Risk is a Relative Term

RISK IS A RELATIVE TERM

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RISK IS A RELATIVE TERM KAREN ELIOT AND ALANA RYDER, EDITORS MORGAN AMONETT RANI BAWA JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE DEMETRA CHIAFOS LAURA GAINES SAM GIUSTO KAIYA GORDON LAVINIA HUANG EMILY KILROY MICHELLE SIPES

COLUMBUS, OH | 2020

Risk Is a Relative Term is published as part of Writing about the Performing Arts at The Ohio State University and the Wexner Center for the Arts (https:// wexarts.org/explore/writing-about-performing-arts-ohio-state). With support from the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, Karen Eliot (Professor, Department of Dance) and Alana Ryder (Manager, Public and University Programs, Wexner Center for the Arts) collaborated on this year-long writing initiative with a cohort of undergraduate and graduate students from varied disciplines. The campus partnership culminated in this student-driven publication, which documents and responds to the Wexner Center’s 2019–2020 performing arts season. Writing by the students also appeared online in the Read, Watch, Listen section of Wexner Center’s website (https://wexarts.org/blog) and in program notes distributed at performances.

With Eliot and Ryder’s guidance and through extensive peer workshops, students with backgrounds in biology, classics, creative writing, dance, neuropsychology, political science, and psychology served as ambassadors and advocates for the arts. They experienced the challenges of writing for the public, accessibility to contemporary art, and the development of observational, analytical, and critical thinking skills. Students applied dance and performing arts history, theory, and current discourse to guide the public through themes such as identity, cultural appropriation, and disability. The students’ writing helped steer audiences toward more illuminated and critical engagement with contemporary art.

More information about the students and others behind the Writing about the Performing Arts project appears on pages 98–99. © Copyright 2020 The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts and individual artists as applicable. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-881390-58-9 1-881390-58-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020915211

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS PROJECT TEAM Johanna Burton, Director Lane Czaplinski, Director, Performing Arts Adam Elliott, Associate Producer, Performing Arts Alana Ryder, Manager, Public and University Programs Ryan Shafer, Editor Ashley Stanton, Senior Producer, Performing Arts Melissa Starker, Creative Content & PR Manager

PUBLICATION TEAM Brandon Ballog, Designer Ann Bremner, Editor Lane Czaplinski Karen Eliot Alana Ryder Printed by Hopkins Printing Columbus, OH

“Risk is a relative term. The work I make lives in certain places, psychologically and emotionally, which for some people would be incredibly risky to do…. The idea that I am half-naked in front of an audience doesn’t seem so weird to me…. I just don’t understand that it is used as the metric of riskiness. With improvisation there is always a risk…, but improvisation in particular is partly a kind of statement that I am willing to accept that this might not work. That is one of the ethics of the piece.

Sometimes the attempt to come together doesn’t work in an easy way.”

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ (interview with lavinia huang, december 2019)

Contents Foreword

1–2

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? > JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE Nora Chipaumire

3–16

INTRO: “I’M LEFT WITH QUESTIONS”

6 10 12 14

CHARTING THEIR TERRITORY > DEMETRA CHIAFOS BACKFIRE > MORGAN AMONETT WHAT YOU FEEL IS VERY IMPORTANT > JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE WEEKEND RESEARCHERS > KAIYA GORDON

Reflection

17–18

FINDING A VOICE > LAVINIA HUANG Radouan Mriziga

19–32

INTRO: “DRAWN BY BODIES, BUILT BY WORDS, SUSTAINED BY MOVEMENT”

22 SEVEN MORE > LAURA GAINES 24 WONDER OF THE WORLD > SAM GIUSTO 28 “7,” IN FIVE > RANI BAWA 30 “7”: THE EXPERIENCE > LAVINIA HUANG FluxFlow Dance Company

33–44

INTRO: IN SUSPENSION

36 38 40 42

“MAKING SPACE” IN CONTEMPORARY ART > RANI BAWA “URSULA”: A STARRED REVIEW > LAURA GAINES DANCERS ARE ARTISTS AND HUMANS > LAVINIA HUANG MY ABSTRACTION-FISHING PROCESS > SAM GIUSTO

Reflection

ROLE OF A CRITIC > DEMETRA CHIAFOS

45–46

Miguel Gutierrez

47–60

INTRO: A BRIDGE TO CROSS OR A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

50 54 56 58

DISIDENTIFICATION AND THE QUEER TELENOVELA > KAIYA GORDON TO CROSS THE BRIDGE CALLED MY ASS > LAVINIA HUANG THE EVENTS OF THE STORY, AND THEN, THE FALLOUT > JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE IS THERE A JOKE HERE THAT I’M NOT IN ON? > DEMETRA CHIAFOS

Back To Back Theatre

61–66

INTRO: “CAN MAY I HELP YOU?”

74 OTHERED > MICHELLE SIPES Reflection

67–68

FATIGUED WRITER > KAIYA GORDON Sharon Udoh

69–74

72 THAT ROLLERCOASTER FEELING > MICHELLE SIPES Annie Dorsen, Triptych, Faye Driscoll

75–88

76 WORLDS COLLIDE > LAURA GAINES 80 A CAMERA AIMED ON CONTROVERSY > SAM GIUSTO 84 EMBODIED DISMANTLING > MICHELLE SIPES Context

89–99

89 DIALOGUE, PARTICIPATION, AND DISCOVERY > ALANA RYDER INTRO: AN INVITATION

94 “AN EXCELLENCE OF CONNECTION…” > LANE CZAPLINSKI 96 FURTHER READING AND SOURCES 98 THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECT Afterword & Acknowledgments SUSAN HADLEY KAREN ELIOT

100–101

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WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE: AN INTRODUCTION JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE

Jacqueleen Bordjadze Rani Bawa Michelle Sipes Laura Gaines Kaiya Gordon Sam Giusto Emily Kilroy Morgan Amonett Demetra Chiafos Lavinia Huang (from top, left to right).

THIS IS THE CULMINATING PUBLICATION for the Writing about the Performing Arts at Ohio State project. This unwieldy title stems from the project’s novel ambiguity: it’s part writing group, part internship, part class, part project. We’re ten OSU students attending performing arts events at the Wex (aka Ohio State’s Wexner Center for the Arts, a multidisciplinary contemporary arts center) and writing about them. The project spanned the 2019–2020 academic year and was supported by the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, which was awarded to Professor Karen Eliot of Ohio State’s Department of Dance in 2018 in honor of her creative teaching and exemplary record of engaging, motivating, and inspiring students. The 2019–2020 performing arts season at the Wex was, to quote choreographer and Professor Emerita Bebe Miller, about “an excellence of connection, not the aesthetics of excellence.” It was also, along with many performing arts seasons this year, cut tragically short. We don’t really know what to call ourselves, we don’t always know what to make of the shows that we’ve seen, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to the performing arts.

Start with what we know: art galleries have books you can buy.

If you liked an exhibition, you can go to the bookstore downstairs and buy the book that has all the pieces of art printed on glossy paper, with a hardback cover and a pretty dust jacket. You can own all the paintings you saw, and some you forgot to see because you felt awkward walking through the silent galleries, with the security guards staring at you, and your uncomfortable date who is realizing they hate modern art, and so you missed the three side rooms in your hurry to get out. But that’s okay because you bought the book, and it’s sitting on your side table to show people that you were there, you saw that show. It’s proof of taste—and a reminder of your visit.

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That is what this book is, for the performing arts. We were at the Wex—most of us, most of the time—we saw these things.

You were there too, maybe. You saw these things, or you wish you did. Thanks for putting this book on your coffee table. It’s proof of taste. It’s nice to go see shows—nice to let someone make you feel something, nice to see what the human body can do, nice to let someone’s voice grab at your lungs and twist them for a little while. If your date still hates modern art, at least you can sit next to them in the dark. Maybe you hold their hand. It’s nice to go see live shows, and even nicer to think about them later. Maybe you could let them radicalize you, just a little.

It would be so easy to radicalize around one of these shows.

So many of them asked uneasy things of their audiences. Mostly, ultimately, they asked that we be a little fiercer with our kindness.

Be a little more aggressive with our softness. Be a little more careful about how we “consume” art. Maybe we should be more than entertained. What else is there to do but dance, on the rhythm and without embarrassment, because nora chipaumire called for it? How dare I just stand there? What am I supposed to do while Miguel Gutierrez’s cast members are shaking their asses and screaming about it? Sit there? When Back to Back Theatre tells me “I’m not getting it,” what then? The least I can do is lean in, try to understand, be more than a consumer, more than entertained.

To have been so freely a part of this world is an immense privilege. And what about now, and the upcoming months, and years? I’m writing this in mid-April 2020. Performance art is not the only canary in the pandemic coal mine, but it was harrowing to lose gatherings of one hundred, then fifty, then ten, then any size. There’s no way to know when we will be in a theater next.

To assume that August will bring a “return to normal” is painfully naïve. Whenever we’re next in a theater, with a crowd of people, watching an artist move and speak, in space and time, with us in that space, we’ll be in an entirely new world.

The postponed performances—Triptych, Annie Dorsen, and Faye Driscoll—are still discussed in this volume, but not nearly to the extent that they deserve to be. The shows we did see are described here, along with our opinions, thoughts, and impressions.

This book is a record, a snapshot, a scrapbook of experiences.

Documentation of the work and criticism of it, in the same breath.

We’ve been trying to be more than just students, writing essays.

We’re trying to be particular, careful, conscious of our biases.

We’re trying to get somewhere with this writing, maybe be a little different than we were before. Thanks for reading. Thanks for supporting the performing arts. (april 17, 2020)

nora chipaumire #PUNK and 100% POP OCTOBER 24–25, 2019

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“I AM LEFT WITH QUESTIONS. MOST OF THEM ARE UNANSWERABLE. THEY AREN’T NECESSARILY QUESTIONS FOR NORA. THEY ARE QUESTIONS FOR MYSELF, MY RELATIONSHIP WITH PERFORMANCE AND MOVEMENT, AND FOR THE WORLD. I LEFT THE PERFORMANCES OF BOTH #PUNK AND 100% POP QUESTIONING WHAT IT MEANS TO REFLECT AND WHAT MY SPECIFIC ROLE IS IN THE PROCESS OF REFLECTION....

JUST LIKE THE REST OF US, I CARRY WITH ME A BACKPACK OF BIASES, EXPERIENCES, IDENTITIES, IDEOLOGIES, AND SO MUCH MORE.” —EMILY KILROY

nora chipaumire, 100% POP, photo by Ian Douglas.

NORA CHIPAUMIRE

“I am left with questions.”

QUESTIONS. DISORIENTATION. DISCOMFORT. BIAS. PRIVILEGE. “Raw power,” says Sam Giusto.

And, “not landing on an easy answer,” writes Michelle Sipes. These were among our stunned reactions to nora chipaumire’s two shows in October 2019.

In our new shelter-in-place, COVID-19-dictated world, though, another often reiterated theme stands out to me. As much as privilege, race, and a nagging sense of unease lingered after nora chipaumire’s assertive, in-your-face performances, so too did the spatial intimacy we experienced in the Wexner Center’s black box theater. Rani Bawa noted, “As I sit down to write about the work I just experienced, my brain is running at ten thousand thoughts per minute. My ears are ringing, I still feel the vibrations of the bass inside my chest. I’m suddenly quite aware that my apartment is cold in contrast to the warm performance space.”

Laura Gaines was unsettled by the way the performers “[got] up in people’s faces.” They “never took the path of least resistance,” she wrote.

Packed into the space, the performers chided, cajoled, and dared us to move in closer, until they confronted us head-on and forced us to endure with them—through sheer physical intimacy—their experiences of racism in America.

Now it seems a physical proximity we are unlikely to experience again. Already it seems like a memory from a different world.

KAREN ELIOT APRIL 16, 2020

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e band, set up in ueeze in around th ll dotte unterfeit Madison, front of a small wa . Performing as Co ng pi um th solely for us, ssba g, heel-tappin ad of performing ste in s an ici us m e s th e band members Sharon Udoh face llowing lyrics. Th be lly rfu ee es an ch d an Each of us becom crooning ballads, d closer to them. an r dies se bo r clo t ou ge s, to ad ing our he encourage us singing and nodd res, d cla an g de in h pp do U cla . t, instrumen the charged air in en os lo d ived an ce re up r words beginning to warm r microphone, he he to in ” ” it! it! sh sh a a e g in e not giv “I don’t have to giv e a shit! This is m giv t no o e m wh r ch be at em by laughter. “W male audience m en, backing into a ing a “bad She bends over th ce, as if he fears be fa sh smile on his pi ged male ee sta sh lly a , na ay tio aw shies version of tradi in an is t in th is , co elf , where is nsen sport.” I ask mys Then I ask myself ? ics to m ck na ba dy r es we go when she and female po ed and humble, so ur at -n n. od io go ct is fra h this? Udo about her in ce begins to forget t of a singing, the audien g in the opening ac in at cip rti pa e ar doh’s we e lik ar between Sh on U It feels more After a brief wait e. ll els wa e ng th hi yt nd an hi we walk be concert than e of adlining number, sid he e en th dd d hi an ly us ce io an perform op. The prev dr ck ba ’s ire nd m ba au e ip th ich nora ch that had served as les of speakers, wh pi m to in fro e ed nc ct tra tru en this wall is cons on, observing our erformers recline g room. in liv eir th to and her three co-p in ng e as if we’re walki the black box spac

sq obbing, ACE ONLY: we lightbulbs. Hip-b STANDING SP d with a few long

Counterfeit Madison (left), photo by Katie Gentry.

nora chipaumire, 100% POP (top), photo by Ian Douglas.

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NORA CHIPAUMIRE 8

When the punk music begins, layers crash ov many er each other and the bass thumps in my sternum. The throbbing doesn’t stop fo r the next hour and a half.

“Introducing an introductio n,” says the male perform er, Pape Ibrahi ma Ndiaye; sauntering up to th eye contact with e mic stand, he makes each of us as he stand by the th takes the roat, charting out his territory. “An introduction.

Introducing an introductio n.”

“An introductio n, introducing introduction,” an nora repeats, as she joins him at her ow n mic stand, th eir voices overlapping un til it’s difficult to make out who is saying what. They be gin counting out loud, onetwo-three-four , encouraging us to bellow th e co count with them unts back to them, to ; they begin cl apping, and they laugh whe n the crowd fu mbles by only managing an arrhythmic sm attering of applause in return.

“Are ya ready? !” they bellow ; our reply is as half-hear ted as our clap s. “These niggas don’t lo ok ready,” nora says, side-eyeing N diaye, a smirk on her face.

(Interestingly, I feel uncomfo rtable writing this word, desp ite it being a di rect quote. I am unsure of whether she w ants me to feel uncomfortable —whether she is asking me to use this wor d, whether she is confronting me with it by taking owners hip of it.) The begin countin y g again, encour aging us to move, to lift ou r feet and stom p them “like real African ni ggas.” They be gin shaking their heads ba ck and forth, sa ying, “Smash yo brain! Bad brain, nothing in it. Smash it! Even if you got a bun, sm ash it!” We all begin shaking and bobbing an d circling our heads with them .

