Alberto Denis: On becoming GoGo Gadget

Alberto Denis...or should we say GoGo Gadget?
(photo by Mike Dennis)

Alberto Denis: On becoming GoGo Gadget

interviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

About two or more years ago, I thought I was all but done dancing for anyone but myself...I'd considered that perhaps the dance world, for the most part, was done with me. – Alberto Denis

Ah, but all that was before GoGo Gadget!

On the second annniversary of GoGo Gadget’s boylesk debut, dancer Alberto Denis–now starring in Third Rail Projects’ acclaimed Then She Fell--recalls his liberating transformation into this sexy-nerdy character.

Alberto Denis
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

Yaa Asantewaa: When you arrived at the idea that you were done with dance--or, perhaps, it was done with you--you eventually turned to burlesque.  What drew you to the burlesque movement?

Denis: Over the years, I rarely engaged in solo choreography and was pleased to learn that I might in fact have something to say. That my work was well received enough to warrant frequent remounting of the work was a surprise to me. XXXV spoke to my experience of time and moments in my life, my journey from infancy to the age I was then--35. While it was fleetingly rewarding to create work on my own, it wasn't what I'd envisioned for my dance career. I was left questioning what, if anything, lay ahead of me.

My struggles with body image are, somewhat unfortunately, inexorably linked to a very natural desire to build a loving, passionate relationship. I'd spent the past several years as a bachelor and continued to find that, in searching for a partner, I focused more and more on my body image. I believe this to be primarily driven by societal norms as well as behaviors within the various communities to which I belong--my identity as a gay male and as a self-proclaimed geek.

I wanted to make a new work, which I'm finally embarking upon now. I wanted to explore my struggle with body image and the concept of attraction. At the time, doing research on bulimia and anorexia, while valuable, was a bit too depressing. I decided to take a look at the resurgent burlesque community and do positive research on a field that celebrates the female form regardless of societal norms.

I went to a performance called Meaner, Harder, Leather which introduced me to the concept that men also participate in burlesque, in what is casually called boylesk. Over several months, I continued to attend performances and befriended a very prominent performer--Chris "Go-Go" Harder–and attended his five-weekend burlesque course.

In that setting, I fully let down my guard, embarking on the long journey of accepting and occasionally celebrating my sexually attractive body. Even thinking those words is still difficult; I'd like to believe that I'm attractive to at least a few. But GoGo Gadget, unlike Alberto, is overly confident, assured, sexual and provocative. I'm so grateful for him, as I truly believe he's directly responsible for my personal growth as a dancer/actor, and he contributes to my process with Third Rail Projects.

GoGo Gadget in action
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

Yaa Asantewaa: Where did you see Meaner, Harder, Leather? How extensive is the male participation in the contemporary burlesque movement relative to female dancers?

Denis: Meaner, Harder, Leather ran for what I believe to be a little over a year at what was then the Vig 27 Lounge on 27th Street between Park and Lexington. In the few years I've been exposed to the burlesque community, I've seen the ratio of male-to-female participants spike significantly, in no short part due to Chris’s workshops. When I began there were perhaps half a dozen or so regularly performing men, whereas now--just from the performances I've been able to see--I've seen closer to twenty-five to thirty male performers engaging in boylesk on a regular basis.

Yaa Asantewaa: What helped you to let down your guard?  Let us in, a little, on the process of how you grew in self-acceptance.

Denis: I felt comfortable participating with a group as opposed to working as an individual, and also with Chris' very enthusiastic and well thought out process for leading the workshop. I'm still growing toward acceptance of what is physically attractive about me. It has been rewarding to rediscover my dancing ability within the context of a different community. To see it rewarded and celebrated has sparked a sense of "attractiveness" that I don't necessarily experience within the context of my dance community.

I believe that courage is also attractive, and I've had to learn to build my courage each time I build a new boylesk act and try it out, both to see if it works and the more basic fact that, by its conclusion, I become fully, physically exposed.

Also, for two years running, I've had an incredible collaborator in my gym trainer, Ray La Roca Grijalvo of SEEK FITNESS, who is genuinely invested in my success and achieving my physical goals. He and his wife have attended several of Gadget's performances. He's also developing relationships with many of my neighbors who also struggle with body image challenges.

Yaa Asantewaa: What’s behind the name GoGo Gadget?  How did this character develop?

Denis: GoGo Gadget references my own Peter Pan complex, directly linking the name to a cartoon from my childhood. Inspector Gadget, a cartoon character of the 1980s-90s, was very popular in my youth. He was often put in situations where he was ill-prepared to succeed, and yet he always prevailed. Gadget also references my love of all sorts of tech gadgetry. (I’ve been employed by a major technology company for the past several years.) Gadget's development is still very much in progress and grows with each performance and each new work.

Yaa Asantewaa: How do you go about bringing him out when it’s time for him to perform?

Denis: The best way to bring him out is through masks, makeup, costumes, music and glitter.  Lots and lots of glitter!  Oh and bubbles too!  Gadget loves candy, fun, sweating, dancing, cartoons, comic books, adventure heroes, men, and a few women too.  And most importantly, he absolutely loves getting naked and feels beautiful about his appearance.

Yaa Asantewaa: Does his personality influence you and help you in everyday life? Or is this something segregated to dance or, specifically, boylesk?

Denis: What a fantastic question! I continue to struggle to introduce his ever-forming personality within my everyday life. I can say that he continues to grow in boylesk, and now recently is certainly making his presence known within my dance identity.

Yaa Asantewaa: How does GoGo Gadget influence you as you prepare to perform in other dance work, including your work with the celebrated immersive theater troupe, Third Rail Projects?

Denis: I can say that Gadget has directly influenced my ability to take greater risks when developing another role. That courage I spoke of earlier is accessible to me outside of burlesque. My latest role creation draws a great deal from my nightlife experiences as Gadget, asking me to be sexually enticing to both men and women, an outrageous attention whore, physically provocative, as well as physically innovative. Gadget's regular activities on stage often explore these kinds of themes, and I'm drawing heavily on my experiences to create dance scores for my new role based on this kind of material.

