August 1994
Stephen Petronio doesn’t want to talk about it. But he’s affable and eventually just outspoken enough that he can’t resist. He says his dances are ideas-driven and, given the velocity of those dances, his ideas must be powerful fuel. But, he says, if he talks about ideas people look for their illustration in the dances and “you can’t read kinetic information like a book—it addresses another part of the mind; ideas style the body.” At one point, he thought he was so successful that he could say anything he wanted about himself (“I’m a fag, big deal. I’m not going to shut up about it, but I’m not going to let that message consume me.”) But he discovered that, like Icarus—who could dash around the heavens in a similarly dazzling, fleeting, audacious way—he could hurt himself by getting too “hot.”
The King Is Dead, the latest Petronio project, is about the death of the masculine icon. It’s about the idea of the death of the hero for him personally, as a sign and as a social entity. The process—neurological, emotional, formal or accidental—of transforming an idea into dance is hardly mysterious. But it is a voyage of discovery. Petronio can’t—or won’t—say how he gets from idea to action, only that it is a mark of success to come to a physical conclusion.
But he will talk about physical metaphors. The King Is Dead, he says, is full of “pelvis receding,” which is the opposite of the classical thrusting male pelvis. Perched on a fire engine red bar stool in a Mexican, unselfconsciously multicultural, noisy, cheap bar in Manhattan, Petronio rolls his head down to meet his tailbone. It’s an action that reveals an abandon and conscious ease with physical danger. (Anyone else would fall off the stool or at least have to uncross their legs and put down their Margherita!)
Stephen Petronio has a soft spot in his heart for Tasdance, the first company ever to commission a work from him almost ten years ago. When he arrives in August, the Tasdance dancers will undergo endless repetition to get the idiosyncrasy of an action right. The barely perceptible glee with which Petronio admits it will be “torture” for them is replaced by a rueful grimace when he confesses that, no matter how often he shows a movement to any dancer and how diligently they practice it, fifteen per cent of the nuance will be lost in translation.
His concern with speed and virtuosity, he admits, is very American. Certainly dance aficionados from other cultures have labelled his work “very New York” because of its concern with “more, more, more—more speed, more space, more money, and more success…”
Petronio is not concerned about the international epidemic of his trademark “fluidity of shape.” He’s not possessive, though he does think that if people are going to knock particular aspects of his work they should acknowledge their source. “It’s a language,” he says of contemporary dance, “people should use it… we’re living in a postmodern culture.” And the more that people speak the language, the more people he’ll be able to “talk” to without words getting him into trouble.
RealTime issue #2 Aug-Sept 1994 pg. 6
Here in New York, dance trends tend to have a ten-year cycle. Movement idioms change like shoe fashions. We get ten years of Reeboks and Nikes and now we’re back in platforms.
“After Trisha Brown” has been the flavour of the last decade. Fluid, overlapping actions flowing effortlessly from dancers who swing, glide, toss, swoop, flick and curl but never punch, strike, squeeze, hold or grab. Ironically, this movement style emanated from a cerebral woman working on formal concerns who may have agreed with Yvonne Rainer when she declared, “say no to sensuality.” But in the past decade the movement (not the formal concerns) became the sexy way to dance.
The popularity of the style has peaked now and will soon be on the decline. It is as much a cliché to the eye at this point as cross-dressing was a few years ago. The movement language was originally evolved as a tool to address formal concerns that have not been passed along to choreographers with the vocabulary. So the movement language, which was so laden with meaning and intention in the hands of its author has become gibberish in the works of a fifth generation of followers who seem like children imitating the words of their elders without knowing what they mean.
The release techniques in which Trisha Brown and company train remain very popular with dancers. (They can add years to a dancer’s career and many options to their movement vocabulary.) But even Trisha Brown is becoming less like Trisha Brown. Reviews of her latest work describe moments of stillness, strongly articulated, almost semaphoric gestures, a new (for her) bound quality, which wouldn’t have been seen earlier. One wonders how masters of dance feel about their followers. Perhaps Trisha Brown is evolving in part in response to the morass of clichés others have made of her deeply felt innovations.
If movement languages tell us something about contemporary social concerns, Trisha Brown and her first generation of followers (Stephen Petronio et al) articulated a glorious, impersonal complexity, fluidity and overlapping of actions as smooth and as dangerous as the computer technology spinning out of control on Wall Street.