Sweat is drippi ng down their the time they necks by move through the crowd— always choosi ng the most cr owded space, parting the se as, making eye contact and holding it. “Jes us died for yo u!” nora

e. us, “but not for m yells, pointing at e!” m r fo t no t bu He died for you, names of wellg tin lis s gin be e Sh le. “He died for known white peop , d the Bush family the Kennedys, an a t, en om m is th In but not for me!” l I read recurs to scene from a nove g ve owner is readin me viscerally: a sla a ile wh om ro ing her Bible in her liv ll tside. This is a ca ou rs cu oc g in lynch e th ng fingers findi to action, I think, ck as nora locks ne y m cross around she’s speaking eyes with me, as if . s died for all of us directly to me. Jesu e th ile wh living room Don’t sit in your . outside lynching happens , down High Street n’ lki wa s “I wa as , ys uus,” nora sa here in Colum-buu knees, miming a s hi up Ndiaye picks ne yelled, ‘Black!’” walk. “And someo encounter, which She recounts this etrator telling her ends with the perp ’ rica.” “So I’m goin to “go back to Af d te lif in ch r res, he back!” nora decla ees gins lifting her kn be e sh as y proudl e m aye. “Watch in unison with Ndi ca! Watch me! I’m -ri ffff go back to Aff -rica! Now we’re goin’ back to Afffff in Afffff-rica!”

NORA CHIPAUMIRE

For the first time, nora and Ndiaye seem to break free of the rigidness in their bodies, their muscles softening as they abruptly switch from embodying punk to embodying the African dias pora: spine articulation, pelvis movement, weig hted, down into the ground, flying through the spac e. The moment is a breath of fresh air and gone as quic kly as it arrived.

“This is round two!” they yell, ado pting their rigid punk stances again, the tendons in their necks popping out. “Round two, roun d two. We’re doing round two. This is for all of you weekend researchers. Round two, just for all of you weekend researchers, so you can steal this shit, ” nora inhales through her teeth before switching to a British accent, “nice, and, pro-per.”

They reset, flying through the Afri can diasporic movement again. It is not long befo re they are calling on us to move, and we are stomping our feet and clapping again. Suddenly the music crescendos, and the movement gets bigger, and they are in our faces, making eye contact with us, and then they are weight-sharing with members of the audience, and then they are telling us to jump up and down, and we are all one throbbing moment of mov ement. When the rest of us fatigue and give up, one person continues jumping in the upper level of seat ing. Staring at her, nora makes the ASL sign for “I love you.” It is a salute, an acknowledgment that they are both here, both now, both revolutionary, both confrontational, both unapologetic—both punk.

When nora and Ndiaye are on the ground, breathless, the music stops. There is a sens e of hesitation.

“I think it’s over,” I whisper to my friend.

Then nora and Ndiaye sit up, elbo ws resting on their knees.

“It’s over,” nora declares.

Nervous laughter bubbles up from the audience as we move toward the door. When I look back, they are still sitting on the ground, sweat runn ing down the back of their necks, jaws set. #punk, indeed.

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(novem ber 29, 2019)

nora chipaumire, 100% POP, photo by Ian Douglas.

NORA CHIPAUMIRE

MORGAN AMONETT THE “BACKFIRE EFFECT” is the name

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given to a particularly alarming human tendency observed by political science scholars in the early 2010s; it describes our inclination to burrow ever-deeper into our own comfortable, if wrong-headed, systems of belief when confronted with some piece of evidence that deconstructs or threatens us. When presented with something that might (perhaps should) fundamentally alter our opinions on the basis of illogic or misinformation, we do not retreat, consider what lies in front of us, and ultimately change our minds; we cling more tightly to the inaccuracies we know and perhaps love.

In other words, we sink into familiarity, avoiding the dangerous and uncomfortable at all costs.

That is, we avoid discomfort when we are able. In #PUNK, nora chipaumire’s aggression, brashness, and unapologetic righteousness forced her mostly white audience into what appeared to be a state of collective confusion. Many times, she and Shamar Watt, her partner in this piece, would stand within inches of an often smaller and always intimidated white audience member, staring directly into their eyes. The palpable relief felt by the folks standing near the accosted was unmissable and hilarious; it was as though they had never been thus confronted

before. It was apparent that they, too, were sinking deeply into comfortable inaccuracy; chipaumire’s brilliance is evident in the way she appeared to correctly diagnose this inaccuracy and respond to it in kind. It may have “backfired” in the moment—the audience was intimidated, frozen, feigning ease and agreement, while obviously feeling a little disconcerted; but, ultimately, that very reaction is what made her aggression necessary and quite well-placed.

The refuge into which her Columbus audience sank, though, was not one of obvious racism. Looking out into the room as she and Watts danced, spoke, yelled, conversed, and occupied space, the urban outfitters-clad/fjallraven kanken-toting/ instagram-sermonizing/softboi young, white liberals appeared ready to participate in the rite of public self-flagellation, ready to silently pretend to apologize in public for their perpetuation of systemic racism.

This penance, almost as inconsequential as ten Hail Marys and a Rosary, is typically all that is asked of them and is certainly an upper boundary of what most of them do. Immediately when chipaumire’s voice rang through the room “introducing an introduction,” however, it was clear that the false martyrdom in which white liberals usually engage was not going to suffice. They would not softly, half-assedly

NORA CHIPAUMIRE

castigate themselves; chipaumire and Watts took the flails right from their hands as soon as they began performing—and began to whip.

This fact—that they were being genuinely criticized for their classism and perpetuation of racism by people outside of their typical, falsely forgiving white liberal echo chamber—cut at the very core of the mostly white, liberal student audience. Discussion and thoughts about racism that revolve around a lack of commitment to actually reducing the degree of stolen power held by white people is a hallmark of their brand of liberalism. Unfortunately, it was painfully on display. As we watched chipaumire and Watts perform, we became progressively less able to perform our own brand of subtle racism and public apologia. Clearly chipaumire knew it, watched it, criticized it as our visage fell apart. Our failure to perform simple tasks at her request after a moment of concentration—like count to four and clap our hands—was visibly frustrating to her, and she told us so. She often remarked that “the Buckeyes [weren’t] ready” to appreciate her performance. She was quite right; by the third or fourth time she remarked that “Jesus died for you, but not for me” or addressed the culturally-and-intellectually-appropriating “weekend researchers” in the room, the audience began to look weary. And, indeed, they (we) were: weary of being exposed, weary of being criticized, weary of being forced to do the bare minimum, weary of being made to reckon with the fact that their very unwillingness to listen to her lumped them in with those telling her, both explicitly and implicitly, to “go back to Africa.” The “backfire” was visible; therein, however, lay the genius of #PUNK. (november 14, 2020) nora chipaumire, #PUNK, photo by Ian Douglas.

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IN THIS CENTURY, it’s important

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to define what we mean by audience engagement. Do the people write out answers to questions, only to later see those answers projected on a wall, or hear them sung by a musician? Do they wear headphones and walk about, following commands only they hear? Are they dragged on stage by an overexcited dancer, semi- or fully unwilling?

Performer and choreographer nora chipaumire doesn’t go in for this sort of engagement. #PUNK and 100%POP rely on the audience—it is difficult and reductive to discuss the shows without reference to the physical and emotional reactions of the audience. The fourth wall is flexible, mobile, and fine, but still ultimately impermeable. She may scan

nora chipaumire, 100% POP (top), #PUNK (left), photos by Ian Douglas.

JACQU EL

EEN BO

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you up and down, so close it seems like her sweat and her breath see into you. Company dancer Shamar Watt may careen into the crowd near you, or fall to the floor at your feet.

But they retreat just as quickly, never asking for more than recognition and reaction. In terms of performance that includes audience engagement, #PUNK and 100%POP are accessible and low stakes.

It doesn’t feel like that though. You are, for better or worse, a vital part of the show.

How you feel about the show is, for better or worse, the vital part of the show. #PUNK and 100%POP are dramatically distinct shows. Or, they are structurally consistent shows that evoked two distinct experiences. Sound is the easiest culprit, and from that sound came two vastly different emotional journeys. #PUNK gathers the audience in a tight circle around a large structure made of wooden boxes. Cast members lounge, cat-like, rising and entering the space with cool surety. In a blend of noise show, concert, and dance theater, chipaumire and Watt pace around the space, screaming into microphones. They’re tethered to each other with the microphone cords, and they chant, incant, sing, and scream. They pull their audience closer. There’s a loose, abstracted

(november 19, 2019)

NORA CHIPAUMIRE

narrative. It repeats and echoes itself, only barely formed near the climax of the work.

And there’s the noise, so loud, so furious and arrhythmic that, like a deer in headlights, I can only move at threat of collision.

My gut refused to comply with chipaumire, no matter what she asked for. “This is not dancing music!” my body wailed.

And this is the thing. The sounds of punk music didn’t speak to me. I saw it speak to others. An older professor head banging, company member Kris Lee cheerfully bouncing in the background for the full fifty minutes (a life-time achievement). But there were more people who couldn’t move. Bugs stuck to flypaper, startled and immobile.

Maybe it’s a lack of cultural knowledge.

Who knows what punk is, anyway. In that frozen feeling, I followed the body language of the performers and the words they were saying. There was nothing else to focus on, nothing to pull me away from the passion/ anger/strength that lives in the performers’ voices and their bodies. Facing wholesale and abstracted rebellion head-on truly does something to an audience. You have to reckon with the possibility that you are a part of the thing she’s rebelling against.

This is quite discomfiting.

100%POP maintains the same format: singer/performer with a microphone, abstracted narration, backup dancers (this time at turn tables), Watt in his barechested glory, a furious pacing that blends into dancing before a dramatic return to the microphone. But in the sound and the audience energy I felt a meshing that created an entirely different concept than the night before. 100%POP felt alive—a river and a groove you could ride on. Still vigorous, passionate, anti-institution, antiracist, anti-sexist. Less terrifying.

In a video interview posted on the website of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, chipaumire says that her aim is “to constantly encourage an architecture of both space and sound and aesthetic that is inclusive, inviting, that is welcoming of the public to participate.” 100%POP is meant to be inviting, to welcome and compel her audiences to respond, move, engage. The same compulsion propels #PUNK, but with a rhythm that stirs up movement.

Able to ride the rhythm and the joy I felt within the music, I felt the moment softened by my own inattention. I wasn’t so pinned to chipaumire’s body but instead was able to cast a wider net into the energy she created. Maybe I felt safer in the midst of recognizable sounds. Something shifted chipaumire’s energy from anger to passion.

Something gave the audience permission to move. Watt could pull a shy mom onto the floor and she could be only delighted to join. Compulsion and invitation. Maybe not all, but more of the audience was ready to go on the journey. Maybe more of us recognized the sound. Maybe the sound itself asked to be danced to.

Where does this leave us? The way the audience receives chipaumire’s work really, truly is a major factor in the totality of her work. During her masterclass offered in Ohio State’s Department of Dance, she spoke about how it felt to have an unreceptive audience. In her words, they perform the shit out of it, despite the lack of contributed energy. Her audience has a responsibility, to feel and to respond, to do more than just consume. What a critical role sound played in my willingness to accept that vulnerability.

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NORA CHIPAUMIRE

KAIYA GORDON

AS THE SECOND HALF of her immersive work #PUNK

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begins, nora chipaumire declares: “this round is for you weekend researchers, so you can steal this shit nice and proper.” It is one of many statements made directly to the audience; one of many made to provoke them and make them confront their reactions, both conscious and subconscious, to her work. As she asks the question, one can almost hear murmuring responses collecting above the crowd: Am I a weekend researcher? I am a weekend researcher. I am not a weekend researcher. I am one of those who has been stolen from. #PUNK is the first of a live performance in three parts, each of which “is a continuation of [chipaumire’s] career-long investigation of portraiture and selfportraiture | biography | subjecthood | liberation | and independence | ,” as the artist puts it in a statement on her company’s website (subsequent quotations from chipaumire about #PUNK come from the same statement). There is no stage: the performance takes place instead on an audiencelevel set. One corner of the room is blocked off by large, stacked wooden boxes holding speakers, which leaves the rest of the set open to both the dancers and the audience, who look on in a semi-circle as the dancers dance through, between, in front of, and at them. #PUNK is made up of stylized music and spoken sections; of instructions and

nora chipaumire, 100% POP, photo by Ian Douglas.

That alignment of aesthetic is important: because “from Harlem’s white jazz fans of the 1920s to the Beats and rock ’n’ rollers of the 1950s to the blues revivalists of the 1960s to the rap fans of the 1990s,” white artists have found in Black culture “an exhilarating way to elude the stodgy status quo,” (Mahon, p. 205). Blackness has been donned as a costume, as in Smith sliding on the character of a n***** much like the tradition of blackface and minstrelsy on the stage and in Hollywood and drag.

Costuming oppression is the foundation of “Rock ’n’ Roll N*****.” It is the foundation of white punk in general and of punk’s “attempt to articulate oppositional identities” (Duncombe, p. 20) failing because of the insistence to identify as rather than with.

In her performances, chipaumire approaches this failing ironically, setting up a space in which she is able to expose the violent absurdity of white punk’s appropriative stance. Her introductory sequence, which is repeated throughout the piece, tells the audience they are “introducing an introduction from Africa …this is an introduction from anywhere in Africa.”

The refrain points to the absurd practice of colonist countries approaching Africa as though it is a singular and vague grouped area, refusing to acknowledge the varied cultures, languages, practices, and lived lives in the continent’s fifty-four independent countries. It is a refusal that functions within the colonist, white-supremacist belief that Africans are less-than; that they are simultaneously exotically different from the west and in need of saving because of that difference. By suggesting that her choreography may be placed as from “anywhere in Africa,” chipaumire presses against that belief, co-opting its violent identification for herself. In the piece, chipaumire “declares [herself] to be an ‘African n*****’ (asterisks mine)—the sort who fucks with the past and fucks even harder with the present | future.” It is a kind of backwards costuming; chipaumire dresses her performance as globally “African” to take back and undress the terms of whiteness (and, therefore, of white punk).

If the first lines of this piece ironically introduce, the next sequence comes as an implication or invitation, depending on the audience’s position within the violence and

NORA CHIPAUMIRE

storytelling; of eye-contact and bounding movement; of stomping, contorting, and dancers mirroring each other’s movements.

And it is spurred, specifically, by the Patti Smith song “Rock ’n’ Roll N*****” (asterisks mine), a song that appears on the same album as “Because the Night,” and has been covered by Marilyn Manson—and yet is also a song I did not know existed before researching and viewing #PUNK. How is it that Patti Smith, beloved underground icon, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, and indie book darling, released a song that not only flagrantly employs the N-word in its title, but repeats it throughout, and that song is not thought of as a scourge on her career? And how might that song, as used by nora chipaumire, indict the very whiteness of punk, which foregrounds its use of that word?

“What was the Patti Smith Group thinking when they recorded ‘Rock ’n’ Roll N*****’ in 1978?” queried Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay in their anthology White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race (p. 18). “This was the post-Civil Rights, pre-Gangsta Rap era, and the N-word was strictly verboten.…

The song made no commercial sense.

But it did make sense in the logic of another tradition: the history of White outsiders and their identification with racial and cultural Others.”

When I tell my roommate or my friends that Patti Smith has a song that included the N-word, they assume I mean that Smith has a song in which she perhaps says the word once, perhaps as an aside, an afterthought. “That’s WILD,” they say, when I explain that, in fact, the word is integral to the thesis of the song: that Smith is someone who might be called that slur, as though she, a white artist, can identify with and assume the trauma of a word that comes directly from slavery and the (continued) genocide of black Americans. It is wild. But it is not out of step with punk ethos; rather, as Duncombe and Tremblay describe in White Riot and Maureen Mahon also discusses in Right to Rock:The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race, white artists who make their art outside of the mainstream — whether they are pushed underground or pull themselves—have continuously aligned themselves, aesthetically, with Black people.