Yaa Asantewaa: Would you recommend some training in boylesk to other male dancers? If so, why? What could they take away from it?

Denis: I believe if a male dancer wants to challenge both his perceptions of self- identity on stage as well as develop his choreographic skills, boylesk is an absolute must. It's a brilliant combination of dance and theater structured in a way that requires taking emotional as well as physical risks.

If you happen to be in Paris on October 5, you can see GoGo Gadget in action at The Lettingo Cabaret. New Yorkers, keep watch for news on the GoGo Gadget front for late fall.

Alberto Denis
(photo by Gustavo Monroy)

BIO

Currently a member of Third Rail Projects and featured in their production of Then She Fell, in 2008 Alberto Denis created [QuA²D] = The Queens Academy of Arts & Dance after leaving his position as Production Director/Producer for Dance New Amsterdam where he created the first ever staff infrastructure for their inaugural theater on Chambers Street in lower Manhattan, while co-curating their first three seasons of programming. Previously he created the Wight Room Dance Series presented at The Movement Salon near Union Square. Alberto Denis has toured the world (Dubai, Dublin, Barcelona, Bangkok, Taipei, Mexico City, Oslo and Prague and more) as a stage manager, audio engineer, assistant technical director and production electrician as well as a performer for many choreographers. He has performed for Arthur Aviles' Typical Theater for five years and in projects for Doug Elkins, Risa Jaroslow, Palissimo Dance Theater, Dixie Fun Dance Theater, ann and alexx make dances, Marta Renzi, Alexandra Beller, Michael Leleux, Heidi Latsky Dance, Lawrence Goldhuber, Luis Lara Malvacias, JoAnna Mendl Shaw’s Equus Projects and Mei Yin Ng’s Mei-Be Whatever. He was also a featured performer in the Whitney Museum's Christian Marclay: Festival performance of Prêt-a'-Porter. His choreography has been produced at Dance Theater Workshop's Family Matters, Danspace Project’s Food For Thought, Dixon Place’s Body Blend and Moving Men, BAAD!’s Boogie Down Dance Series and Out Like That Festival and Kinetics Dance Theater, Baltimore MD. He has also served on the Dance Theater Workshop Curatorial Advisory Committee.

Ben Asriel: A Shift at the Right Time

Ben Asriel
(photo courtesy of Kevin Kwan)

A Shift at the Right Time

by Evan Teitelbaum

      “I like playing second fiddle. But I still like having a fiddle.” Ben Asriel laughs playfully, but he’s pointing out a critical aspect of his work as a dancer. He dances for choreographers who use their dancers’ individual qualities and choices to shape the work, giving Ben a sense of ownership over his art even when he is not the sole creator of the piece.

      He expresses gratitude for those creative relationships, for having had the opportunity to make his mark with choreographers such as John Jasperse, Juliana May and Walter Dundervill, as he shifts his focus to a radically different endeavor. This coming semester, Ben will leave his life as a full-time performer behind him, becoming a full-time student at Columbia with his sights set on medical school. He feels ready. In his own words, his “‘Benness’ has been used and expressed in a full way” through dance.

      We are squeezed onto a loveseat in the studio apartment he shares with his boyfriend Brian on a tree-lined street in the West Village. I prod him to take a stab at defining this “Benness.” Foregoing a surface description of style, he distills what about dancing has fascinated him the most: the object-subject split. A central paradox of being a dancer, as I see it, is that the dancer is simultaneously a body-object being observed, and a subjectivity communicating his experience. By way of illustration, Ben takes me into his process with Dundervill: “We’ve done a lot of work on being an object and being a shape and being aesthetically beautiful and very kind of Apollonian, but at the same time existing within the piece as yourself and noting your experience and also projecting that subjective experience of what it is to objectify. And that, I really love that.”

      It’s a dizzying explanation, but fortunately I understand exactly what he means because I’ve witnessed it in real time. In a performance of Dundervill’s Aesthetic Destiny 1: Candy Mountain that I saw at what was then Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts), Ben and Burr Johnson performed a duet of shared shape-shifting. Maintaining contact on the surface of their bodies, they created symmetrical forms of sloping curves and defined angles. This meticulous shape-making objectified the body to an extreme, forcing it to conform to geometry over anatomy. The atmosphere, however, was thick with the awareness it took to move so precisely. The sensitivity to the other that was required to maintain connection textured the undertaking with a palpable vulnerability.

      Ben’s approach to performance stems equally from his childhood in Glasgow, Kentucky and his graduate study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (which turns out to be much less of a culture clash than you might think). Ben’s mother (“brilliant,” “cultured,” and “bad-ass”) taught dance at a local studio and did nothing to discourage Ben’s interest in his body. Her creative movement classes for kids involved “lying on the floor imagining things,” which Ben notes prepared him well for the type of class work you might find at a Movement Research offering. Ben keeps a video of himself dancing in his grandparents’ backyard as a child and says,“what I was doing there was very me. It was something I could do now.”

      I try to picture this childhood improvisation, this early uncovering of “Benness,” and wonder what it was like for a quirky, artistic boy to grow up in a small Kentucky town. For Ben, the smallness of the community actually provided plenty of space. In small towns, he explains, “there’s a lot that happens outside of the norm but, because everyone knows each other, it’s almost unnoticed in a way.” Familiarity rendered potential bullies unintimidating. They’d all grown up together.

      Arriving in New York at 22, Ben sought to recreate the comfort of knowing everyone. Faced with a tight community that he didn’t have automatic entrée to and initially frustrated that he didn’t have a seat at “the cool kids’ lunch table”, he used his post at the Dance Theater Workshop box office to scope the scene. Now, asked how he has gotten work with some of the more visible scene-shapers of downtown dance, Ben shrugs, “I just have friends who make work, and I dance for them.”

      But something is shifting for him now. Curiosity fueled his exploration, and he’s not interested in performing with a quality that has become “known.” His essential “Benness” needs to maintain its vitality. “I don’t want it to ossify within me, “ he says. “ I don’t want it to become a thing inside me that’s stale. That people can hire…I feel like performing it feels like controlling it where it used to feel like releasing it.”