What is replacing this? “New Expressionism” is the phrase today. It means dance has an emotional edge again, a merciful antidote after ten years of soft, seamless movement. And New Expressionism is coinciding with an increase in the presence or visibility of companies led by African-American, Asian, Hispanic and other ‘non-dominant’ cultures, men and women. They are looking at a mix of social issues, gender issues, personal stories and cultural contexts in work that freely mixes dance, story, song and any other elements that might be effective.
The leading company in this ‘genre’ is the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company. Actually Bill T Jones has been defining new actions in dance for 20 years (just as Trisha Brown worked for 20 or so years before she was “discovered” by hordes of young wannabes). Bill T Jones has broken through as a leader not by being the first to try new mixes of movement stories and social themes, but because of the quality of the work.
Unlike Trisha Brown, Bill T’s contribution is not a movement style. For movement he takes what he needs. One minute he requires soft and released—surrender in emotional terms—and the next he demands furious attack. In dancers he wants the embodiment of all possible dualities—screams and whispers, amazons and sylphs, people who can be both mud wrestlers and ballerinas in action.
In these politically correct, multicultural times one could dismiss Bill T Jones’ current popularity by saying it’s just that he’s HIV Positive, black and angry. But I propose it is more than that—he is an original artist. And as such he is leading a movement, which will spawn followers and eventually clichés. What an artist of this stature does is to grasp and express the bigger picture. Bill T Jones doesn’t choreograph a dance about AIDS. He goes back to the Bible, to the Book of Job, and asks how we can have faith when we are visited by plagues. In The Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he crashed together the experiences of slaves with that of Jesus; somehow he made a meaningful ‘semioclasm’ of martyrdoms, so that we could look at our current predicament in the context of endless human suffering and momentary panaceas. He says his new work Still/Here is not going to be about how he lives with HIV, but how we all live with death. It will be about survival, and it will no doubt be an uplifting encounter with pain, ecstasy and lunacy.
Choreographers/movement theatre artists ‘arriving’ in the wake of Bill T Jones include people like David Rousseve (African-American and gay), Jowale Willa Jo Zolla (an African-American woman leading an all-female company); Patricia Hoffbauer (Brazilian); Amy Pivar (Jewish-American and gay), and many more. Their companies have names like REALITY or Urban Bush Women.
These artists are distinguishable from the ‘pants-off’ political work of the 80s by the evolution of their craft and the vulnerability found in their characters. Their take on sexuality/homosexuality, AIDS, cultural difference and social injustice is not as strident as it might have been a few years ago. Sweet stories, wit and self-mocking, and sensuality are evident too. Having a Democrat in the presidency means there is a less clear-cut enemy in power, and Bill Clinton is trying to address a lot of the same social issues as these choreographers. So perhaps artists feel they don’t have to scream to be heard. In fact, the very popularity of this kind of work at the moment means that they are being heard more than most people, and this creates a bit of a paradox when they talk about under-representation.
What is interesting about this movement is that the words used in the mix of dance and text cannot become meaningless in the same way that movement languages can become gibberish. The words are spoken, usually in simple declarative sentences in English. But what is scary is this: no matter how articulate, right and even moving the works of these artists are, their themes can become trivialised as they’re handed down. Sorrow won’t go away, but it will go out of style. And then how will we talk about pain?
RealTime issue #2 Aug-Sept 1994 pg. 7
Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century inspired a generation of female replicants. With cyborg replication uncoupled from organic reproduction, cyborg sex is a nice prophylactic against heterosexism—“My mistress enters my sensory orbit.” Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—gamegirls, simultaneously organism and machine, who populate cyberspace ambiguously and polymorphously, like Intelligent Mist. The cyborg is feminist ontology and epistemology and it gives us politics.
It is a creature in a post-gendered world—“I image a muscular hybrid”—resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity—“She decodes my perversities in nanoseconds.” It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence.
Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define different political possibilities and limits from those constructed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman—“I’m psyching for some hard downtime with a free radical.” Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, ie through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished (w)hole, a city and cosmos. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. As illegitimate offspring they are exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their Fathers are, after all, inessential—“millennia later I am accommodated in an oral cavity which amplifies the workings of her secret cybernetic body … she transforms me into pure code, pure speed…”
All New Gen leading a band of renegade DNA Sluts, Patina de Panties, Dentata and the Princess of Slime, grants the wish for (s)heroic quests, exuberant eroticism and serious politics. She is omnipresent intelligence—an anarcho-cyber terrorist with multiple guises whose main aim is to virally infect and corrupt the informatics of domination and terminate the moral code. In this game you become a component of the matrix, joining ANG in her quest to sabotage the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe…
Monsters still defined the limits of normalcy in the human imagination. Before they successfully interfaced their bodies with cybernetic matrices, human beings had to appreciate that any desire for stable identity was useless and retarded certain monstrous instincts necessary for healthy interface. Luckily, monsters represented a very large, indelible territory of habits, taboos and details in their psyches. Monsters still exist and their semiologies continue to proliferate. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallocentrism. The name of the game is infiltration and re-mapping the possible futures outside the (chromo) phallic patriarchal code.