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power of whiteness. This is emphasized by the existence of two audiences: one made up of those who have arrived themselves to see the show, and one made up of other Black dancers, presumably part of the dance cohort, who are always engaged, looking, following, swaying. The performers ask the onlookers to join them in movement, encouraging them to stomp and clap as steps are counted. Even if one tries, it is impossible to escape this performance; merely by standing still within the crowd, one is engaging, albeit passively, in chipaumire’s ask. And really, there is no stillness there — the set’s ground shakes with the stomping of feet and the largess of the music. If you are, as I am, one of those implicated in chipaumire’s taking back of the character of “Rock ’n’ Roll N*****,” a take-back that chipaumire makes explicit as she recites words from Smith’s song, there is no hiding from that implication. In the middle of the crowd, I looked around at those around me, trying to discern who was discomforted, and how. Some took chipaumire’s ask and engaged, especially after soothed with a direct invitation—“white folks, you too can smash your brain,” chipaumire suggested at one point—some moved backwards, and some fidgeted nervously. Afterward, I heard much talk about the performance in “dance terms,” as though by talking about the work in the language of the dance institution, it would be possible to get out of the being in it; out of being a white person in it; out of the dis-ease of being placed in position along with the racist legacy of white punk.

Am I good? If I am good enough, can I distance myself from Smith? Can I be good by not talking about race?

Have I not done this here? Have I not, in focusing on Patti Smith’s song, in someone else’s fault, suggested that the white punk violence chipaumire presents is historical, that I do not carry it within me? I do. So does the white audience of each performance chipaumire makes, even when the predominantly white canon of dance makes it comfortable to talk about chipaumire’s performance without self-implication. This urge to distance oneself with specifics, or thoseother-people-ing, or theory, is mimicked by a 2016 Reddit thread about the Smith song, called “Let’s (probably

uncomfortably) talk Patti Smith’s ‘Rock N Roll N*****’.” It’s notable, I think, that the thread comes so far after the creation of the song, far after the crystallization of Smith as a legend—and it is notable, too, that it isn’t, after all, an uncomfortable conversation. It is, instead, a conversation that blends theory and bended history, a conversation in which all anonymous users feel comfortable using the N-word, uncensored, unquoted, and in which user Air–putih claims it is “important to take into account…that while institutionally racism has not changed much in the US in the past 40 years, culturally the worlds are completely different and that Smith’s experience of and usage of the word ‘n*****’ [asterisks mine] are completely different and carry an altogether unlike charge. This is not an attempt to absolve Smith of anything nor to set a further conversational tone, but rather a reminder of caution.” Caution for what? Should we be cautious in indicting whiteness?

In resisting supremacy? In calling out co-optation as violent? Here, again, is the problem with white punk: the attempt to costume oneself as Black and be white too.

And, in #PUNK, this problem is active, just as the asks to the audience are active, just like the white worries that thread through the crowd are active. Just like, always, white supremacy is active, sowing the ground for people like Smith to use Blackness aesthetically, to use it for oneself to further solidify the place of power each of us white people is born into.

About #PUNK, chipaumire says: “having inherited zimbabwe’s historic and political baggage, I use my work to question how status and power are experienced and presented with the body.”

If this is the burden of chipaumire, the burden of her white audience is the history and continuation of the white supremacist settler-land we live on. While white punk, in collapsing social rejection with social oppression, seeks absolution in outsider status, chipaumire’s performance rejects that, instead encouraging white audience members (rock ’n’ rollers, perhaps) to examine the violent repercussions of their ambivalent whiteness. (november 17, 2019)

FINDING A VOICE, BECOMING A WRITER LAVINIA HUANG

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When I was asked to participate in an official writing cohort for the Wexner Center, I was surprised. I never regarded my writing as anything noteworthy, let alone adequate for the public. For as long as I could remember, being asked to write anything engulfed me with anxiety. In my mind, the quality of my writing was a strong determinant of my ability to achieve my goals. Writing is an essential skill that people use to make assumptions about me, define me, judge me. Tests and applications to get into schools, internships, or jobs all require some sort of writing portion so the reader can “see who you really are.� Whenever I had to write anything, even for a small assignment, I feared that it would not be good enough, and that I would be selling myself short because I was never satisfied with the words that I put on paper. As much as I wanted to improve, I also wanted to avoid any writing that was not required of me, not because my writing was necessarily bad, but because the task of writing itself was always followed by copious amounts of stress.

Regardless of my fears, I knew I had to take the opportunity to be a part of this program whether I wanted to or not. My work was already recognized by Karen Eliot, a published author who has a PhD in literature and a distinguished career in dance and the arts, and the higher ups at the Wexner Center for the Arts who had published a piece of mine on the center’s website. It was time for me to rise to the challenge and confront all the self-doubt that was holding me back from my true potential. Nonetheless, I still held reservations about whether I was qualified to make critical and analytical comments on controversial topics within the arts. I was worried that I would not have anything novel to contribute to meetings with the other people in the group who, compared to me, were all well-versed in conveying their critical thoughts out loud and on paper. I concluded that I would have to learn to be confident in whatever I produce and to be able to share it with anyone.

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I can say with conviction that my writing has improved substantially throughout the 2019–2020 season. With each piece that I write, it is clear to me and my readers that I have made progress, giving me gratification for having this experience. Not only did I become a better writer, I gained exposure to a world of performing arts that profoundly transformed my observational, analytical, and critical thinking skills. Interviewing an established artist, Miguel Gutierrez, over video chat is what ultimately pushed me out of my comfort zone. I am the type that does not like to ask too many questions unless necessary. I would never be the one to volunteer to speak for a group or offer my commentary. So, to independently conduct an interview, with virtually no experience in professional conversations, was a huge accomplishment for me. On top of that, I produced a piece from the interview that I was positively proud of, filled with inquiries about identity, queerness, culture, abstraction, and intersectionality. Now that the public can read my work in a print publication, I can confidently call myself a “good” writer.

(MARCH 6, 2020)

Radouan Mriziga 7 NOVEMBER 15–16, 2019

Radouan Mriziga, 7, photo by Marc Domage / Benjamin Boar.

WRITERS FOUND UNEXPECTED sensual pleasure and even spiritual refreshment in Radouan Mriziga’s 7. Performed November 15 and 16, 2019, in the cavernous, nearly-empty space of Mershon Auditorium, 7 guided audiences through familiar terrain while prompting them to see it all anew. Sam Giusto has stood and performed on the Mershon stage before, but she and other audience members were unprepared to “watch from the stage as the performance circled around [us].” She noted, a “peculiar sense of anticipation in the air as the audience was led through the winding backstage hallways of the auditorium” to end up standing on a stage that looked sparser, and smaller, than she’d seen it in the past. Lavinia Huang instinctively moved out of the performers’ range as they danced close to and around her. Then, in a “moment of epiphany,” she realized their proximity was intentional: she was inside the dance instead of outside looking on. Mriziga shaped a world in which physical bodies interacted with perceived space to imaginatively create what Lavinia calls, a “geometric masterpiece.”

Laura Gaines offered the poignant description I’ve borrowed as a title. Rani Bawa was “mesmerized” by the spare work that drew the audience into intense awareness of the sensory pleasures of live performance: in this show we hear, see, smell, taste, and touch differently. It proved to be a calming hiatus, taking us away from the frenzy of our busy lives. Sam “felt something akin to entrancement, and a level of comfort I did not expect to feel.”

In this uncertain moment, when the future feels uncharted, perhaps this is what we seek in art: that it might help us to renew our imaginations and our sensory pleasure in the world. We can hope that it might renew our sense of wonder in the everyday.

KAREN ELIOT APRIL 18, 2020

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“DRAWN BY BODIES, BUILT

BY WORDS, SUSTAINED BY MOVEMENT.”

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SEVEN MORE

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LAURA GAINES

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1. DANCE

The first thing you see. Simple, clean movements. All different, all seemingly random, but all with a clear intent. Instead of music, each movement is accompanied by a number. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The performers’ voices ring loud and clear in the space. It is the heart of the performance.

2. THEATER

One monologue. Inserted in the middle of the show, it stands out. Delivered beautifully, clearly, strongly. The performer doesn’t talk about a structure; she builds one in the theater. Words form walls, syntax forms statues. Nearly a soliloquy, addressing no one and everyone all at once.

It builds the performance to the sky.

3. MUSIC

Always implied, occasionally audible.

A single instrument, a single performer.

Fading in and out of the piece, its absence and presence equally noticeable, but its entrances seamless. In its absence, silence implies a continuation of sound. One solo stands out, a gorgeous interlude following the monologue. Entrancing, enchanting, beautiful. It ties the performance together.

4. ARCHITECTURE

Drawn by bodies, built by words, sustained by movement. Chalk marks on the stage form the base, spaced perfectly. Bodies of all sizes mark the same lengths using different measurements. Asymmetrical symmetry, imprecise precision. Words make the base a building. Movement maintains its structure.

It is the performance’s foundation.

5. VISUALIZATIONS

Projections create an illusion around the stage. Placed in corners, they draw the eye, alluding to a beach. They are referenced in the monologue. They are enlarged during the solo. Calm, peaceful, tranquil, they remain constant. Reassuring and ever-present. They create the tone of the performance.

6. LOCATION

Starting in the audience. Appearing in the balcony, in the rafters, on the stage. Performers seem to appear out of nowhere. They integrate into the audience.

Unconcerned about where people are, solely concerned with where they need to be. It is set, but always moving. It is the purpose of the performance.

7. AUDIENCE

On stage, in the house, standing, sitting, walking. Unsure of where to be.

Wholly immersed in every section of the piece. Hanging on to every movement, every word, every note. A prop for the performers. Completely new every show, completely variable. It is the performance. (november 27, 2019)

Radouan Mriziga, 7, photo by Marc Domage / Benjamin Boar.

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WOND

ORLD

T F H O RE E W SAM GIUSTO

THERE WAS A PECULIAR SENSE of anticipation in the air as the

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audience was led through the winding backstage hallways of the auditorium; clearly, like myself, the people surrounding me were not used to the idea of the audience watching from the stage as the performance circled around them. We made our way through the final set of doors and onto the stage from which we’d be experiencing 7: Radouan Mriziga’s show depicting the human body as a wonder of the world.

This was a stage I’d been on before for my own performances, and seen from the audience’s seating maybe twice as many times, but never before had it felt quite as small as this time. The bar lights hanging from the ceiling were low to the ground, giving the taller members of the crowd just a few feet of headroom. The shell had been removed from the stage, yet the audience forming a ring around the perimeter of the stage created artificial walls to enclose us. We did not know where the performance would start, or how. For a while, we simply rested in an odd air of discrepancy; a big stage turned small on which the audience stood, arguably somewhere we didn’t belong. This moment didn’t last all that long, though, as soon a female voice cut the air, silencing all muttered chatter and turning our attention to the rows and rows of seats before us.

“One, two, three, four, five, six.”

The woman’s speech was calm, absolutely serene, as were her movements. Her gestures were calculated as she reached forward, stepped to the side, or paused. She repeated her counts with near-identical inflection, cycling through her motions at her own pace. My attention was uprooted from her, though, when a man on a backstage balcony also began to speak—still with that same calm tone, and still with those easy, well-placed gestures.

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The rest of the dancers came in chorus: one at the back of the stage, right among the audience; one at the back of the house, partially shrouded in shadow; another on the top tier of seats.

Each made their counts of six and their calm motions, and each time one joined the chorus my head would snap, searching for the new voice amid the storm of numbers. I moved to search out these new dancers not from shock but just a need to pinpoint their locations; I began to anticipate their entrances, keeping my head on a swivel to see who had arrived where. The dancers did not speak in unison, nor did they move that way. Each of the seven had individual movements and gestures, some very different from others, but the common thread remained the calm, serene counting: “One, two, three, four, five, six,” now accompanied by an eighth man in the audience balcony plucking at a string instrument that to me sounded like a hammer dulcimer. This went on for a while, and I felt washed over in a sea of pleasant sounds and fluid movements; I floated idly, letting the calm voices of the dancers pass me by, turning here and there at my own discretion.

I was in the eye of their storm, awaiting what was to come.

After a while, the dancers gathered on the stage, within the walls of the audience, each with a roll of masking tape in hand.

The man who counted from the back of the stage, Radouan Mriziga himself, produced a piece of chalk from his pocket and drew an X dead-center on the stage. He then got low, placed his elbow at the intersection of this X, held the chalk to the floor, and turned his entire body around the pivot point he’d made, creating a perfect circle. He spread out from this point, using his body as a measuring tool to create an elaborate sketch spanning much of the stage. The other six dancers followed up with the tape, stretching long pieces to go from one labeled vertex of the sketch to another, tamping down their pieces with step sequences once a piece was correctly laid. They moved wherever was necessary, with that same peaceful air, not thinking of how to move around the audience that was coming closer and closer out of sheer interest. We were the rocks to their river; they simply flowed around us. As the tape piece neared completion, one of the dancers, armed with blue painter’s tape, created a star at the very center of the piece, where Radouan himself had begun with nothing but an X. It completed the elaborate design; a pop of blue on a black stage covered in off-white tape.

The woman who had first begun to count explained that the design they’d created was a plan for a building. She described the green rock much of the exterior would be made of, the pillars around the perimeter, the tiered nature of the building as one ascended to higher and higher floors, and the intricate dimensions of each of these aspects. The numbers escaped me as soon as I heard them, but the building itself became clear in my mind. The woman did not give the building a purpose; it did not appear to need one.

The moment the woman was finished talking, all of the lights in the auditorium turned off at once. Then, on came a projector, displaying images of water, rocks, and forests all superimposed over each other, flowing from one to another seamlessly. The instrumentalist, too, began to play again, sitting in a chair just before the projection, his dexterous hands nimbly pulling each note from the instrument in a beautiful, fluid melody. My legs were a bit tired

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from standing, but I felt unable to move and sit like many of the other audience members. Something about this moment, about these flowing images and this music, was calming on a level I’d never experienced in a performance setting before. I felt something akin to entrancement, and a level of comfort I did not expect to feel. So when the music stopped and the house lights came back on, I was disheartened to feel the dead weight return to my legs.

The performance continued, with one of the female dancers executing floorwork with a series of incredibly demanding spins, but I was still reeling from the peaceful atmosphere of that projection and those sounds. I sought that feeling out again but was unable to recapture it. The show closed as it opened, with each of the dancers once again engaged in their own separate movements and making their counts. This time, though, they counted to seven rather than six; they’d achieved what they were after. As before, their movements were flexible, fluid, plastic; their focus remained entirely internal.

My own focus felt increasingly similar. The dancers executed their final counts as the lights began to turn off, one by one. I counted in my head, preparing for the room to get that much darker, that much smaller. And in the final moments before that last light went out, I wondered if I’d feel serenity quite like that ever again.

The lights went out. The show ended. I went home. But in my head, all the while, the numbers echoed with knowing clarity.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.” (december 6, 2019)

Mershon Auditorium (previous page), photo by Laura Gaines.

Radouan Mriziga, 7 (above), photo Marc Domage / Benjamin Boar.