      Ben’s readiness to leave dance is also a comment on the lack of support for the arts. Ben admits: “I always felt selfish dancing. Or not always. That was something I fought and I think a lot of people fight. The idea that the culture gives us that making art is somehow selfish. Which it isn’t. It’s essential. And it’s generous and it is definitely a sacrifice to live an artist’s life more than it is to do lots of other things.” Despite Ben’s conviction, fighting this cultural disregard takes a toll.

      By choosing medicine as his next venture, Ben is not abandoning the fight. He will take his experience as an artist into his approach towards medicine. “I felt really disenfranchised by the medical community as a dancer, not having health insurance. And so I guess I want to change it from the inside.” His transition back to school also speaks to the seriousness of his relationship of two years. He and Brian flirt with ideas of how to create a more stable future together without, of course, ruling out the possibility of “just staying crazy.”

      Ben is excited to talk about Brian, his eyes brightening as he tells me about Brian’s culinary gifts. I brace myself for envy as I await a mouth-watering anecdote about an unforgettable meal this culinary school graduate prepared in some early stage of their courtship. Instead, Ben talks about how Brian watched food being cooked as a child and would “not just see it browning, but like he understood what it meant to be like a molecule of the food as it was cooking.” As Ben is speaking, I again find myself picturing little Ben dancing in his grandparents’ yard. I am struck by the sense that Ben and Brian’s younger selves shared this nonverbal curiosity –an intuitive, embodied way of tapping into things.

      The small but airy apartment they now share feels just right for two creative entities contemplating how they might fit themselves more neatly into a less precarious lifestyle, but without being in any big hurry to do so. Although Ben apologizes for the gentle cascade of worn socks, books left out of place, and crumbs on counters, I am warmed by the lived-in state of things.

      I ask Ben if he’s been seeing a lot of art lately, and he says no.

      “I feel a little out of touch with what’s happening and that feels okay. I don’t feel the need to, like, get in touch.” At 32, he’s expressing a very different attitude than the 22-year old angling for a spot at the downtown dance table.

      “I’m kind of looking forward to being a spectator or maybe a funder, or having some other role in dance—”

      “Or health care provider,” I suggest.

BIO:

Ben Asriel grew up in Glasgow, Kentucky where he cultivated his love of art in his mother’s dance classes, on the soccer field, and playing trumpet in the GHS band. He studied music theory at Brown University (AB Music ’03) and dance at NYU Tisch (MFA ’06). In addition to MAYDANCE, Ben dances with Walter Dundervill, and Liz Gerring Dance Company. Ben has also performed with Gerald Casel, Daria Faïn, Jack Ferver, Gabriel Forestieri, John Jasperse, Antonio Ramos, Edisa Weeks, and Pavel Zustiak, among others. In 2010/2011 Ben was a Choreographic Fellow of NYCB’s New York Choreographic Institute, supported by Oregon Ballet Theater. His dances have been presented by CPR - Center for Performance Research, the Chocolate Factory Theater, Dance New Amsterdam, Movement Research at the Judson Church, The Tank, and Danspace Project. He is currently enrolled in Columbia University’s postbac premed program. Tell him what you think: basriel@gmail.com

Wendy Whelan: The Opposite is Also True

Wendy Whelan
photo by David Michalek

Wendy Whelan: The Opposite is Also True

by Troy Ogilvie

Wendy Whelan bursts in thirty minutes late to our first interview (only steps away from her Upper West Side apartment) because of some late-night partying with family and friends for her 46th birthday.  She enters the cafe wearing red lipstick that stands out against her long blonde hair—her talented husband, David Michalek, by her side.  Candid and incredibly down to earth, Whelan is generous and articulate with her words, confident and lively in demeanor.  

Whelan has begun her transition or, in her words, “transformation” from New York City Ballet (NYCB) into her own project: Restless Creature.  This new project will be revealed at Jacob’s Pillow in August 2013 and consists of four duets with four male choreographers.  Restless Creature will be the first endeavor for Whelan where she engages firsthand in production elements.  In the protected environment of NYCB she never had to fundraise, clarify her ‘brand’, or commission choreographers.  When asked about the additional workload, Whelan enthusiastically responds with “I want to do this.  It’s my debutante ball, my coming out party!”  She says that it is “easy to get spoiled at NYCB” because they have everything and while she appreciates it and continues to perform with the company, using her full voice will be exciting and fulfilling in a new way.  

While sitting in on a meeting between Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten and Michalek, Whelan was struck by the confidence and clarity of intention with which Van Noten spoke.  “He’s not settling for anything less than himself.  The integrity level was so inspiring.”  Getting ideas across exactly the way you want requires bravery and vulnerability; Whelan has dealt with this reality frequently as a performer.  “I’ve gotten years of bad reviews from [Alistair] Macaulay and it was so painful at first to get through all of that, just coming to terms with all the negativity towards me has made me let it go.”  Shedding the fear of critique has been a part of her process all along, although this time Whelan fans the creative flame behind the project in addition to being a performer.  Fortunately, Whelan has an optimistic and realistic view on life, ballasts that will aid her in navigating her new adventure.  One of the ideas that has served as Whelan’s compass throughout her long career is that “the opposite is also true.”

Whelan had several wise teachers in her youth who taught her optimism by flipping her perspective and enabling her to see opportunity even when her reality was frustrating.  When told at age twelve that she had severe scoliosis, her Louisville teachers encouraged her to continue coming to ballet class despite intensive treatment that at times included a full torso cast.  The experience helped her to focus on “squaring off [efficient body alignment] and gaining strength” which paid off in flexibility and control once the cast was off.  This brush with her immobilized self during a time when young dancers are anxious for high legs and flashy tricks, gave her an enviable solid backbone of technique.  Although the optimism of her discovery was grounded by the reality that scoliosis is never cured, Whelan still works and learns about her spiraled spine every day.  

