep moving towards is a queer world, and I am grateful for the many worlds created by the artists of FROLIC. Perhaps by next year time will have expanded, contracted, widened, and shapeshifted again -- and I welcome that joyfully with my fully feeling queer body now, and everyday.Screenshot from "I Only Eat for Pleasure" by Heather Stockton and Aiano Nakagawa
Audrey Johnson is a queer Black mixed-race dance artist living in Oakland, CA. She is a maker, performer, teacher, writer, and sometimes farmer, and calls Detroit, Michigan home. www.audreyjohnson.space.
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