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7, IN FIVE

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RA

NI

BA WA

5. TOUCH

Voices, counting, “one, two, three, four, five, six” (later adding “seven” to the sequence too); a plucked string instrument; the whir of water flowing through a stream; the puff of icy air; bodies thumping against the stage; friction between bodies and stage; chalk dragging along the stage; tape being ripped, pulled, and stuck to the ground.

Reverberations of the musician’s fingers on the instrument’s strings; chalk coating the performers’ fingers in a white dust; friction between the performers’ clothing and the chalk lines they dance upon; the tape’s stickiness on the performers’ fingers and the stage floor.

2. SMELL

Chalk, dispersing its fine particles throughout the air and into my nose; sweat hugging the skin of the performers, evidence of the extreme physical demands of the piece; perfume, the pleasant floral notes and earthy tones of an audience member passing by me.

3. SIGHT

Darkness, audience members standing alongside me on stage; performers, scattered through the auditorium, paradoxically, as the audience occupies the stage; a string instrument, strummed at various points along its wooden base; small gestures, paired with counting to six; performers, on the stage, in the balcony, on the scaffolding above the curtains; white chalk on the black stage; lines of masking tape with clean cut edges; performers, again, this time physically interacting with the space they have built with weight shifts, intricate turns, and athletic floorwork.

4. TASTE

The lingering mint flavor in my mouth from my gum; the heaviness of the air entering my lungs, the same air that the performers gasp to inhale while I take it for myself; the softness of my mouth lacking any precise stimuli.

Radouan Mriziga’s 7 is truly immersive, mesmerizing, poetic, and captivating.

Standing or sitting on the stage as the performers weave around you, seeing the chalk dust float from their fingers, smelling the sweat on their skin, touching the stage floor with your own feet, tasting the same air the performers are gasping for, and hearing the sounds of the tape stretching past your ear—it is an unparalleled experience. An audience member is overloaded with sensory input coming from all sides—it is mesmerizing.

It is like the awe evoked by submerging yourself underwater for the first time, discovering a new world beneath you. The instrument’s harmony, the natural sounds, and the sounds of bodies create patterns of ebb and flow that give the piece poetry.

With so much sensory input, the audience is captivated from the start, constantly wondering where the next stimulus will come from.

Seven performers, five senses, and limitless brilliance. (january 23, 2020)

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1 .SOUND

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7: THE EXPERIENCE

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LAVINIA HUANG

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I KNEW THIS PERFORMANCE was 30

going to be a departure from the traditional audience-in-seats/performers-on-stage structure the moment I was led outside and instructed to enter through the stage door.

Along with a group of other audience members, I file onto the stage cautiously, unsure of where we are to stand.

“One, two, three, four, five, six...”

I turn my head, looking for the source of sound. A man is on a walkway about two stories above the stage. He makes small gestural movements as he repeats the sequence of numbers.

“One...”

This time, my body instinctually shifts towards a woman’s voice. I see a darkhaired woman in a skater dress and leggings, covered in marble print, standing in the aisles between the seats. She continues chanting the numbers in an accent that I could not quite identify.

There is also music, notes from what looks like a kantele (a Finnish harp), reverberating throughout the auditorium.

The man playing the instrument sits on the balcony level. One by one, four other performers join in, chanting the numbers one through six while carrying out

minimalist gestural phrases of movement.

Radouan Mriziga, one of them, is placed in the center of the stage. Another woman is positioned stage left on the apron. A man is in the back on the first level of seats. The last man is on the balcony level in front of a projector that casts a blanket of calm blue waves onto the wall behind him. Another projector on the stage level of seating casts a similar scene. Heads turn intermittently to watch each of the seven performers, all dressed in street clothes with tones of blue and white. I scramble to keep track of all seven of them, dispersed around me. For a moment I forget about one of them until he or she catches my attention with the snapping that accompanies each spoken number. I am intrigued by the different ways that each person speaks. I wonder if they all come from Marrakech, where Radouan is from, or maybe Brussels, where his company is based.

Radouan pulls a piece of chalk from his pocket and marks an X on the stage, the center of what will become a geometric masterpiece. The other performers make their way onto the stage to execute their part in the work of art. Using his forearm as a radial measurement, Radouan draws

circles and curves stemming out from the center of the stage along lines made by masking tape put down by his fellow performers. Every time they pull a new piece of masking tape, they wait for the sound of the taping to be completed.

Everyone crowds around the lines of tape and circles of chalk, moving to different parts of the stage so as to get a new perspective of what will become of the surface of the wooden floorboards.

One of the women uses the length of her body from her toes to her mouth to mark increments on the lines. Another man revolves a piece of chalk at the tick marks around the palm of his hand to create perfect circles, even erasing and starting again when a piece of chalk breaks and messes up a circle. They focus on creating the floorplan, in a nonperformative way, adjusting the tape when needed, securing the tape with their feet each time they stretch it across the stage.

Once the work of art is seemingly finished, the dark-haired woman proceeds to describe the dimensions of a building, with her companions echoing her words to other parts of the audience. Together they model the building with their hands, creating an image that I can see coming together before me like an animation of a three-dimensional floor plan growing from the ground up. Only then do I notice geometric figures of masking and fluorescent tape on the walls of Mershon Auditorium. Suddenly, the lights go out, and for a second, we are all still in the darkness, with bits of light coming from the fluorescent tape and the aisle lights, taking in everything we had just been immersed in. The projector turns on to cast clips of nature on the wall behind the musician, who has appeared on the stage to play the kantele again. The mirage of waves and trees shines light onto the musician who gives us the calming melodies that were first heard at the beginning of the performance. At this point I decide to sit down on the stage and relish the serenity. I feel like I could stay here for a very long time and not think

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about anything but the tranquility that the music and scenes of nature in a dark theater gives me.

But I spoke too soon, and the lights come on in the house, revealing one of the performers, a man in the balcony, who throws his body along and down the aisles of the seats. The other dancers follow suit towards the stage. They dance together, in and around the audience members, some of whom (including me) move out the way to give space to them. I moved out of instinct, just as, when I see someone coming towards me, I want to make way for them to do their thing. But I had an epiphany. I wasn’t supposed to move at all. They could see me as much as I could see them. They are the ones who decide to come towards me, an audience member who could stand or sit wherever I wanted.

None of the performers ever touched an audience member, no matter how close they came. The whole point was for them to dance around you, and I instantly regretted moving every time they came towards me.

Another female dancer, wearing blue jeans and Adidas sneakers, comes onto the tape and chalk design and easily executes a series of acrobatic moves. I can see that she utilizes every muscle in her body when she puts the weight of her whole body onto her arms in a freeze. She swings her legs and uses the momentum to spin on her butt, getting chalk all over her jeans, and she repeats this about a dozen times. I had no idea how this connected to the performance, but I commend her for the hard tricks that she did in jeans (of all tight-fitting clothes). The dancers end with the repetition of movements and the numbers, this time, up to seven, fulfilling the title of the piece. To be honest, I couldn’t really make sense of it all. Nonetheless, I found myself smiling and clapping at the end, pleased with what I had just witnessed: seven dancers counting to seven in a piece called 7. (december 2, 2019)

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DECEMBER 5–8, 2019

FLUXFLOW DANCE PROJECT

FluxFlow Dance Project Ursula: The Tale of Monkey and Bear

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FluxFlow Dance Project, Ursula, photo

by Kate Sweeney.

FLUXFLOW DANCE PROJECT

IN SUSPENSION: WORKS-IN-PROGRESS IN SPRING 2020 we are suspended in time. Separated from our

communities, the future feels stark and unclear—or the realization that we can’t know our future has pressed in on us more harshly than it did even a few months ago. In this moment, our world is “in process” and we move toward something that we can’t quite picture for ourselves at this point. Still, artists and writers recognize that it is through not-knowing and stumbling into experimentation that we might be led toward the most fruitful discoveries. If we knew what the future held, would we seek to make art? Work toward social change? Experiment at all? For all our uncertainty, we know that we can look ahead to a world that will operate differently; we will confront a society with new expectations of how we should interact with one another. We sense that we must care about each other, we must attend to the health and safety of our communities in ways we did not consider before this pandemic.

In writing about the FluxFlow Dance Project’s works-in-progress performances of Ursula: The Tale of Monkey and Bear, Demetra Chiafos responds to the humanity of the characters depicted and summarizes the learning that transpired throughout the course of the piece. The character of the director and artist is entirely self-involved and, at the work’s conclusion: “He is left alone with his own narcissism and abusive, controlling tendencies, with no one to confront but himself. The lights cut to black,” she concludes.

For writer Rani Bawa it is the very humanity of the FluxFlow approach that stimulates her interest in her essay describing her visit to the troupe’s vibrant rehearsal: “These dancers’ hearts are made vulnerable in Ursula as they freely share raw pieces of themselves that become transformed into movement phrases,” she writes. The rehearsal process offers the opportunity for ideas to develop and change over the period of the work’s making and the ideas shared in rehearsal may not ever find their way into the final product. Still, it’s in the sharing and exchanging that the work is honed.

As writers, we work through various processes to achieve our final products and in response to FluxFlow’s Ursula, several shared their works-in-progress, their reflective notes that are steps along the way to realizing finished essays. These essays are the raw pieces of our very human thoughts and feelings, and we share them with our readers here.

KAREN ELIOT MAY 4, 2020

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“MAKING

RANI BAWA

SPACE”

IN CONTEMPORARY ART FluxFlow Dance Project, photo by Laura Gaines.

THE WELCOMING NATURE of the studio and the dancers were

what struck me most about my experience observing a rehearsal at Flux + Flow Dance and Movement Center. As I entered Flux + Flow’s Columbus rehearsal space, I was first greeted by Sole, the dog of co-owners Russell Lepley and Filippo Pelacchi. I subsequently met Lepley, and he introduced me to Pelacchi and Kelly Hurlburt, the other two dancers in Ursula, which premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts in December. This warmth has stuck with me, as I sit here writing and reflecting on the piece.

These dancers’ hearts are made vulnerable in Ursula as they freely share raw pieces of themselves that become transformed into movement phrases. They truly embody the mission of “making space” for the audience, and for all, in their work.

that might be needed to give the audience the context of the scene, without feeling like they were simply telling a visual story.

Lepley’s perspective on the dancers’ relationship with the audience is eloquent.

He elaborated on this view, saying that all too often in contemporary art, audience members are overwhelmed with the art they’re experiencing and feel that they don’t have the capability to understand it, since they don’t see themselves as artists.

In Ursula, the dancers aim, instead, to “make space for the audience” by giving them enough context to be able to share in the story being portrayed on stage. Lepley believes art has a greater impact when the audience members can see themselves in it. The story of Ursula tackles topics of freedom, relationships, and humankind.

Each audience member will take away her/ his/their own view of the piece; that is the beauty of art.

But Ursula goes further than that. It not only recognizes the role of perspective in art; it uses this crucial role to create a multifaceted work that brings the hearts and souls of both the dancers and audience members to the forefront. Lepley hearkened to his own past when building this work, and he hopes that audience members will be able to do the same when experiencing it. There are elements of humor, surprise, and stunning beauty. But behind all of that are elements of humanity, offered to the audience by the dancers in hopes that they, the audience, will let themselves become a part of the piece as well. (november 2, 2019)

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Flux + Flow, cofounded by husbands Lepley and Pelacchi, has two main efforts: classes held at the movement center and the FluxFlow Dance Project, their resident dance company. As described by Lepley and Pelacchi on the Flux + Flow website, the company represents “a decided break from tradition,” that “seeks to transform the unmentionable to the universal through humanity, compassion, and vulnerability.”

Ursula is a work that stems from this core mission, by incorporating elements of dance and theater to explore the concept of freedom through the lens of contemporary art.

I recently had the opportunity to observe a rehearsal of Ursula and to listen to an interview with Lepley, conducted

by Demetra Chiafos (BFA Dance, BA Japanese Language at Ohio State). As I watched the rehearsal, what most stood out was the collaboration between the dancers.

The genuine connection and friendship between Lepley, Pelacchi, and dancer Kelly Hurlburt shone through during both the in-between moments of rehearsal and the rehearsal itself. After each run, the dancers stopped and discussed what went smoothly and what needed further development.

This process intrigued me, especially since I have been trained in classical ballet, where the power boundaries are much more defined in the rehearsal process.

In ballet, the choreographer or director typically makes decisions and the dancers strive to comply. In the interview, Lepley reflected a bit on his own background as a dancer and how his past fuels his vision of Ursula. As a former member of a ballet company, he expressed a feeling of “being willfully imprisoned”— a feeling of having chosen to be in the company, and of being privileged to be a dancer in the company, while not having a real voice to express his own views and creative impulses. This hierarchy, along with many other classical conventions, are the elements of tradition that Flux + Flow aims to break.

In their creative process, a frequent discussion topic centered on the balance between mime and movement. The dancers toyed with the amount of mime

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URSULA: A STARRED REVIEW LAURA GAINES

DANCING • DIALOGUE • PRODUCTION SOCIAL COMMENTARY • OVERALL

URSULA BY FluxFlow Dance Project was a multifaceted, highly involved piece, and one about which I had many varied opinions. How many stars would I give it?

That would depend on which aspect I was thinking about.

To begin on the surface level, the dancing was stunning. As a classically trained ballerina, I am inherently biased towards pieces with solid ballet technique and pointework, and this piece definitely had both. Not only were the solos and duets equally beautiful, the pointework by Filippo Pelacchi had all the polish and poise of a principal ballerina. The movements during the duets were perfectly synced, and many of the short segments of dance had an incredible comedic layer that was clearly appreciated by the audience.

The dialogue during the performance, however, fell far short of the dance’s beauty. While it sustained the comedy brought out by the movement, the spoken lines seemed unfinished and unclear. When they spoke, the performers stood at stands next to the audience and read their lines, as opposed to having them memorized.

The fact that they hadn’t memorized their

lines was not hidden, but perhaps it should have been; this particular choice made the production seem like it was still in the rehearsal stages—and even a touch unprofessional. Another choice I didn’t particularly understand was their use of Italian throughout the performance. About half their lines were in English, the other half in Italian, and I could detect no rhyme or reason as to when they used one language over the other. The entire speaking aspect of the piece made little sense to me and seemed like an afterthought in their creative process, even though it was incredibly central to the understanding of the piece, and I felt it was very lacking.

Despite my dislike of their approach to the dialogue, I did enjoy the overall production. The setting was very intimate, which I enjoyed for this piece. I appreciated their use of technology and screens throughout the show, and the juxtaposition of that against their low-tech use of balloons for sound effects. I also enjoyed the use of balloons throughout the piece, which contributed not only to the visuals but also to the comedic tone throughout much of the show. The one thing that detracted

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from the production for me was, again, the unprofessionalism of the unmemorized lines and the choice to stand directly next to the audience to read the lines. Aside from that, the production was very well put together, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

The final layer of the piece I’d like to mention is the social commentary. Most noticeably, the performers flipped many traditional gender roles while using arguably the most traditional style of dance, which I found to be an interesting, but well-received, choice. Not only was the only performer doing pointe work a male, when it is traditionally a female style of ballet, during the duets it was primarily the female performer partnering the male, as opposed to the other way around, which is also not standard. These unconventional choices made the performance more comedic and showed how the gender norms in ballet are unnecessary and could easily be flipped. The characterizations, with the female bear having the strongest will and being unafraid to do what she needed to do for herself and the male monkey relying on her, were also unusual and challenging

to typical gender roles. Their intentions in flipping the gender roles, however, could have been convened more clearly, rather than being left for the audience’s interpretation, and I believe doing so could’ve resulted in the piece feeling more finished than it did.