These lessons in optimism and reality prepared her for an injury in 2003 where she tore some of her plantar fascia, the thick connective tissue which supports the arch of the foot, while performing a piece by William Forsythe onstage at the Bolshoi.  The tear put her out of commission for four months, the longest stretch she had ever taken off (“I don’t do vacations!”).  During this time, she became engaged to visual artist Michalek, whom she married in 2005.  Asked if she would have gotten around to marriage if she had not gotten injured, she replied, “No, I really wouldn’t have.  I had to break the pattern.  It was locked in like a piece of mylar, this is what you do, everyday.”  Although the discipline “frees” your spirit, the schedule can “freeze” your life.  Her ankle cast, while conjuring suffocating memories of her scoliosis confinement, created a break in her relentless schedule and gave her a glimpse into life outside of dance.  Having internalized those lessons in optimism from her teachers, she recognized her opportunity for growth.  

In a world where New York City Ballet exists and where the opposite is also true, there must necessarily exist a choreographer like Kyle Abraham.  His choreography has been described as a “ rough-around-the edges approach to a singular blend of hip hop, both lyrical and hard-hitting, and glued together by modern dance and ballet” (Jane Varnish, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).  Seeing his work, Whelan thought, “If I could ever dance like that from where I am now, I would be an amazing dancer.”  So she invited Abraham to choreograph a duet for the two of them as part of Restless Creature.  To give you an idea of the intensity of the challenge she has before her, famed ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov says it took him 20 years to fully transition into modern dance.  

While the early rehearsals were overwhelming, Whelan now feels like they are onto something.  “It was incredibly intimidating to start with him.  Just watching them [assistants Chalvar Monteiro and Rena Butler], I thought oh man, I’ve bitten off too much.”  So far, they’ve come to a compromise where “he’s doing his thing and he’s given me a limited vocabulary to try to embody.”  Her initial instincts are strong and she continues to be “intrigued and enamored by what he is doing” and enjoys the challenge of “biting into it, trying it.”  Modern dance and ballet have much in common, but their opposing qualities can make the two dance forms seem incongruous when seen on stage together.  

In process with Brian Brooks
             photo by Erin Baiano

The physicality and chemistry that Whelan feels when working with men sustains her inspiration and electrifies the space, which is why she chose to only collaborate with men on her first project.  Acknowledging the awkwardness of this admission, she says, “there’s something about pleasing the man.  You get excited when you please the man.  Gay or straight there’s a physical, sexual dynamic that gets in there and charges the piece.  It’s a power balance between a man and a woman.”  She has not felt this creative tension with female choreographers thus far.  “Maybe it’s from being in the dance world for so long, you know, Black Swan,” citing the Darren Aronofsky thriller.  Although she has only experienced a few “weird things,” the fantastic extremes portrayed by Natalie Portman’s character reveal a culture in the ballet world that puts women on high alert with one another.  

As the opposite is also true, she says “let’s get real and let’s think about another aspect of it that’s not built on this romantic ideal.  Let’s get off the pedestal, and jump down, get off and walk with everybody else.”  While the image of a tiaraed ballerina with long, clean lines defines the ideal, Wendy Whelan does not fear looking contorted or jagged onstage.  In fact, she often portrays ‘the novice’ in Jerome Robbins’ The Cage where a predatory female insect species teaches its young novice how to kill the male members.  She tells Wendy Perron in the article “Jerome Robbins Roles for Ballerina’s” (Dance Magazine, May 2012) that “I could use my weird assets.  Jerry let me go with that ballet.”  Whelan never saw herself as a “purebred Balanchine ballerina” but rather as a continuation of the Jerome Robbins legacy, especially since she experienced his exploration and experimentation first hand and felt a kindred curiosity.  It seems his celebration of her unique qualities gave him a special place in her heart.

Rutgers professor Daniel M. Ogilvie is a pioneer on the topic of the undesired self.  While most people spend their lives attempting to narrow the gap between their ideal self and their real self, Ogilvie sees real benefit in giving the undesired self its attention.  “The ideal self is cognitive while the undesired self is completely visceral and non-conceptual.”  In other words, the ideal self lies in images of beauty and perfection while the undesired self lives in the realities of an aging body.  One of the amazing aspects about the human condition lies in the way that body and brain harmony rely on the equal presence of both the ideal and undesired forces.  Too much ideal self and reality is lost.  Too much undesired self and stagnation ensues.  Whelan may have more of a handle on this topic than she realizes: “So you can feel one way but if you really search for it, you can find the opposite of it. So I try to do that all the time and I find it helps when you are struggling with something.  Even when you’re feeling high and mighty, it will keep you grounded so that you’re like, you know what? The opposite is always true.  It keeps you in tow.”

The day before our interview was not only her birthday.  It was the day she coached a younger dancer on one of her most renowned duets for a festival that for the first time in fifteen years did not invite Wendy to perform.  She always knew there was an “expiration date” when it came to ballerinas “of a certain age.”  Directors tend to “just look at that number more than anything and they say, move on.”  Although she had always watched on as the oldest dancers dealt with moving on from company life, she had not seen the inevitable move coming until it became her reality.  “This is the life part of the art,” she said on our interview.  “Right now I’m looking at this moment as the true moment of grace.”  She is acutely aware that as a ballerina “you’re a princess in the middle of the stage one second, with the lights on you, and then it’s over.”