All battles take place in the Contested Zone, a terrain of propaganda, subversion and transgression. Your guides through the Contested Zone are renegade DNA Sluts, abdicators from the oppressive superhero regime, who have joined ANG in her fight for data liberation…Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying (hopefully) a new developmental code—Virus of the New World Disorder.
Humans were preoccupied with perfectibility. They often said, in the mirroring way they had of saying almost everything, “I want to make myself perfectly clear” and “I want to make my self perfectly clear.” Since the difference between these statements was evident only when the written form was carefully read or ‘self’ was correctly enunciated orally, human beings were prone to totalising arguments, theories of unity and hierarchical dualisms, Gamegirl Objective: To defeat Big Daddy Mainframe, a trans-planetary military industrial imperial data environment.
The path of infiltration is treacherous and you will encounter many obstacles. The most wicked is Circuit Boy, a dangerous technobimbo with a gratuitous 3D detachable dick, which, when unscrewed transforms into a cellular phone. The phone is a direct line to the Cortex Crones, brain matter of the matrix and guardians of the digi cryst. However, el clitoris es linea directa a la matriz.
Technological determinism is only one ideological space opened up by the re-conceptualisation of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage the play of writing and reading the world. ‘Textualisation’ of everything in post-structural, postmodern, post-real theory has been damned for its disregard for lived relations of domination that ground the ‘play’ of arbitrary reading. Postmodern (feminist) strategies, such as cyborg myths, undermine the certainty of what counts as real, probably fatally. The transcendent authorisation of interpretation is not necessarily cynicism or faithlessness like the accounts of technological determinism destroying ‘man’ by the ‘machine’ or ‘political action’ by the ‘text.’ What cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we? On your dangerous and necessary journey to screw up BDM, Circuit Boy and the Cybermen: You will be fuelled by G-slime. Please monitor your levels. Bonding with the DNA Sluts will replenish your supplies. (I can vouch for this strategy, especially if you remove more than your shoes in the Bonding Booth). “She willingly slide into the other she had always felt herself to have been. She could use her body to connect with the networks of her choice.”
Be prepared to question your gendered biological construction.
Humans classified themselves by gender, which severely impeded the development of social relations such as those involving reproduction, science and technology. One by-product of gender identifications was labelled the Oedipal Complex, a kind of psychological virus. Recall this early but already lethal example from my databank: “Ladies and Gentlemen… Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity… Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem.” The Oedipal Complex was promoted as an irreversible development and caused many disfigured identifications. Consider the transfer of guilt to an entire social class of women in this example or in concepts such as ‘purity’ and ‘mother.’ Such perversions almost certainly account for the brief appearance of Oedipal chimeras during early cyborg development. Fortunately, Oedipal chimeras extinguished themselves on cue by mirroring their identity in dualism. For this, human beings learned to distinguish illegitimate fusions that are ethically unproductive from those that are critically speculative. They are fast becoming post-Oedipal, like me. The potential of cybernetic worlds rests with the feminist cyborg. Salutations, pussy.
Be aware there is no moral code in the Zone.
Once they articulate the representational problems raised by cyborg technology, they will have achieved the status of partial explanations. Then monsters will represent the potential of community of human imagination, and they will say, “I want to make my selves partially appear.” Enjoy. “We move through this post-real world at the speed of thought.”
VNS Matrix: artists Julianne Pierce, Josephine Starrs, Virginia Barrett and Francesca da Rimini working from Sydney and Adelaide. Their current project is the ongoing development of an interactive computer artwork titled All New Gen. VNS Matrix creates hybrid electronic artworks that ironically integrate theory with popular culture. As cyberfeminists VNS Matrix’ mission is to highjack technology and remap cyberspace.
This article was originally published by Contemporary Art Centre, South Australia under a different title in Broadsheet, 1993.
RealTime issue #2 Aug-Sept 1994 pg. 17