Overall, this piece was most enjoyable from the perspective of a dancer but was lacking in professionalism. The commentary on gender norms was intriguing, and the production was highly entertaining, but I wish the piece had been more finished and had a more polished quality before it was performed. (december 31, 2019)

FluxFlow Dance Project, photo by Laura Gaines.

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DANCERS ARE ARTISTS AND HUMANS LAVINIA HUANG

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I WONDER if any artist ever gets the

freedom and satisfaction they desire if they are constantly working under the direction of someone with whom they feel they cannot reach their full potential. In FluxFlow Dance Project’s Ursula, the bear, Ursula, isn’t happy even after leaving her circus act to collaborate with her partner. I think many artists feel the same: They are following the direction of someone else, but they have no realistic alternative. Filippo Pelacchi, Kelly Hurlburt, and Russell Lepley convey this metaphor with the monkey and the bear, wearing monkey suits made from a grey plush fabric and head pieces that resembled those of a circus monkey, complete with the ears and their own rendition of a red

fez hat. At times their message is direct, in clear English: “I am the one with the great ideas, not you! People should worship me!”

Pelacchi would declare inches away from the first row of the audience. I sat towards the back, but I would imagine someone up front might be met with a few flying drops of spit here and there from the passion and fervor that came with each repeated statement.

At times their message is more abstract.

Two of the three performers walk into the space with bright, colorful balloons tied to their extremities. The balloons get in the way of the dancers as they repeat an isolated and angular movement phrase.

But each time they complete the phrase, a balloon falls or gets ripped off and it

choreographers speak to dancers when they want them to simply execute movement without commenting on it, but also from seeing the transparent meaning of the mindless steps and knowing the dancer’s job is to simply memorize them. Lepley then steps out from the shadows in a pair of pointe shoes and demonstrates his ballet training and experience in an impressive classical combination. Pointe technique is traditionally assigned to female dancers, and I have never seen such admirable pointe technique by a male dancer.

Not only does Ursula offer innovative contemporary movement throughout, it also provides a splash of comedic relief in its mime and sound effects with the balloons, the show’s signature prop. A theme of vulnerability is prominent, as Pelacchi repeatedly throws his voice into the audience.

“I don’t need you! You suck!”

He shows the raw emotion that so many artists experience and even shows his raw body as he strips off his monkey suit, revealing his bare skin on the floor with his back to the audience. He sits at a slight angle, allowing the possibility of viewing his genitals if you were sitting at the right spot in audience. Still, the most significant element of the show was its promotion of artists’ humanity. Touching the souls of viewers, Ursula garnered a well-deserved standing ovation. (december 20, 2019)

FluxFlow Dance Project, Ursula, photo

by Kate Sweeney.

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becomes easier for them to dance without restriction. It is not fair even to describe the balloons as restrictive because they follow each limb with little to no real physical impairment. It is only when they get caught up with the other limbs that they cause an annoying hindrance. The balloons serve as a symbol of the circus or other companies that hold the artists that they employ in constraints, binding them to ideas that they are too egotistical to submit to but can free themselves from at their own will.

FluxFlow uses different mediums, employing technology to expand their performance on a projected screen. A scene displayed on the three-sided white backdrop shows the frustrated monkey longing to leave the circus with the toadying bear who is too doubtful to take such an initiative.

From the Italian voice-over, I get strong vibes of Amélie, a French movie about a young woman who tries to make the lives of the people around her more fruitful. The two characters converse about yearning to make their own art and be recognized for it, to be happy and thriving in something they could call their own. The dialogue is coupled with interpretive movement when each of them voices an opinion. Somehow the English subtitles make what they are saying much more relatable, as if seeing the words along with hearing the dynamics of the Italian language augment the sentiment of the monkey and the bear.

Another scene is projected on the backdrop showing Ursula, the bear, in the forest, dancing in the trees. Two of the performers admire the creature from afar off-screen, commenting on how cute the bear is and trying to capture its attention.

After another English and Italian conversation between the monkey and the bear, it is clear the bear did not get the satisfaction and happiness promised by the monkey after they left the circus to run their own act.

As the bear, Hurlburt is blindfolded by her headpiece and instructed to carry out a series of steps in different directions in front of a projection of herself naked in the forest. Lepley then tells Hurlburt, “Okay good, now work on that.” I let out a little chuckle, partially from understanding how

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MY ABSTRACTIONFISHING PROCESS SAM GIUSTO

FLUXFLOW DANCE PROJECT

ONE OF THE MOST interesting aspects of dance as an art form is its capacity for vagueness, abstraction, and ambiguity. One can glean a nearly endless number of interpretations from a specific movement, because motion can be thematically meaningless just as much as it can be laden with emotional and narrative weight.

Not a dancer myself, I enjoy comparing my interpretations of dance with those of other people and seeing what abstractions made the jump to the forefront of their consciousness. Having only the show’s program in advance, my practice is to watch the abstract movement and follow its intertwining with the theme, a process I find particularly interesting. It was the lack of vagueness in FluxFlow Dance Company’s Ursula that made me feel somewhat disconnected from it.

Ursula was very different from pieces I have viewed in the past, operating as a dance/theater combination as opposed to strictly one art form or the other. Ursula is a reflection on the story of the Monkey and the Bear: one a tortured artist whose creativity, even in a prestigious organization, is stifled because he is not the one in control. Such is the story of Ursula. Frank, a monkey born into a circus, believes he is a far better choreographer than the humans could ever be, and eventually he runs away with Ursula, the bear who is his star pupil, to form their own dance company. Free to exercise his genius, Frank begins to put Ursula through harsh and rigorous rehearsals so that he might finally execute the performance he has been dreaming of his entire life. Ursula, though, is just as stifled under Frank’s new direction as she was before and opts to leave to follow her own passions. This story is easily spelled out to the viewer through various scenes of exposition-heavy, intentionally off-kilter dialogue. I didn’t have much of an issue with the peculiarity of the lines themselves or their delivery—I could easily write that off as artistic license. The problem I had with the dialogue was that it existed in the first place.

To explain my critique of the theater aspect of Ursula, it’s important to discuss the dance half of the performance. Again, I myself am not a dancer, but it was clear for anyone to see the technical prowess required to execute the sequences in this piece.

The projection portion of the show where Ursula and Frank speak to each other showcased intricate, word-for-word corresponding motions, each executed with extreme precision throughout the entire five-plus minute scene. The pointe solo towards the end of the piece was also incredibly demanding of the male dancer, Filippo, as his heavy breathing could be heard throughout the small performance space. Just as demanding and beautiful was Frank’s rehearsal with Ursula, with incongruous mixtures of sharp and fluid motion coexisting in a high-tension atmosphere.

The movements of Ursula were gorgeous to see, but the theatrical aspects of the piece made it increasingly difficult to pay as close attention to the dance movements as I normally would. It became easy for me to look with a less inquisitive eye on the dance itself because I knew what it represented; it was spelled right out for me in the dialogue. I knew what the rehearsal scene represented because I’d already been told, so it felt less imperative that I analyze it to

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discover its meaning; it already had one. Having such a rigid and concrete story took my attention away from the piece, removing the abstraction-fishing process I usually delight in going through. For this reason, in my eyes, Ursula fell a little flat. It was exactly what it said it was going to be, which left me feeling a bit disappointed.

Not all of the show was as straightforward as I’ve described, though. The beginning scene in which Frank dances with balloons tied to his extremities, reciting a scathing monologue while he dances, did have some depth beyond the words being spoken. I enjoyed watching the balloons naturally pop, their strings breaking under the duress of the routine. I thought about how that might represent Frank breaking free from his creative confinement in the circus. But even that thematic element is particularly easy to grasp and much more straightforward than other pieces I have seen.

Overall, I would consider FluxFlow’s Ursula to be an enjoyable theater piece with technically striking dance portions, but it did not live up to the expectation I had in my mind of a gorgeous blend between the two. (march 2, 2020)

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EMILY KILROY

THE ROLE OF THE CRITIC DEMETRA CHIAFOS

Between reading articles about the role of the critic, writing about the nora chipaumire show, and interviewing Russell Lepley for the Read, Watch, Listen promotional post about Flux Flow Dance Project’s upcoming show, I have been reflecting on the role of the critic in my own life. I have also been considering my responsibilities, freedoms, and obligations when writing as a critic.

I have been asking myself what my prior interactions with critics have been, how these interactions have shaped my previous impressions of criticism, and how those impressions are changing through my involvement with this project.

I remember one main interaction with criticism while I was growing up. Every time a new movie came out that my family wanted to go see, we would look up the reviews to decide if it was worth seeing.

Most notably, I remember that if a movie got a particularly low score on Rotten Tomatoes, we would decide it was a pass. Now that I am older, I can think of plenty of movies that I really like that have a low Rotten Tomatoes score. It would have been much more useful and functional had my family read written reviews—instead of seemingly arbitrary percentage scores—and then decided for ourselves what to make of the reviewer’s opinions.

While a percentage score tells you if a group of reviewers liked the movie, it tells you very little else. On the other hand, if criticism is written well, it communicates much about the work, regardless of the reviewer’s personal thoughts and feelings about the work.

When it comes to dance and other live performances, you might tell from tone or word choices in the reviewer’s description if the reviewer liked the event or not, but the description contains much information on its own. I have read reviews in the past — unfortunately I cannot remember what for, or who wrote

them—where critics expressed that watching the dancers throw themselves into hard objects again and again made their bodies hurt and they wished the show would just end already. While those words connote that the critic did not particularly enjoy the performance, the description also tells you what was happening in the performance, giving you further information to decide for yourself whether you would like to attend or if you would be able to bear watching the performance. Maybe you like watching dancers throw themselves into hard objects over and over, or you like deeply embodied movement! If so, that is the show for you—even though the critic did not like it.

This role of the critic in communicating information to those who have not yet seen something has changed drastically in recent years. With increasing accessibility to the internet, more people than ever before can share their opinions publicly, regardless of their training or whether they receive a salary. It is incredibly easy to set up a free blog on a space like WordPress and write to your heart’s content. This also means that more criticism is available than ever before.

This accessibility can be a good thing. If readers see that a lot of people are writing about the arts, they may be more likely to attend an arts performance simply because of sheer repeated exposure to thoughtful reflections. Research studies show that arts improve education and quality of life, especially if exposure begins at a young age, and so it would be a good thing if exposure to arts reviews encouraged someone to interact with the arts.

There is one caveat, however, in relying on the internet, you are unlikely to see anything unfamiliar just pop up on your feed.

Therefore, unless you are already exposed to the arts, a review of Swan Lake probably is not going to appear on your Facebook wall.

Despite these questions about the accessibility of the art form and the dissemination of critical writing, I do believe it is the role of the critic to educate. By writing about the arts and encouraging independent formation of thought and opinion, the critic can spark a love for the arts or a desire for more knowledge in those who would not otherwise have that interest. The critic can write a call for action and create ripples of change in society. The role of the critic can easily become a position of activism and social justice beyond just teaching others about the arts or giving a movie a 47% rating. Which leaves me the question—how do we go about this?

How do I, as someone who writes about the arts, call for change, educate others, and inspire people? This is a question I do not yet have an answer to, and one that I will continue asking throughout the duration of this project and in my future as a writer.

(NOVEMBER 29, 2019)

Miguel Gutierrez This Bridge Called MyAss JANUARY 24–26, 2020

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

A BRIDGE TO CROSS OR A BRIDGE TOO FAR? FEW PERFORMANCES provoked as many contrasting views

as did Miguel Gutierrez’s This Bridge Called My Ass, with its deployment of traditional Spanish language tongue twisters (Trabalenguas), its quotations from popular telenovelas, and its raw, explicitly sexual movement. Demetra Chiafos vacillated between feeling insulted and bored while Jacqueleen Bordjadze longed for the piece to have undergone some good editing.

Lavinia Huang frankly acknowledged that she enjoyed the work’s over-the-top humor; Kaiya Gordon was moved by its message of inclusion versus exclusion. Gutierrez says that the piece is partly inspired by This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a groundbreaking 1981 anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, a reference that may have eluded spectators. As audiences, do we watch this work and perceive, with Kaiya, that it constitutes “a cleave from cultural objectivity, a turn towards interconnectivity, disidentification with the straight and white references they dance in and away from”? Or, do we wait impatiently for the show to be over, feeling somehow that the work lacked meaning, or that its references and graphic sexuality excluded us? Perhaps, as with all spectatorship, it depends on where you sit—physically, as a viewer in the performance space, and emotionally, experientially, and socially in your life.

KAREN ELIOT JUNE 1, 2020

Miguel Gutierrez, This Bridge Called My Ass, photo by Ian Douglas.

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MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

DISIDENTIFICATION AND THE QUEER TELENOVELA KAIYA GORDON

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MIGUEL GUTIERREZ’S This Bridge Called My Ass is many things:

a triptych, a noise show, an operatic drama, a telenovela. The work is ironic, dramatic, and funny, stocked with tongue-in-cheek jokes (sometimes untranslated). It turns towards comedy to dislodge expectations of the oft-created tragic Latinx story and to confront the audience’s expectations about sex and drama. And it is a large production, which I had to crane my neck to see holistically: six performers, multiple segments, and a variety of sound and dialogue.

Last, but not least, the work is hot. Throughout the second section the entirely Latinx cast, in various states of undress, navigates found objects with frenzied movement, portraying an intense intimacy with things like gloves, speakers, and wires. Tongues and asses come out as cast members exchange touches and weight, feeling into each other with improvised movement. And this electrical energy is directed, like their comedic attentions, at the audience as well—This Bridge’s performers are clearly and ironically aware of their audience: frequently, the cast engages with audience members, as though daring them to become part of the project. At one point during the piece, a cast member looks directly at me as they lick an electrical wire.

Miguel Gutierrez, This Bridge Called My Ass, photo by Ian Douglas.

transports us across symbolic space, inserting us in a coterminous time when we witness new formations within the present and the future ... the stage and the street, like the shop floor, are venues for performances that allow the spectator access to minoritarian lifeworlds that exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present. James’s workerist theory allows us to think of the minoritarian performer as a worker and the performance of queer world-making as a mode of labor (José Estebon Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 56)

But we are not allowed full access: disidentifying with telenovelas is not for white people (no, not even us white queers!). The imposition of whiteness onto telenovela’s characters is already played out in the colonialist construction of Latinx identity.

There is no need for white watchers to disidentify, when their identification is already the norm; they do not need to peer through the violent structures of racism to find some aspect of character to grasp on to. Gutierrez’s play with language and translation throughout the piece underlines this point. During the first segment, Spanish tongue-twisters are chanted by the cast members; during the second, Latin American music blasts from speakers, and the third and final segment is made up of a collage of telenovela dialogue. These sonic choices are inclusionary to some and exclusionary to others: Gutierrez uses untranslated text, especially untranslated humor, to invite his queer Latinx audience, specifically, to engage with the project fully.

In her essay “Why My Novel Uses Untranslated Chinese,” Esmé Weijun Wang says she is “making a commitment to the possibility of being unintelligible” (the essay is on Literary Hub). This unintelligibility is a technology of her book, just as Gutierrez’s unintelligibility in This Bridge is a technology of his project: both create a new set of references in excluding references pointed at majoritarian people.

The title This Bridge gestures to a larger text being cited by the work: This Bridge Called My Back (ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa), a collection of radical feminist essays first published in 1981.