Bio:

Wendy Whelan was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky.  She began her dance training at age three.  Four years later she performed the role of a mouse in the Louisville Ballet’s production of  The Nutcracker.  In 1982, Ms. Whelan moved to New York to continue her studies full-time at the School of American Ballet and the Professional Children’s School.  She was invited to become a member of the New York City Ballet corps de ballet in 1986 and was promoted to principal dancer in 1991.  Ms. Whelan has performed the full spectrum of the Balanchine repertory.  Her roles range from the abstract ballets of Balanchine’s Agon, Episodes and  Symphony in Three Movements  to his more romantic works including  Liebeslieder Walzer, A Midsummer Nights Dream, and La Sonnambula.  She has danced the full-length classics such as Peter Martins’ Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty.  She worked closely with Jerome Robbins on many of his ballets, most notably, The Cage, Dances at a Gathering, In the Night and Opus 19/ The Dreamer.  Christopher Wheeldon has created leading roles for Ms Whelan in 13 of his ballets including,  Polyphonia, Liturgy, and After the Rain.  She has originated featured roles in the ballets of Alexei Ratmansky, as well as works by William Forsythe, Wayne McGregor, Jorma Elo, Shen Wei and Twyla Tharp.  In 2007, Ms Whelan performed with Morphoses the Wheeldon Company and was subsequently nominated for an Olivier Award and a Critics Circle Award for her performances on the London stage. She has been a guest artist with the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden and with the Kirov Ballet at the Maryinsky Theater in St Petersburg.  She received the 2007 Dance Magazine Award and in 2009 was given a Doctorate of Arts, honoris causa, from Bellarmine University.  In 2011, she was honored with both The Jerome Robbins Award and a Bessie award for her Sustained Achievement in Performance.  Ms. Whelan appeared as Arabian Coffee in the film version of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker and has appeared in numerous televised broadcasts of Live From Lincoln Center, on PBS.  In 2010, she starred in the dance film Labyrinth Within, by the award winning Swedish choreographer and filmmaker, Pontus Lidberg.

Edisa Weeks’s Delirious Dance Acts

Edisa Weeks's Delirious Dance Acts

by Anita Gonzalez

At the Player’s Club near Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, Edisa Weeks mounts the stairs of a nineteenth century building and sits down at Mark Twain’s favorite poker table to chat about her projects and her passions.  A tall, thin dancer, sinuous and composed, she nevertheless commands space, resting at ease in her perceptions of art and art making.  We talk, and I learn about how Weeks turns contemporary dance into social commentary.

On her website, Weeks writes that her company Delirious Dances, “was founded on the belief that people of all economic and cultural backgrounds, ages and abilities are empowered by the immediacy of dancing.”  As a choreographer, Weeks heavily invests everything: body and finances, to create work in intimate spaces—spaces like swimming pools, store windows or living rooms—that create immediate and close encounters between dancers and audiences.  The innovative nature of her dance projects, combined with the sense of abandon within her choreography, make works like Liaisons(2006), presented in New York City and Berlin, feel delirious indeed.

Liaisons originates from a notion to bypass the bureaucracy of traditional dance production venues while directly engaging with small-scale audiences.  Using a quartet of dancers, Weeks stages choreography in living rooms.  Email lists and word-of-mouth help Weeks identify individuals who would like to offer their homes.  Once they agree to sponsor her performance, she sells tickets through Brown Paper Tickets, Ovation or other ticketing agencies.  On the night of the performance, a core group of dancers go to the sponsor’s home where they dance.  After each performance the dancers participate in a response session.

In one section of Liaisons, dancer Jenni Hong enters a circle of seated viewers and drops her underpants to the floor.  What type of liaison does discarded underwear bring to mind?  A few moments later, Hong finds underwear everywhere—in drawers and cabinets and underneath chairs—and she tosses all of them to the center of the floor.  Next she dances; flailing her legs and rolling with abandon across the floor, at times stopping to smile knowingly at an audience member.  Maybe they share her secret history of underwear encounters.  Later, other dancers execute lifts and turns that daringly occupy contained space.  Occasionally, they pause for eye contact or gentle handshakes.  The sudden breaks between dance and gesture draw a laughing, delirious response from the audience.

How does Weeks overcome the fear of approaching strangers to ask to enter their personal spaces?  “I practice,” she responds.  She stands on the street asking people if she can dance in their living room.  The best places are libraries because people are more relaxed.  Post offices and grocery stores almost always get a negative answer. Berlin, unlike New York, has no tradition of door-to-door salesmen, so odds were better over there.  While standing on public streets in Germany, Weeks asked eighty people if she could dance in their homes.  Three people said yes.

Although Weeks describes herself as lacking in the “gift for gab” that enables other choreographers to verbally sell their work to presenters, she is tenacious.  “I am really stubborn,” she says.  This artist is determined to keep making dance despite economic barriers.  Weeks aspires to provide consistent work for her dancers.  Instead of spending time networking with presenters, she produces the work within her means.  Often presenters schedule a dance work for a single run of three or six performances.  They rarely re-present a work, preferring to look for the next new event or hot item to include in their dance seasons.  By simplifying the production process and finding her own venues, Weeks’s dancers engage in a piece of choreography for at least a year.

One of her more recent projects, To Begin the World Over Again (2012), composed by Joseph C. Phillips Jr., features six dancers and an actor collaborating with an ensemble of thirteen musicians.  In a climate of reduced funding for the arts, Weeks decided to self-produce this work by collaborating with responsive venues, taking out loans, fundraising on Kickstarter, and using her teaching salary to augment the dancers’ rehearsal pay.  The interactive, evening-length, multi-disciplinary dance was performed at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn.  Based upon Thomas Paine’s statement that “We have the power to begin the world over again,” Weeks explored the notion of United States democracy and what it has meant.

The choreography of To Begin the World Over Again depicts an active expression of delirium.  With the audience seated on four sides of an arena-like space, performers leap, roll, fling and run, continuously propelling their bodies through space until they collapse to the ground.  This is an exhaustive call for democracy.  Later, with the assistance of a Master of Ceremonies, the audience collectively decides who will play the character of “Democracy.”  Once selected, this same character is beaten down, stripped to their underwear, and demoralized.  The dramatic actions demonstrate how a well-conceived and idealistic notion that originated in the seventeenth century can be reduced to mere rhetoric with the passage of time.  At the end of the work, the dance becomes gentler.  Some performers leave the arena to connect with a seated observer or to share a smile or an embrace.  Eventually, the entire audience joins in a collective spiral dance that literally democratizes the arena space.

