Snowflake Towers. Photo by Lydia Daniller.
Queering Dance Festival - A Verb of One’s Own
By Garth Grimball
Smear the Queer.
Queer as a Three Dollar Bill.
Queer as Folk.
We’re Here, We’re Queer, Don’t F*ck With Us, We’re Fabulous!
For many of us “queer” was what not to be. It was threatening, exposing, and led to violence. Thrown at us like a verbal molotov cocktail; meant to harm the recipient and notify the public of a conflict. A conflict of identity. And yet, time moves gayly forward, and language, the most mutable of (popular) culture, is queer and unreliable and difficult and crucial.
We repurpose and redefine words thrown at us to empower us. Gay is Good. Black is Beautiful. Disability is not Inability.
Queer is….?
This September saw the inaugural Queering Dance Festival presented by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center over the course of 10 days in various East Bay locations. The identity held in this festival is present as a verb, not a noun. What is it to queer dance? The five original dance works of QDF’s Program B struggle and delight in acts of story, body, and collectivity.
The program opener is “Seeds and Sequins,” a solo performance by Snowflake Towers. Towers enters in darkness commanding the space with her powerful voice calling out and a buffalo rattle keeping rhythm. The live vocalization gives way to a pre-recorded voice-over as the lights reveal Towers moving through different scenarios, living and re-living each moment simultaneously. We hear an immigration and assimilation story of her family, centering on labor, visible and invisible. The visible labor of her family’s agricultural work planting seeds. The invisible labor of being an outsider in an outsider community; the labor of passing, presenting as someone else. Towers transforms, donning a gold sequin gown. The speakers pulse with Respect’s “I Am What I Am.” Towers is a glam goddess. She lip syncs and sashays honoring the seeds planted and sharing the fruits of her labor.
Frances Sedayao’s “Momentary Lapse” begins with Sedayao bathed in a pool of light and the sound of a heart beat monitor. Sedayao’s body winds and unwinds. Another body enters the space. Laura Renaud-Wilson drags a chair to upstage center, sits, and stares forward like a stoic monument. The dramatic tension in “Momentary Lapse” lives in the chemistry of Sedayao and Renaud-Wilson. They speak in ellipses interrupting, finishing, complicating each other’s narratives. Their bodies link, support, and abandon in kind. When a loved one dies do we let a part of ourselves die too? How did we create together? The performers negotiate how to start (over) when presence and absence bleed together.
Quaking, shaking, convulsing. Technical displays serving peak body. “Disclosure” by Mark Travis Dance toggles between theatrics and virtuosity. Styles Alexander and AJ Guevara dance this male-male pas de deux with expansive physical reach and awareness. The choreography is big, almost too big for the intimacy of the theater. The intimacy allows the audience to feel the effort and the body in this dance. The breath, sweat, and skin of the body is the thesis in “Disclosure.” Alexander and Guevara’s dancing emphasizes the physical impact and release in partnering. They cradle and toss. They challenge and compete. In the midst of leaps and turns Travis incorporates gesture to muddling effect. The gestures are grounding when given space to breathe and lean into melodrama as passing references. The dance ends as it begins. A body alone in spasm, but met with the support of a partner.
JanpiStar. Photo by Lydia Daniller.
JanpiStar’s “Ameliorate” is a Robert Andy Coombs photograph come to life. Desire and the presentation of desire to question how desire communicates. JanpiStar enters back to us. Bare torso save a bright red-orange harness (popular attire at events like Folsom St and Dore Alley). The solo performance is languorous and tactile. Hands move with grace and power caressing the body, wheeling the chair, down to the floor and back up in teetering balances. Their gaze and physical focus gradually move from floor to sky. Caresses become slaps on the body creating a rhythm as their arms reach upward and eyes follow.
The final work on the program shares a beautiful symmetry with the first, at least formally. In “Sam Cooke Wasn’t Gay” Stephanie Hewett uses ritual, voice over and lip sync to examine artistic process, intersectionality and cultural hijacking. As Hewett crawls into the space her recorded voice informs us that the work is unfinished. A narrative device that risks a blamelessness by way of apology but evolves into a meta commentary on process and ownership; on the definitions of queerness and the living of queerness. Hewett walks the perimeter of the space rolling and unrolling the legs of her pants. We learn of her injury fears, love of techno, and how “feeling inspired is the new falling in love.” She is falling inspired but subordination taints inspiration. Black techno co-opted by white space. A black man, one of the greatest vocalists of the 20th century, shot and killed by a white woman. Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” starts to play and Hewett erupts in sinew and stretch across the dance floor. In a deep second position plie, fists to her heart, she stares directly at us for the first time mouthing the lyrics. The confrontation is striking. Hewett exposes her body, her ideas, her process, but rarely her look. The ending is the most unfinished part. The music stops and we learn the original plan was to sing the song herself, but time and money got in the way. Instead, she invites us to sing-along with her. We do. It’s messy and awkward and queer.
So. Queer is….?
Perhaps queer need not be a slogan or an anthem. So much of activism and identity is commodified into branding. There is power in numbers but freedom in ambiguity. If the dance in this festival is any indication, queering is an act of devotion without limits.
Stephanie Hewett. Photo by Lydia Daniller.
Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, California. He is the co-director of Wax Poet(s), company member of Dana Lawton Dances, and performs regularly with Oakland Ballet.
*Editor's note = the review of Program A of the Queering Dance Festival will be published by October 10th.