Made up of poems, letters, and both personal and critical essays, the book informs the multiplicity and multimodality of the performance as much as does its Latinx politics. And both struggle with the meaning making of traditional narratives.

In the anthology, “Third World” women of color feminists grapple with white feminism—is there power in disidentifying with a power such as whiteness? And in Gutierrez’s project, the turns towards telenovela and improvisation push against the traditional narrative of drama and

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

In the introduction to José Estebon Muñoz’s seminal text Disidentifications, Muñoz describes encountering Marga Gomez’s performance, Marga Gomez Is Pretty,Witty, and Gay (1992). Like Gutierrez’s, Gomez’s performance is rife with queer Latinx identifiers. Both artists play with homo-exclusionary structures — Gomez, the talk show; Gutierrez, the telenovela-–and turn them upside down, so that they are tight with queer tension and desire, identities that Muñoz notes as sites “of struggle where fixed dispositions clash against socially constituted definitions” (p. 6).

To disidentify, then, is to swim through that clash to find and reimagine how one, as a minoritarian subject, is both pulled into identity and able to push against it.

Or, in Gomez’s case, out of her disidentification with white heteronormativity emerges an imaginative “queer life-world, one in which the ‘pain and hardship’ of queer existence within a homophobic public sphere are not elided, one in which the ‘mysteries’ of our sexuality are not reined in by sanitized understandings of lesbian and gay identity” (p. 34).

In This Bridge, Gutierrez’s cast members both situate themselves within and subvert the canons of the telenovela and improvisational dancing—sites of majoritarian power (the first, heteronormative, the second, white). For the white or straight spectator, then, This Bridge is a minoritarian performance, which, to again quote Muñoz:

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dance. But whereas the book’s intent is didactic, Gutierrez’s This Bridge is fluid and funny.

And yet both engage their audiences, and both embroil themselves in the complex politics of being alive. In “I Come With No Illusions,” a 1979 letter (written in Columbus, Ohio!) featured in This Bridge Called My Back, Mirtha Quintanales writes: Perhaps one of the greatest lessons I have learned is that in fact “human nature,” bound as it is to “culture,” implies variability and difference. Yes, we all need to eat and sleep, keep ourselves warm, protect ourselves from harm, be nurtured into maturity; touch and be touched, etc. But, how we choose to meet these needs varies and changes from time to time, place to place and is dependent both on history and the particular set of environmental circumstances contextual to our lives.

What both puzzles me and distresses me is the degree to which we seem to be “culture bound.” As if “setting the cultural mold” implied never quite being able to break free from it. At least not completely. This seems to be particularly true in the most private activities of our lives—how we express and share feeling in the context of our intimate interpersonal relationships. The wonder of it! (p. 147, 4th edition)

I think about this wonder—that of expressing and sharing intimate cultural feeling—in the first segment of the piece, when cast members recite tongue twisters while hanging clothes and fabrics about the set. Pinning and unpinning, the actions reflect a kind of making and unmaking of the set, making and unmaking the audience’s expectation at the same time. Their movements are remarkable; they improvise continuously for over an hour, strenuously pushing their bodies over objects, the floor, the walls, and each other. And, in the midst of that movement, I see a cleave from cultural objectivity, a turn towards interconnectivity, disidentification with the straight and white references they dance in and away from. I think, in particular, of the stretched fabric, held together by clothespins, floating above the set, and how it resonates with the touch between performers. I think about tension—the performers tenuously connected to their words, themselves, the set, each other, and the audience—us. (march 4, 2020)

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

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RANI BAWA

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

TO CROSS THE BRIDGE LAVINIA HUANG

LOOK, I AM GOING TO BE HONEST. 54

I wholly enjoyed the piece sober, but I felt like this was the kind of performance that could have, or even should have, been appreciated on another level while under the influence. Despite having interviewed Miguel Gutierrez and doing extensive research on his work, I did not know what to expect. I knew it was going to be provocative, but that was certainly an understatement. When the performers started to get rid of the little clothing they had on, I immediately scanned the faces of my fellow audience members, anticipating looks of discomfort, disgust, or disapproval.

For the most part, people did a good job of minimizing their expressions, especially putting in extra effort when the performers approached them within touching distance and made eye contact while imitating sexual actions on themselves, objects, or each other. I almost wanted one of them to lock eyes with me, someone who wouldn’t shy away, someone who appreciated the daringness and commitment of each performer to the full disclosure of their body, their identity, and their art.

It takes a lot of courage to put your fully nude body on display. No matter how many times they’ve done it or how much self-confidence they’ve built up, I am sure putting on this performance is no easy feat. While some criticized the performers, I found myself admiring them, eager to see what else they had in store beyond the stark improvisation that opened the performance. Dressed in skimpy, laced bodysuits, the performers launched themselves into a Spanish soap opera, or telenovela. Although I pride myself with my six years of Spanish, my eyes darted from the subtitles projected above to the characters coming for each other’s throats. The script was chaotic and hard to follow with a plot twist

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

CALLED MY ASS Miguel Gutierrez, This Bridge Called My Ass, photo by Ian Douglas.

practically in every line. I gave up trying to understand what was going on, but I was entertained and impressed, nonetheless.

A voiceover of the script projected from the speakers as the performers flawlessly mouthed their parts, complete with exaggerated facial expressions and gestures.

Each character had their own humorous personalities that meshed to create an amusing but tumultuous drama. The insertion of a dog made of metal clamps after all the characters had seemingly been killed was very odd and questionable. A deep, scrambled voice portrayed the dog as a malicious entity so ludicrous that it was comical. Maybe it was because I was familiar with the artist and his conception of the

piece that led me to have a very different reaction from my peers who grimaced when I laughed. Or it could just be that other people have a more reactionary view that focuses on how the piece made them feel. But as a performer myself, I could not look down on these artists before me who willfully, and willingly, presented their vulnerabilities.

Aware of the way some audience members react, Miguel Gutierrez told me in our December interview, “The idea that I am half naked in front of an audience doesn’t seem so weird to me. I kinda hate that it is a big deal in some places. It’s not like it feels normal. I just don’t understand that it is used as like the metric of riskiness.”

Normal or not, the exhibition of nudity or queer aspects in This Bridge Called My Ass inadvertently causes viewers to build a wall of discomfort. Such walls should be torn down to reach a more receptive look into the performers and the themes themselves, which may or may not be encouraged with a suggestive state of mind. Maybe then, critics will be able to cross that bridge called my ass. (april 24, 2020)

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MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

THE EVENTS OF THE STORY, AND THEN, THE FALLOUT JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE

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INITIAL THOUGHTS

Materials. Familiarity. Discomfort.

Duration. Softness. Humor. How am I meant to read this? The events of the story and then, the fallout.

MATERIALS

They used them. Not to say that it’s like watching kids play with toys but I got that feeling. I don’t have a long attention span.

I like watching things shift and change quickly. I like when the way that I think of an object changes based on someone’s interaction with it. A scarf is a cape is a blanket is a sex toy is a curtain is a carpet. A speaker plays music and is a sex toy, a block, a pillow. A ladder is a podium, a sex toy, a blanket, handcuffs. There’s a theme here.

FAMILIARITY

Miguel Gutierrez, This Bridge Called My Ass, photos by Ian Douglas.

Goes hand in hand with discomfort. And duration. Lord don’t I know all about a good hour-long improvisational score using materials and musical landmarks. It’s been done. In rehearsal, and sometimes on a stage. I know I’ve done something similar in a Columbus City park. I’ve seen similar from CBUS Dance, in contact jams. It’s the epitome of postmodernism, and still I’ve never seen a version quite like this. That much public nudity takes time to square with, and then you have to ask yourself: why did it take me so long?

Where’s my line of acceptable behavior, and do I like where that line is? And how much of this am I willing to watch, for how long? Does nude grinding mean that this commonly accepted style of abstract dance art is no longer artistic? Would I accept this content in a different context?

DISCOMFORT MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

I’m still hung up on the challenge of the rate of change and duration. I’m an impatient person: How long will subversive/rebellious choice making capture my attention? When is enough, enough? What actually is the value of pushing me/us/the audience to experience this activity past a comfortable duration?

Probably I could have kept watching This Bridge had new elements in addition to sound, materials, and relationships been brought in. But I got the point: Duration is a familiar push and pull, and discomforting the audience is another familiar conflict among art makers.

SOFTNESS

I rarely think about the human body as tactile. A body can move, through space, an expression of artistry or athleticism. A body expresses personality and feelings with a clarity similar to that of spoken language.

On a bigger scale, bodies carry fashion trends or have violence enacted on them. A body has texture. I never think much about what it’s like to be in contact with another person, how their skin would feel to press into, what it must smell like, how touch might change a relationship. How gaze is a form of touch. How painful vulnerability is.

HUMOR

Laughter changes all the stakes. Performer nibia pastrana santiago looking you dead in the eye as she licks a blue plastic glove is alarming, but not at all when she smiles at you. Any tension or fear of escalating public sexuality dissipates when overly clichéd and dramatic lines from any and all telenovelas begin to play out in lip sync.

Absurdity and a postapocalyptic, glowing white god dog upends any context you think you knew about the work. Don’t take yourself so seriously. This isn’t modern art.

Live a little.

How am I meant to read this? In a line, This Bridge Called My Ass is pushing at stereotypical images of “hypersexual Latinx people” by way of durational improvisation, lip syncing trope-y

telenovela scripts, absurdity, and nudity. It demands that the audience examine what makes them uncomfortable and why. Are there shorter ways to boil it down? Am I missing something? Would I watch this again? All unclear.

The events of the story, and then, the fallout.

A way to read the structure of This Bridge is to see the opening as the action, set up, conflict, relationships, secrets, sex, the lived reality. The second half becomes the exposure—extended, drawn out, ever-mounting and ever-expanding in the exposure of relationships, betrayals, contracts, promises, the explanation for the past hour laid out in lip-synced and captioned Spanish. “Her brother fucked his sister who grow up their father and had a kid through the gay uncle who is dying of a gunshot wound” is such a comfortingly familiar drama. Everyone is implicated, no one is safe. (march 10, 2020)

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MIGUEL GUTIERREZ 58

IS THERE A JOKE HERE DEMETRA CHIAFOS

THAT I’M NOT IN ON?

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

LAURA GAINES

I DON’T MIND NUDITY if I can perceive an artistic reason for it or if the nudity furthers the work’s narrative. From its opening, however, Miguel Gutierrez’s This Bridge Called My Ass made me incredibly uncomfortable: full nudity from everyone on the stage, with cast members writhing on the floor, climbing ladders, and performing pretend sex acts for almost an hour. The whole event was accompanied by various musical works and sound effects, some of which came from the performers stomping on a laptop keyboard. They shoved speakers into their underwear (when they wore it) and put power cords into their mouths. It was gratuitous and very abrasive. Perhaps the director’s point was to make me uncomfortable, but I felt assaulted. One could see the equivalent — for free—on the internet if desired.

The second-to-last section of the piece—a satirical take on Latin American soap operas—was genuinely funny, as the characters acted out one dramatic plot twist after another. The increasingly absurd plot twists revealed that the characters were all related even though they’d all been having sex with each other and one of them was pregnant. Some of the characters screamed in shock, falling to the ground —

others broke into a physical altercation.

I laughed out loud. I would’ve liked it much better if that twenty minutes had been the entire hour-and-a half piece and if they had been fully clothed at that point instead of wearing lace lingerie that was entirely see-through.

The third section killed the joy the second section had given to me. I do not know why they arranged large metal clips to form a dog, put the dog onto a glowing platform, and then played a voiceover where the dog announced that he was “God’s dog’s dog” and “dog of the universe, dog of the multiverse” who “shits in front yards” and “on monuments” and “in parks” and … the list went on.

What relation, I wondered to myself, does this weird extraterrestrial little clipdog have to nudity and Latin American soap operas? Is there a joke here that I’m not in on?

When the dancers circled the glowing clip-dog of the multiverse as if in rapture, I held my breath, asking, as I had four or six or maybe eight times throughout the work, is it finally almost over?

Yes. It was. (february 15, 2020)

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Back to Back Theatre The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes FEBRUARY 13–15, 2020

BACK TO BACK THEATRE

“CAN MAY I HELP YOU?”

“KEEP IT SIMPLE; USE SMALL WORDS.”

These are notes Lavinia Huang scribbled in her program during the performance of Back to Back Theatre’s The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes. A troupe employing actors with disabilities, Back to Back Theatre does not typically feature performance content about disability. That made Shadow an unusual piece in the company’s repertory and one that could signal a larger, ongoing project, acknowledges Bruce Gladwin, Back to Back’s artistic director. Shadow covers a lot of ground and deals broadly with identity, artificial intelligence, and the confrontation between technology and the experiences of the disabled as well as abled populations. In a preview interview with Gladwin appearing on the Wexner Center’s Read,Watch, Listen webpage (https://wexarts.org/read-watch-listen/first-time-backback-theatre-talks-disability-onstage), Kaiya Gordon noted that the script for Shadow came about collaboratively and featured actors as activists who, writes Kaiya, quoting Gladwin, “can say what they need to say.” Some things need to be said, echoes Jacqueleen Bordjadze who writes in her post-performance notes: “some things need someone to stand up and say them.” Rani Bawa thought of the phrase I borrowed as the title of this brief commentary. And Michelle Sipes streamlined her emotional response, poetically rendering the performance’s cumulative effect: “Rage needs reckoning/Status quo unraveling/Power dismantling/Can you handle/your own/othering?” Simple, small words, they might just disrupt our notions of what is “normal.”

KAREN ELIOT JUNE 21, 2020

Back to Back Theatre, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, photo

by Jeff Busby.

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BACK TO BACK THEATRE

OtherEd MICHELLE SIPES

You’re not getting it Blank stares Blind from privilege Can you walk in these shoes?

The gate is different Can you keep up?

The verbal cadence uniquely flows Is this too much?

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What about the rage?

The abuse, experimentation, and slavery Ancestors past and modern-day technology The cream of the crop eaten The imperfect beaten Thrown out Disregarded Because of someone’s status quo Who gets to other?

Who has that power?

Others don’t make it into the collective We

are not in this together An other education Tables turned Magnifying glass on Are you getting it?

Rage needs reckoning Status quo unraveling Power dismantling Can you handle your own othering? (february 29, 2020)

BACK TO BACK THEATRE 65

JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE

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RANI BAWA

BACK TO BACK THEATRE

TO BE A FATIGUED WRITER KAIYA GORDON

IS TO BE UNSTEADY: A BOAT MOVING THROUGH BANKED FOG.

I wake up in the morning, but keep my body curled in bed. It is so, so, so difficult to get up. It is so, so, so difficult to get up every day, at any hour. It is not just sleepiness that clouds my eyes; my entire body aches the moment I awake, straining to escape from the weighted fatigue that presses upon me everywhere, always. It follows me to my desk, where I struggle with my emptied brain; to the grocery store, where I find myself blanking out in the middle of produce aisles; to my service job, where I fumble interactions with customers; and to my classroom, where I stumble through my sentences, often leaving the ends untied.

I am not a writer by choice, but by brain design. The curves and folds of my brain seem to make connections only through my fingers, tapping on a keyboard, piecing together different ideas, tensions, resonances. So what happens when the design of my brain falters? When to simply sit up and at a computer requires an enormous amount of effort?

The narrator in my head is asleep. I do not know how to wake them up.