Weeks’s current project, a commission from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, opens in June as part of a gala celebration, and in response to the expansion of the native flora garden.  In this site-specific work, she will use dancers to explore the ecosystem of native plants in Brooklyn.  The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is interested in profiling native plant life once prevalent within the borough.  Weeks researched pine barrens, prairie grass, oak forests and sphagnum bogs, all eco-systems that once existed in the vicinity of Brooklyn.  In her new work, performers represent each of these systems.  We talked at length in our interview about how sphagnum bogs have layers that preserve the past and how Native Americans once used sphagnum moss as an anti-bacterial or antifungal treatment for wounds.  Clearly, this artist is interested in the wider impact dance can make on society’s perspectives about the earth.

I asked Weeks about how research informs her approach to making dance.  “I had a really influential teacher,” she says, referring to George Houston Bass (1938-1990), a professor of Theatre Arts and African American Studies at Brown University, co-producer and story editor for the WGBH series “On Being Black.”  Bass founded the Rites and Reasons Theatre and was also the secretary and executor for Langston Hughes.  While studying in Providence, Weeks took a class with Bass that emphasized the importance of using detailed research to support art practice.  As a teacher, he inspired several other students who would later impact Black art in many ways: playwright Lynn Nottage, Producer Robe Imbriano, actor Erik Dellums, storyteller Vallerie Tutson, visual designer Garland Farwell, and, of course, choreographer Edisa Weeks.

At the Player’s Club, Weeks and I engaged in active conversation around the challenges of balancing life, career, and academic pursuits.  Because she is an artist who invests in her projects, most of her income goes back into her art and into supporting her family.  Her husband provides core emotional, psychological, and strategic support for the work that she undertakes. She says that instead of taking expensive trips, or going out to dinner, they take simple vacations, like touring Philadelphia by bicycle.  Sometimes they stay at Black-owned bed and breakfast establishments as a way of supporting the Black community.  Her current position as an Assistant Professor at Queens College allows her to have both roots and support as an artist and thinker.  She uses teaching to spur her creative work and to provide stability for her artistic endeavors: “After years of scrambling, it is bliss not to be hustling for the next job.”

Our interview ends with a tour through the Player’s Club and discussion of her upcoming residency in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she plans to work with University of Michigan students at the Museum of National History, developing a site-specific installation inspired by the structure of genes and DNA.  She looks forward to summer as a time to devote to developing new ideas.  I am curious to know what delirious movement projects will next emerge from the mind of this creative artist.  Whatever the ideas are, Weeks has the talent, training and gumption to make them a success.

BIO:
Edisa Weeks is the Director and Choreographer for DELIRIOUS DANCES, which seeks to create intimate environments where people can experience and interact with contemporary dance. Her choreography merges theater with dance to explore the beauty and complexity of life. Her work has been performed in a variety of venues including swimming pools, storefront windows, living rooms, senior centers, as well as at Chashama Theater, The Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, The Guggenheim Museum, The Mermaid Parade, Summer Stages Dance Festival, and The Haus Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin, Germany. Edisa Weeks received a BA from Brown University and an MFA in dance from New York University’s TISCH School of the Arts where she was an Alberto Vilar Performing Arts Fellow. Weeks teaches technique and choreography at Queens College in New York.

A Conversation with taisha paggett

the dancing body is the same body 

we move through the world with: 

a conversation with taisha paggett     

by Jaime Shearn Coan

    

taisha paggett (photo: Taka Yamamoto)

As your interviewer, I’d like to begin by asking: Do you have any concerns about being represented?

A lot of my issues around representation actually have to do with being in other people’s work—how I am continuing or contrasting one’s standard notion of a black dancing body on stage. This was coming up a lot when I was younger. I started dancing when I was eighteen, kind of late for a dancer. I remember being cast in these Alvin Ailey-esque type dances, and wondering: “Who, or what is this figure that I’m being asked to perpetuate all the time?”

I was very aware of myself as a black dancer within the downtown dance scene, which is predominantly white. Our training was always: “the neutral body, the neutral body—we’re just skin and bones.” I totally believe that but I also think it’s so complicated and it’s a very privileged thing to say. How the body is talked about in dance when we’re training—I think that’s where a lot of those questions came up for me.

Going back to my earlier years, I remember just loving the freedom that came when the teacher would pull the curtains over the mirrors. There was this notion that we could just be in our bodies and not worry about how we looked. That’s powerful, but it also is this practice of overlooking the fact that our bodies are radically different. When we’re performing, we’re not performing in the dark, we’re performing in front of an audience, for the people that are on the other side of the mirror.

I’ve always been aware of my difference in the dance world. I remember when I first moved to New York, I went to go take class at the Trisha Brown dance studio. I was super excited—my first time! I got in the elevator and it was this beautiful diversity of bodies—different colors, and hair textures, and heights, and body sizes. I was like, “This is amazing, we’re going to Trisha Brown, we’re going to take class!” And at the first stop on the elevator, all the people of color got off, because that floor was the Alvin Ailey studio. Then the elevator closed, and it was me and a bunch of white people, and we went up to Trisha Brown, and I was like, “Oh, right.”

And that’s actually why I started making work. I was interested in spending time reflecting on those experiences. I never had a dream of being a choreographer. I had some questions that I wanted to take up. I feel like identity—specifically, questions around how we come to understand ourselves as individuals and as members of a community—is constantly a part of my work. I feel like it will always be part of my work. I don’t believe that identity politics is dead or that it can ever be dead. I think that the ways in which we talk about it really have to shift.

Could you speak about your training, in dance but also visual art? You’re saying you’re motivated by questions rather than wanting to be a choreographer. And your work is very interdisciplinary.  What were some turning points for you in your approach to making work? How did you become interested in presenting work in galleries and public spaces in addition to more traditional dance venues?

First off, I have no formal training in any other discipline other than dance. Back in my hometown of Fresno, where I first started dancing, I had a friend and mentor named Cheryl Kershaw, a dancer with a visual arts background, whose work really blurred those lines.  She exposed me to a lot of possibilities around artmaking and was super influential.