In February, I try to go to the singer’s show, because I am supposed to write about the singer. I look up the bus routes. Eat dinner.

Get dressed. I fall asleep—only for a second! I think, too weary to hold my head upright—to light, and wake up to dark. I have missed the singer’s show. Just like I missed class last week, and my psychiatric appointment the week before. On the phone, my healthcare provider scolds me, telling me that if I keep missing appointments, I’ll get kicked out of behavioral health. I sigh, and promise myself to go next time.

My teacher doesn’t scold me, nor does the singer from the show.

They are too busy to care. I scold myself anyway.

During my junior and senior years of high school, I spent at least one day a week slouched in my room, or huddled in the bathroom under a pile of dirty laundry. This is the time of my life when the sickness began to pull at me, sometimes gently prodding, and sometimes grabbing so hard it could tear the skin from my flesh. Still, I wrote frantically, in the night, on a laptop that only worked when it was plugged in. I blogged intensively, took photos every day, and kept a notebook filled with poetry drafts. I couldn’t turn it off.

What has happened between then and now? Illness has knocked me over, like a sailor in a storm.

As a fatigued writer—a fatigued me—I have an hourglass that haunts me, hanging over my head, reminding me of the limited resources I have each day. The grains of sand fall quickly, too quickly, as I desperately try to get everything done: to maintain my relationships, to complete my service shifts, to prep my lessons for class, to give my peers’ feedback, to research, to read, to watch TV, to feed my cat, to shower, to eat, to do laundry, to take my medications, to walk, to be in the light, to be in the dark, to, to.

To write. It is always last.

I used to joke about trying, truly, to give up poetry—why, I would say, laughing, would I want this? This life? This time, expended on art? But I could never give it up; it is the way I see the world. When, in the car with my partner, I stare into their eyes and kiss them, my body can only think: poem. When, taking a long walk in San Francisco, my home, my feet can only think: poem. When, lying on a bed at the doctor’s office, the doctor takes a stethoscope to me, my heart can only beat: poem.

The problem is not the poems. They come to me. The problem is the way they slip through my fingers, the last grains of sand in the glass.

And here—I am flailing in my fatigue. I am sitting on the beach, watching a tsunami come to pound against me. I am trading grains of sand for glass, cutting myself to write, to essay.

(MARCH 13, 2020)

2019–2020

SHARON UDOH

Sharon Udoh Wexner Center Artist Residency Award

SHARON UDOH

A CENTRAL OHIO TREASURE WHO’S POISED FOR GREATNESS, SINGER, KEYBOARDIST, AND SONGWRITER SHARON UDOH COMBINES VOCALS THAT SEEMINGLY ERUPT FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH WITH A STAGE PRESENCE THAT SOMEHOW FEELS BOTH DANGEROUS AND KIND.

EVER GENEROUS WITH HER GIFTS, Udoh’s performed with

a wide variety of bands in the Columbus music scene. With her own rock ’n’ roll group, Counterfeit Madison, she has released two albums and created the 2017 performance Counterfeit Madison Meets Nina Simone: A Celebration of Blackness. The band’s most recent album, 2017’s Opposable Thumbs, launched with a soldout release party at the Wexner Center. The disc reaffirmed the relevance of her storytelling and searing musicality, and her appearance in another Wex-supported project—a theatrical version of Joan Didion’s The White Album by director Lars Jan—showcased her talent at such prestigious venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. Udoh’s residency work incorporated several elements, including filming a music video in the Wex galleries and an Aretha Franklin tribute concert, created in collaboration with Columbus performer DJ Moxy. She performed opening acts for two performances by choreographer and dancer nora chipaumire at the Wex in fall 2019.

As part of her residency, Udoh also participated in the center’s Pages arts and literacy program for teens, presenting the performance discussed next for them on January 24, 2020.

Counterfeit Madison, photo by Kate Sweeney.

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SHARON UDOH

THAT ROLLERCOASTER FEELING MICHELLE SIPES

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A LOW, BUZZY RUMBLE passed through

the intimate theater space; roughly 250 high school students sat in the Wex’s Film/Video Theater seats, waiting for the show to begin. These students and their classroom teachers are participating in Pages: An Arts, Literacy and Writing Program led by the Wex’s Associate Director of Education Dionne Custer Edwards.

Did that buzz mean they were excited to be at the Wex and away from their high school classrooms? Or was it just the nervous energy pulsing out of their teenage bodies?

Pages is a unique yearlong educational journey. Over the course of the program, the students engage with three arts experiences and post-experience discussions: this performance, a visit to see visual art in the galleries, and a film screening. In conjunction with the Wex’s programming, Custer Edwards invites three local artists into the program to facilitate a wide-range of arts learning activities for the students

and their teachers. These connections take place in the high school classrooms as well as at the Wex, providing a cross-pollination opportunity for the students’ learning and the teachers’ pedagogical growth.

The artists-in-residence pair with one of the arts experiences, drawing from the artwork’s themes, ideas, and concepts while blending their artistic practice to curate educational moments for the participants.

The discussions are rigorous, complex, and dynamic—as is the cultural makeup and diverse perspectives and experiences of the students in the program.

“Birds flying high you know how I feel” The students settled into their seats, into themselves. The buzz softened.

“The sun in the sky you know how I feel” Wex Residency Award artist Sharon Udoh captivated the jittery teenagers.

A Columbus native, Udoh has an enthralling stage presence—dynamic,

SHARON UDOH 73

funny, bold, and kind—that oscillates from overwhelming you with her power to seducing you with her approachable joviality. And most notably, Udoh’s voice: It’s a rollercoaster of love, joy, and heartache with pitches that leave one feeling like a puppy dog staring up with admiration. (By the way, I strongly dislike rollercoasters. But goodness, that shrill feeling that rises in the pit of your stomach when you are totally swept away—that’s the feeling Udoh brings out in me, and, arguably, in anyone.)

“Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel” Udoh’s hands bumped the piano keys with a charming pulse. There were whispers, necks were craning, and a hand popped-up shimmying with what seemed like approval, acknowledgment and joy. Udoh curated a special performance for these young adults.

A mixture of Nina Simone songs and her original music, she swooped the audience members up in her carpet-ride-of-a-

performance—silence permeated through the students, ears tuned, bodies engaged.

The cover of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good finished and the crowd exploded with claps and hoots.

“These songs are about me; about Nina at one point; and maybe about some of you.”

Udoh’s low tenor then drifted into To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Simone. Udoh is very generous with what and how she shares with the audience. She unfolded her upbringing: being raised by Nigerian immigrant parents, a Christian mother and an atheist father—she didn’t listen to “secular” music until age 21. She didn’t know of, let alone listen to, the Beatles until age 25. She then performed Here Comes the Sun, explaining how Simone covered the George Harrison song, and she in turn is covering that cover. What I find important about Udoh informing the students about this—many of them people of color—is

SHARON UDOH 74

that she very astutely takes agency over the song, offering an alternate doorway into this globally known song by a white English man. While I can’t assume to know how these students felt, I can say that their body language shifted; their bodies listened differently, causing me to believe that Udoh’s perspective and interpretation provided opportunities for these young adults to feel emboldened, invigorated, and energized. Udoh divulged her lived experiences as springboards to address themes of identity, relationships (not just with “bae” but with friends, family, and yourself), self-love, race, gender, and religion, to name a few. Like a coming-of-age novel, Udoh hooked the students in, giving space for them to feel, respond, and absorb.

“I sing. I play the piano.

I also really like to eat.”

An audience member yelled out, “Me too!” confirming that feeling of being totally welcomed as you are—no excuses, justifications, or qualifiers necessary — that her performance evoked. Udoh’s performance was part music and part conversation—it had moments when

you escaped with her through lyric and instrument; and moments of reprieve, reflection, and critical discourse. Local writer, poet, and activist Scott Woods was in running dialogue with her throughout the performance, acting as a backboard for her to ping off ideas and meta-observations between songs. This dynamic relationship modeled cross-sector collaboration in an inspiring way. As Udoh finished her set, they naturally transitioned into a post-performance discussion, opening the floor for the students to ask and respond.

Through her music, Udoh inspired a conversation about artistic ancestors’ works being made manifest on the contemporary stage. She showed the audience—and I want to reiterate again that the majority of these students are people of color—how to reimagine, question, and deliver content from an emergent perspective. (april 2020 / june 2020)

Sharon Udoh Pages performance, photos by Brandon Ballog.

ANNIE DORSEN

Annie Dorsen Yesterday Tomorrow MARCH 20–22, 2020

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WORLDS COLLIDE: THE UNION BETWEEN COMPUTERS AND THEATRE LAURA GAINES

Annie Dorsen, Yesterday Tomorrow, photos by Alexandre Schlub.

ANNIE DORSEN

I RECENTLY SPOKE with Annie Dorsen

about her upcoming work at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Yesterday Tomorrow, as well as about her creative processes. Our conversation introduced me to a novel intersection of science, technology, and the humanities: using computer algorithms as collaborators on theatrical pieces. As a student majoring in statistics and minoring in dance, this idea intrigued me; my discussion with Dorsen did not disappoint.

I asked Dorsen to define the term she coined for her style of composing pieces, “algorithmic theater.” She uses it to differentiate between her works and those created as multimedia performance; in her work, computers and computer algorithms serve as “collaborators.” That means she works with computer programmers to design and write code that “performs in a live theatrical situation.” The computer generates material for the performance in real time and the algorithm won’t generate the same output each time, so each performance is “one of a vast number of possible performances,” and each will most likely never be seen again.

Dorsen had very limited knowledge of computer programming going into this creative endeavor. The idea came from an essay she read by Alan Turing titled “On Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which, she says, is “a foundational text for the field of artificial intelligence, and particularly for natural language programming, the side of computer science that’s trying to get computers to be able to create plausible speech or text the way a human would.” From this essay, and an idea from a televised philosophical debate, Dorsen created Hello Hi There (2010), her first algorithmic theater piece revolving around “a very old-fashioned kind of chatbot system.”

She has since created several algorithmic theater works, including Yesterday Tomorrow.

Although they are all in the same genre, Dorsen’s works come from different sources.

Unlike the Turing essay that inspired her first work, Yesterday Tomorrow was a completely unplanned idea she came up with when a friend explained programming genetic algorithms to her. Dorsen recalled the moment: “While we were talking, I just sort of said, ‘Oh I see, so you could, for

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example, use a genetic algorithm to turn one thing into another, you could take the song Yesterday and turn it into Tomorrow’… and then the next day I thought, Well actually, that’s an interesting idea. It would be fun to try that.”

Dorsen frequently comes up with her concepts by reading, doing research, and speaking with people, and the next idea “pops out of her mouth in conversation.”

She noted that her pieces have evolved through time. In her earlier works, she intended to “demystify” computer science for her audiences, particularly since her audiences had limited knowledge about computers and were not necessarily “technically minded.” Dorsen used relatively simple programs that were easy to understand so as to prevent her audiences responding only to the “whiz-bang effects.”

Instead, she hoped the audience would think alongside the piece. Additionally, her earlier pieces had “very emotional … almost biographical” sources. Today, Dorsen says she is moving away from simpler code and more personal pieces and heading toward more technically complicated machine learning algorithms and the cultural, social, and political questions they raise. Dorsen mentioned that the algorithms have “some interesting aspects in terms of very old aspects of theater… plausibility, verisimilitude, representation.” As such, Dorsen’s works are shifting from this unmasking of computer algorithms to more intense machine learning questions.

Since she doesn’t want the “whiz-bang effect,” I asked if she hoped for a particular reaction from her audiences. She responded that she didn’t have a particular message she wants to communicate but wants her audience to approach the performance, “in the spirit of curiosity.… I like the notion that the audience is very active in their minds trying to make sense of it… there’re moments of beauty, there’re moments of humor, there’re moments that are very surprising, also to me, because I don’t know what the programs will produce each night.”

My conversation with Dorsen acquainted me with a brand-new (at least to me) intersection of science, technology, and the arts, and I greatly look forward to seeing the unique performance. I plan to bring an open and curious mind, and I can’t wait to see what Dorsen’s algorithmic collaborator shows us. (february 18, 2020)

TRIPTYCH

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another ) APRIL 14, 2020

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TRIPTYCH

A CAMERA AIMED ON CONTROVERSY SAM GIUSTO 80

series of components all packed into the hour-long runtime, Triptych aims to invite audiences into a contemplative space, as tuttle says, to ask, “What does it mean to coexist? What does it mean to peacefully coexist?”

This is far from the only question raised

by Triptych, though. For the uninitiated, immediate questions about the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and its impact are likely to arise, but those who are more well-versed in the context surrounding Mapplethorpe’s photography would inherently look deeper. When I asked tuttle about his creative process for writing Triptych’s libretto, he mentioned several questions that were evoked by studying Mapplethorpe’s archive, including ones such as, “What conversation do the 1980s want to have with this moment in time? How do each of those images and questions—brought into this historical moment in time, and contextualized in this sociopolitical moment in time—, how through text, music, poetry, and movement might we be able to hold space for what it means to be human and to be collectively sharing space together on this planet?”

He explained that, in meditating on the images while he wrote, he allowed his raw emotional responses to be shown with transparency to the audience, and one of the reasons for this rawness was the fact that Triptych was ultimately put together rather quickly.

As tuttle explained to me, composer Bryce Dessner had the idea for Triptych long before anyone else was brought on for the project. And even once work began, lineup changes in the production of the piece took place. For example, tuttle was not the original librettist and Kaneza Schaal was not the original director. When it came to writing the libretto, tuttle told me that after being brought onto the project in June of 2018, he had a first complete draft between August and September of that same year. Rewrites and reworking of the piece were not extensive, given that the piece came together as quickly as it did.

This, tuttle said, gave a sense of uniqueness to Triptych when compared to his other works. “It’s a piece that, because I wrote

TRIPTYCH

CONTROVERSY IS ONE of the flashiest forms of attention. For those who believe that any press is good press, controversy may be the goal; for those on the shier side, it may be skirted or expertly sidestepped. For the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, some of whose works focused on the beauty of gay male subculture, including BDSM, and the Black male form, controversy became nearly synonymous with his name. And for the multimedia performance Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), the specific controversy sparked by Mapplethorpe’s work—both at the time of its creation (in the late 1970s and 1980s) and today—is the thematic topic that should be carefully weighed by the audience.

Triptych showcases the vocal talents of Roomful of Teeth singing a libretto written by korde arrington tuttle and composed by Bryce Dessner, all while Mapplethorpe’s photos, carefully curated by director Kaneza Schaal, are projected on a large scale, so that the audience might view and contemplate them as the text (drawn from words by Essex Hemphill and Patti Smith) and music speak to the emotional evocations those images might bring to the surface. Each of the piece’s three sections draw from a different aspect of Mapplethorpe’s photo archive and different elements of his legacy and history.

I had the opportunity to speak with korde arrington tuttle in a phone interview to discuss the piece, the creative process of those involved in its creation, and his own perspectives on Mapplethorpe’s photography. The librettist described Triptych as “a theatrical, dramatic experience that combines music and opera, theater, photography, and multimedia in a way that calls audiences into a collective presence.” He said the piece could be thought of as an “aria that moves through Robert Mapplethorpe’s XYZ catalogue: X is inspired by the theme of Robert’s more classical imagery and S&M, Y being [his still life images of] flowers and the trial [in Cincinnati in 1990 about the possible obscenity of some of Mapplethorpe’s images], and then Z being an exploration of [his] relationship to the nude black male form.” Truly a dense and complicated

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it and put it up so quickly, I continued to learn about it as it was performed,” tuttle said. “Which is scary, but also a joy and an honor. It’s vulnerable, as a maker; it calls vulnerability to the forefront of my mind, spirit, and psyche in a way that has allowed me to grow.” This place of vulnerability and the emotional rawness behind the libretto give Triptych a great deal of its weight, as it encourages the audience to engage in similar ways with Mapplethorpe’s photography, and form their own relationship to it.