Later, when I went to college (UC Santa Cruz), I felt like I was too old to focus on dance, although I was super into it. My focus was Art History, but I had some fantastic teachers who let me write all of my papers on dance. I was like: “Why isn’t dance in here?” And they were like: “You’re dancing, you’re really interested in it, so make these connections.” I think that was the place where I really started expanding this notion of what dance is. I wasn’t just trying to talk about the concert stage, but rather how the dancing body makes meaning—in whatever context. And when I got to studying more contemporary performance works, I was able to make really tangible, tactile connections. I think that turned my brain on.

Then I moved to New York (not to be a dancer!) and lived there for three years. I wasn’t interested in making work, but I had a lot of questions bubbling up in my head. I ended up performing a lot, so I was always in studio and in creative process. Something shifted and I realized that I wanted to go back to school, that I was interested in addressing these questions. I decided that I didn’t want to go to a conservatory program—that wouldn’t make sense for me at all. I chose the World Arts and Culture/Dance Program at UCLA because they did have a really interdisciplinary perspective: thinking about dance and other embodied practices all under the same umbrella.

How I started was not thinking that I wanted to be interdisciplinary. I just started thinking about the frames in dance.  Why are they so set? Identity, and the notion of the black dancer was one of those frames. But then I started seeing the stage as a frame. And the division of labor as a frame. And I just wanted to play with that. Why is it that what I’m doing is limited to the bodies in space? How come I can’t design where I perform and how come I can’t do the lights? And why do there have to be lights? And why does the audience have to be separate? 

A lot of my friends are visual artists and I got involved in having conversations with them about their work and my interest in the body. I have always believed that the dancing body is the same body we move through the world with. It was always already politicized. I guess those divisions were never really there for me in the first place.

I did some projects with Ashley Hunt, and Ultra red, and then I started working with artist Kelly Nipper, as a dancer in her work. So I was in Los Angeles, and in graduate school, and I ended up focusing a lot more on other choreographers’ work (my professors). As soon as I graduated, I started touring their work, which was all concert and black-box performance. When those things ended, I was motivated to start making work that went beyond those spaces, and to return to those initial questions I’d started exploring.

That’s when I made Decomposition of a Continuous Whole, which is a piece where I’m blindfolded and drawing on the walls of a room. I wanted to create a space where an audience was around me, and I wasn’t aware of their viewing, their eyes. I wanted to get out of this 7 minute, 15 minute, 45 minute, evening length dance structure. I wanted to expand time and have no narrative arc. I just wanted to be in an experience. And I wanted my internal experience to be as informative as what the audience was taking in.

I’d love to talk about LET’S USE THESE THINGS, your 2012 solo show at Commonwealth and Council Gallery in Los Angeles? Is that the largest spanning work you’ve made? Looking at your website, I was struck by the range of practices you engaged there. And then there was the multiplicity of your representation; I felt like you as the performer and creator were very present in all the different pieces. Also, you did something with your hair?

LET’S USE THESE THINGS was my first full installation where I’m here, and the work is there. It was a string sculpture, a painting (let’s say), a video, and a book.

That [hair] piece was called Proscenium. It was in a small room. I dipped my hair in different colored paints, and did this splash that I called “hair whip color magic.” That action was also documented and incorporated into a video called Fila Buster in the Autotuniverse which played in another small room of the gallery. So it’s like this trace of performance that becomes an object in itself, but you have to read through a knowledge of a body. In addition to the paint-streaked walls, the Proscenium piece was also full of lit candles, making it a memorial in some way.

I was especially drawn by the video triptych in LET’S USE THESE THINGS. In the center, you are performing movement outdoors, on your left is a televised dance-aerobics competition and on your right, a body-builder, who  is past middle-age, female, and black, poses in a Fitness America Pageant. What sparked your interest in popular movement phenomena such as Zumba and fitness competitions? Can you speak to your process of bringing these practices into your body?

What brought me to Zumba in the first place was this interest in negotiating shared practices and putting my body up against these other forms. I came to this whole project with the realization that I had become fixed in my notions of what is dance and what’s not dance. I’m a dancer—I felt like I should know all these other forms that are coming up, and bring them into my body. What does it mean to consider that as another type of knowledge?

Another aspect of this project was about getting some inspiration from Earth-based spiritual practices. What has been really valuable is trying to source, to find, radical practices. I feel like embedded in Earth-based spiritual practices is a really intense, capitalist critique. It says, “That tree over there is just as important as the strip mall you want to build, so we can’t plow down that tree because it lives there.” And it’s this awareness that the Earth and the things that we live around—they have a right to exist and they have intelligences. I got into these goddess notions (this is really kind of underground information, but it’s in the work), and this notion of maiden, mother, and crone. Things in threes: intelligences in threes, and three different stages of life.

I found these fitness videos, which just blew my mind! And then I came across this woman: Ernestine Shepard, the older woman who’s the bodybuilder (she was 74 at the time of this recording, so must be about 76 now). Here’s this elder who is practicing this type of form that is the exact same thing as what the fitness people are doing, but what does it mean to look at her—this coming out in her form? The juxtaposition of this virile grandmother with buff muscles. I was interested in placing myself as a negotiation or intersection of those two points. What I was doing was improvised, it was very square, because that was how I was interpreting Zumba. Zumba on my loosey-goosey, everything-flows body creates square, angular, structured-ness.

Can we talk a little bit about your vestibular mantra (or radical virtuosities for a brave new dance)?  In it, you write:

stay visible, stay wanting more, stay addressing

what’s not there and what the

audience isn’t willing to see.

….

stay knowing that if they get this dance, there might be something wrong.

stay knowing that if something is only to be gotten, we might all be doing something wrong.

Maybe this has to with the frames you were talking about before: the show’s over, the lights come on, we go home, we’re satisfied (or not). It seems like you’re expressing an interest in the audience and performers moving forward together, being more involved, or interdependent. I feel like there’s also a kind of pushing too: “what the audience isn’t willing to see.” There’s an interesting tension that’s coming across. Were you ever more concerned with the audience “getting” your work?

I do think about what the audience perspective might be on work while I’m making it, and then I have to put that away, and come back to it. The experience of someone spending time with my work—well, time is a resource, and I think that’s very sacred. I also feel that the audience is the work. There is an exchange that happens; the work exists because there is an audience. I mean, work can exist without an audience, but I do feel like there’s a completion of a circle when the audience is present. I’ve become more interested in creating spaces that envelop both the audience and the performer into this total experience.

My issue about what the audience isn’t willing to see, and knowing if there’s something to be gotten, we might be doing something wrong—is that there’s this “aboutness” that weighs so heavy in dance-making (and in making work in general, and in thinking). That “about”—we’re so fixated on that. And there’s so much more. I feel like work is an experience. When you even say that word “about,” it fixes—like it has to have a certain conclusion, or have a series of logic in place. I feel that that’s really limiting and not useful at all. So, it’s not about not caring what the audience gets. This work might not be “about” what the work is about anyways—it could simply be about us being together in space. It could be as much about the tampon you accidentally dropped on the floor while you were trying to turn off your cell phone and what came up for you in that experience—as much as it is about this duet I did. Again, frame—it’s not just the dance. It’s all the other things that come up.

Yes. I feel that that’s also really relevant to writing about dance, that we tend to go to a place of the mind, rather than trying to talk about how it feels to experience a performance through our bodies. Relying exclusively on language, or ideas. That somehow feels safer, or easier. It’s also keeping it away from us, the audience, as in: “This is not about me, this is about what I’m seeing, what’s being presented.” I think people only think of the audience being involved if it’s an audience-participatory work. And people have very strong feelings about that, for or against.

Audience participation gives me the hives! I guess I'm interested in involving the audience on a more experimental level.  How do I shape the environment so they feel that the boundary between them and the stage is not so present? I also really like making work in small spaces where eye contact can actually happen between people. 

What are you working on now?

The Fila Buster project started last year with a piece I was asked to propose for the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco. The prompt was: “This is what I want.” I decided the thing that I wanted was to address speech and the act of speaking. I had become very aware of the silence of my body. A friend of mine made a comment to me about one of my works: that she was really struck by me being blindfolded and not talking. She felt that sometimes it took power away from me. I sat with that and was thinking about how the voice is so not-present in dance.

So I was interested in speech and voice and I started researching ideas about talking and came across filibusters, which I thought was like a queering of time—a way to toy with and stretch time, and use it as a tool. In the filibuster, you’re just buying time through speech. So I was questioning this thing of “aboutness” and thinking, “How do I get to these ideas?” I decided, instead of making a piece about filibuster, to make a character called Fila Buster, who was the embodiment of these ideas. A pivotal moment in American history when the notion of the filibuster became a household name was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which was part of a chain of events that eventually led up to the American Civil War. I got interested in this character being a woman who is trapped between that era and this current era.

It made me realize that, in dance, the “neutral body” that we perform is always a version of us that’s not actually us. I got interested in pushing that thought further and exploring the possibilities around inserting character and subjectivity into a dance, seeing what that might add to these questions around identity and fixed-ness. The specificity of identity but also the ambiguity of identity is really interesting to me. And so, all the works I make now have Fila Buster. Her questions, her thought process and subjectivity are present, and she's the one who guides and helps me make sense of it. That’s how I’m getting at “aboutness.”

The process brought up more questions than what I could address in that piece. This next work that I’m making is also under this Fila Buster Project/Certain Repetitions Fail Us.  It has a working title of Parallelogram, and is definitely a continuation of questions about Zumba and structured dance forms, history, and identity.

It seems similar to writing a persona poem. Or like a prompt, in that it can bring you to new places. Do you feel that you receive a voice? Does that character feel like a real person to you, that you work with, or are you very aware that you’ve created her?

I definitely enjoy tapping into the notion that she’s speaking through me. That’s actually quite informative. But I'm also clear that she's a series of ideas and a strategy for doing things. And that “she” is an “it”. She’s not even a “she”. To call her a “she” would be too much to fix her as this thing. She’s like a transhistorical constellation of ideas.

Wow. Yes. Okay, one last thing: Can you address your decision to forego capitalization in the spelling of your name and in your writing?

I think it’s my lack of interest in labels and certain types of fixed formalities. I typically don’t capitalize the beginnings of the sentences when I write my bio. Politically, I think there’s something about softening myself into the collective of the other words on the page and choosing to make decisions about how that narrative is constructed. I guess I see the bio as a script, a location, and a point of entry—so I do pay attention to how it speaks.

bio:

taisha paggett makes things and is interested in what bodies do. she believes language is tricky, thoughts are powerful, and that people are most beautiful when looking up. her work for the stage, gallery and public sphere include individual and collaborative investigations into questions of the body, agency, and the phenomenology of race, and has been presented nationally and abroad, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, Danspace at St Mark’s City (New York City), Defibrillator (Chicago), The Off Center (San Francisco), and BAK Basis Voor Actuele Kunst (Utrecht, NL). as a dancer she’s had the honor of working extensively with David Roussève, Stanley Love Performance Group, Fiona Dolenga-Marcotty, Vic Marks, Cid Pearlman, Cheng-Chieh Yu, Baker-Tarpaga Projects, Rebecca Alson-Milkman, Kelly Nipper, Meg Wolfe, Ultra-red, and with Ashley Hunt in their ongoing collaborative project, “On movement, thought and politics.” she lives between Los Angeles and Chicago where she's a full-time Guest Lecturer at the Dance Center of Columbia College. she holds an MFA from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and is a co-instigator of the Los Angeles-based dance journal project, itch.

The Dancer is Never Asked About...

The dancer is never asked about...

how many baths we take.
health insurance costs.
intellect...
or mathematics.

The dancer is never asked about...

physical limitations.
survival.
pain.

The dancer is never asked about...

childhood.
high school.
raising kids.
home.

The dancer is never asked about...

climate change.
sexuality.
race.

The dancer is never asked about...

ownership of work.

The dancer is never asked,
but we will ask
these and many other things we believe
the dancer can and will talk about.

Tutting Tutorial

The theory of tutting and who i learned it from. For all the glowsticking.com people that wanted a resource on how to tutt.