Looking at the work of an artist like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose life and chosen craft sparked and continue to spark controversy and social scrutiny, can produce a lot of changing, complex feelings in an audience. Everyone can have different opinions and responses to Mapplethorpe’s photography depending on who they are and many of the fundamental aspects of their identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality. In this way, tuttle says, “This very much is a piece about all of us, about everyone. This is a piece for young people; it is for black audiences and audiences of color; it is for queer audiences—it’s an intergenerational experience. It also is

for women; it is for folks who identify as gender nonconforming; it really is a piece that invites all of us to share space with one another and sit in the dark and encounter a story that reflects this moment in time, but also speaks across time and space.”

Having the opportunity to speak to tuttle about this work opened my eyes to a myriad of things, from the way I engage with history to the way I engage with art to the way I engage with myself. Seeing Triptych will only drive those thoughts further, and I invite others to see not only Mapplethorpe’s photography and the hard work of Triptych’s creators, but also to see a bit into themselves. (march 15, 2020)

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), photos by Maria Baranova.

FAYE DRISCOLL

Faye Driscoll Thank You for Coming: Space

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APRIL 16–19, 2020

FAYE DRISCOLL

EMBODIED DISMANTLING INTERVIEW WITH FAYE DRISCOLL MICHELLE SIPES

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THANK YOU FOR COMING: SPACE has

faced two postponements at the Wex this season: the first, for Faye Driscoll’s personal reasons, and the second (with a new date still pending), due to the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. In this current moment, April 14, 2020—a time when the world cannot gather, cannot be thanked for coming to anything, and can only observe performance via digital technology—I reflect on my summer 2019 interview with Faye. It was warm outside that day. I could hear the bustling streets in the background of Faye’s words—she was in New York City, and I was in Columbus, OH. I imagine how those streets might have looked, teeming with people: New Yorkers, tourists, friends, family, and lovers alike.

My body’s sensation was so different that day: I did not feel caged like I do now.

There was no hesitation or gloom—I was excited to see this show! I was thankful to be able to witness and participate in Space in March 2019 at a Wex-commissioned work-in-progress showing. On a personal

note, my body has endured a great amount of grief; I lost my father and my brother, both of whom I was very close to, in a short period of time. Space is the only artistic performance that I feel captured that gut-wrenching-feeling caused by grief.

Throughout Space, Driscoll interacts with a variety of objects: red clay, a lemon, and a cinder block to name a few. She hurtles the red clay, smashing it against the clean, white performance floor; its splattering causes a loud, percussive “thunk.” She bites into the lemon, contorting her face in response to the sour exploding in her mouth; as I watch, I feel like I can taste it, too. And, she places the cinder block on her chest, gasping to breathe as she allows her body to succumb to the block’s intense weight—reminding me of the unrelenting, out-of-nowhere pressure of grief I used to feel in my chest. These moments in Space allow the spectator to feel with Driscoll — the physicality of hurling an object as hard as one can; the memorable eruption of lemon-flavor in one’s mouth; and the stiff, immobilizing tightness in one’s chest

(april 14, 2020) MICHELLE SIPES: After I watched the

in-progress showing of TYFC: Space, I am struck by the time you have spent developing this project. Can you comment on the time commitment you’ve made to the series?

FAYE DRISCOLL: I made the Thank You for

Coming series, in part, because I wanted to think differently—I wanted to challenge myself to think differently about my work, to think of my work as a body of work.

I’ve been making work all of my life and there are always connections from one project to the next—something like an uncharted thread that I am returning to.

This series was about creating an umbrella of intention that allowed all three works to be in dialogue with each other and yet, each would be a kind of work itself, iterative and distinct. The other two works [Attendance and Play] are ensemble pieces and each took two and a half years to create. Space is me alone with the audience —I prefer saying that rather than calling it a solo piece. It was created in a much shorter timeline than the other two works; it happened in some fairly intensive

five months. The work happened over this intensive tunnel vision period. I was really worried about the short work period for Space, but what was really incredible is that it was absolutely fed, informed by, and resting in the research that I had already done in the other five years of making Attendance and Play. It kind of burst out quickly, but was already really layered with all of that the research.

FAYE DRISCOLL

caused by stress and anxiety—all of which manifest in real-time as embodied responses to Driscoll’s performance. When my father and brother passed, I felt so isolated; it was as if parts of me dissipated, exposing gaps that made me feel empty and distant.

I feel grief and isolation today, too. It’s very different, but it’s there. Oh, how I wish I could see Space right now—not only to feel with Driscoll and other spectators, but to see and feel in a place that doesn’t include my couch or computer screen.

I’ve always known that we need art. But now more than ever, I firmly know we need live art and the social components that accompany watching performance with other spectators. It’s a way to reconcile these feelings our bodies entangle with. Watching Space confronts our internal grievances— this is a performance we currently crave, desire, and need. In the future, watching Space will be a reckoning. But for now, we pause and reflect at a distance.

MICHELLE: I’m thinking about some of these uncharted threads and the connections and through lines in the series.

For instance, the relationship you have with objects in these works—can you give some insight to that development and your creative process broadly?

FAYE: My work with objects and materials

goes back to You’re Me [which premiered in April 2012 at The Kitchen in New York City], that was when I started to really work with them. You’re Me was the work before this series. I’m interested in the “stuff-ness” of our human existence; like how we need things, or how we are completely dependent on clothing, objects, phones—you know, shelters. They become a part of our lexicon of self, our mode of being. [Faye breaks off, “Oh, Alexa thought I was talking to her.” We laugh at the irony of objects communicating in this moment and the notion of “Alexa-con.” She then jumps back in.] I’m interested in creating a playful space, a space of flexibility and malleability in world-making. Our stuff makes our worlds—it is our world, and it is us. Objects are important in this series as a way to have relationship to the audience; to cast them in roles in the works; to ask them to hold a thing and by holding that thing be seen, be among, and be a part of the world making. The objects are an extension of our bodies and the intention of the bodies.

MICHELLE: That seems evident: how each of the objects has an intentional presence, even to the way the pulley system was built. This whole notion of world is created in Space, a point I remember discussing with you. Can you talk about your direct interactions with the audience? How you coach and guide them with care and respect?

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FAYE DRISCOLL

FAYE: There is a relationship to care in my

FAYE: There’s been an increase in boldness

communications, and in the overarching structure of the work, but also in that I am in a sense a figure in need and the audience makes choices about being in relationship or witnesses others being in relationship to that need.

in me. An increase in stamina in working on a seven-year endeavor of creating a trilogy of works. I am someone who loathed the idea of participatory work (and maybe still do). I believe that we are already participating whether we notice it or not. I know now that there is a real need for it, a longing, a craving towards being touched, being a part of. You know, having a reason to be there other than a consumptive, passive viewership. That’s maybe what has increased the boldness in me, and it’s not to be cocky like, “You know you want this,” but there is a kind of confidence that has grown in me about a need in us to be among.

I think I try to set up a container for myself through the objects, through the pulley system, through my tasks, that has an immediacy and underlying need, an urgency that is, in some sense, a kind of weaving that I feel like I’m doing. The need, the request, the ask, the gentle demand becomes, “I’m in this ritual. It’s going to happen. It needs to happen — are you here with me?” And the tension created through this ask becomes a part of the structure of the work. Space particularly is dealing a lot with absence, loss, grief, death, trace, trying to hold, being unable to hold something massive in this single body.

MICHELLE: How have you evolved as an

artist and as a person, and what have you learned while transitioning from ensemble to singular performer in this practice?

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MICHELLE: I guess I have to ask, “No” is an answer the audience can choose; how does that affect you in the moment?

FAYE: I really like a “No” versus a kind of

“Yes, but actually no,” or an “Umm,” or some other in-between thing. It’s all kind of interesting to me actually though. I’ve never had a crowd that is an all “No”—that would be quite difficult. There’s a way in

MICHELLE: Right. The culture of an audience is always discrete, unique, and specific.

FAYE: Exactly. And not in your control —

it’s a very interesting dynamic system to kind of try and sway, play with, or move.

Sometimes you think it’s really gone wrong and you’re wrong, but really it hasn’t.

MICHELLE: Do you ever see all three-works living in the same time and space, or are they independent of each other?

FAYE: Yeah! They are discrete works; they

are in dialogue with each other, and I have about five different ways I can imagine them coming together: All happening on

the same day; in the same space; happening in different spaces; being broken apart and made into new things throughout a building. It’s exciting for my brain, as an artist, to imagine that there is a freedom or permission to rework and to remake out of things I’ve created and are complete.

FAYE DRISCOLL

doing this work [that makes] my system curious and prepared for a multitude of responses. Typically, you’ve got a mix to draw on. I’m dependent to a degree, but I also feel like I’m going to do this with or without, but it’d be better if you were here. It’s always affecting me, how it goes, how an audience is—it makes such a huge impact.

MICHELLE: There is this notion of dismantling in its own way in each of the works. How do you address this climax of dismantling with the three together? Has that manifested differently in Space? What is “dismantling” for you inside of Thank You for Coming?

FAYE: I love that word dismantling so

much and I don’t think I’ve used it a ton, but it really resonates. I think there is a sense of emergence happening in all of the works. A kind of constant emergent arrivals that crystalize and dissolve. There’s also this third space between performer and audience that’s really being charged a lot and expectations are subverted and shifted.

And then there’s literally construction and deconstruction of stuff, and the set, whether it’s the pulleys coming down, 87

FAYE DRISCOLL

or the benches moving in Attendance, or the white backdrop constantly moving in Play —there is an instability in that. The invitation to world-make or co-create inside Thank You for Coming is through witnessing.

Space, also, literally addresses the different telling of our physical selves and in dying.

MICHELLE: Can you talk about your definition of co-creation?

FAYE: The first thing that comes to me

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is that it feels aspirational. It feels like a kind of a “thing” I really want and really crave in the way I engage in this life that I have. It’s always as if I’m failing. The way that I’m engaging with co-creation is the hope for it, or the possibility of it. I don’t know that I truly am doing it. I don’t know that the works have enough of the kind of chaos and fall apart. It’s almost like the dismantling of chaos and the falling apart of the audience allows for these little fissures where the audience gets to join in.

But in fact, the work is made up of these really tight structures that you are getting to taste and feel. It’s a way-of-being — and maybe participating in that way-ofbeing—but it’s only a little match being lit for one second. To truly co-create is a huge aspiration. I feel like it’s something I’m really trying to effort towards, or labor towards, or push into. Thank You for Coming is really intent in that labor. (august 14, 2019)

Faye Driscoll, Thank You For Coming: Space, photos

by Maria Baranova.

Dialogue, Participation, and Discovery “YOU’RE ALLOWED TO BE INTIMIDATED BY THIS PROCESS, BUT YOU CAN’T LET IT OVERWHELM YOU! THIS IS ABOUT GROWING AND LEARNING, AND YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO DO EITHER IF YOU CHICKEN OUT.” —SAM GIUSTO

FOR SOME, college can shake worldviews and belief systems to the core. Within and outside of the classroom, perhaps in galleries or theaters, students may embrace slowing down, paying attention, and weighing observations and interpretations. Sometimes they also quicken their paces. In all kinds of stretching and leaping through new experiences, they find their voices and listen to others while wrestling with the unfamiliar and unknown. It could be a time to catch glimpses of who they are and what they’re capable of when confronted with new ideas, people, and challenges. No one could have anticipated the course of this 2019–2020 school year.

When I arrived at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016, I was most excited about the collaboration and experimentation we could support across the disciplines. The year-long partnership between the Wexner Center’s education and performing arts departments and Karen Eliot of Ohio State’s Department of Dance exemplifies what’s possible when we open institutions to dialogue, participation, and discovery. It has laid a foundation for future university partnerships that value exchange among students, artists, programmers, and scholars.

I want to thank the students of the Ratner cohort (the “Rat Pack”) for their willingness to travel on this uncharted voyage with us. At our first full group meeting in August 2019, multiple students spoke about the importance of a community that would form over the academic year. In a survey collected at this gathering, they mentioned their eagerness for a structure to write (a chance to develop a practice) and to spark connections with motivated

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peers from different fields. Other students described how the project offered opportunities for new reading and research along with interactions and exposure to contemporary artists, some living in Columbus. More remarked on the ways that writing permits self-reflection and catharsis. Another wanted to develop her voice, clarity, and ability to write for the public.

This initiative is one way we live up to our commitment to the next generation of students and arts audiences and support the diversity of arts professionals and advocates. Not only have the students helped each other to thoughtfully encounter the often-disorienting world of performance, but their eagerness to serve as liaisons to the arts on campus and in larger Columbus communities became evident in their dedicated teamwork to interview artists, continuously improve, and ask what they can do beyond their writing.

The Wex gained a set of ambassadors through this project.

We got to share young, intelligent, fresh voices on our website and within program notes at each performance. Vitally, these were noninstitutional voices that modeled viewpoints outside of the curatorial and academic. They contributed to the discourse around our season and animated artist residencies. We were asked questions about what more we could do to expand community engagement and public programs. The writers developed informed opinions while examining their positionality and privilege. They responded to the complex, difficult art and issues of our time as a collaborative. In turn, our institutions and staff must adapt and meet the calls for change ignited by these students’ voices.

My heartfelt thanks extend to Karen Eliot, all of the artists who participated in conversations with students, designer Brandon Ballog, editor Ann Bremner, Wexner Center Director Johanna Burton, and colleagues Lane Czaplinski, Ashley Stanton, Adam Elliott, Ryan Shafer, and Melissa Starker.

ALANA RYDER MANAGER, PUBLIC AND UNIVERSITY PROGRAMS WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS MAY 19, 2020

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RANI BAWA

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AN INVITATION

THE STUDENT WRITERS’ EXCITEMENT was palpable as we gathered one afternoon in spring semester 2019, in a seminar room in the Wexner Center for the Arts, where Director of Performing Arts Lane Czaplinski previewed the upcoming performing arts season. As Lane described the 2019–2020 line-up, the writers listened with a bit of apprehension and a great deal of eagerness: apprehension because they were grappling with the scope of their tasks ahead, and eagerness because, as Lane described them, the artists’ projects so clearly aligned with many of their own aesthetic and social interests. It promised to be a thought-provoking, fun, and challenging season.

In the essay that follows, Lane describes the season ahead and muses on the role of the performing arts in the twenty-first century in the context of an earlier conversation he had had with Bebe Miller, choreographer and professor emerita in the OSU Department of Dance. Bebe’s point, says Lane, is not that the arts compromise their excellence by opening their doors to the community at large, but rather that the artist has the capacity to challenge audiences to DO SOMETHING. “Art isn’t just about what artists do,” he writes, “but it’s also about what it invites others to do.”

I think it was just that challenge, the invitation to do something meaningful with what they would witness, that struck the student writers and that finds expression in Jacqueleen Bordjadze’s Foreword, “What Are We Doing Here?” and throughout this book.

The seeds of the invitation were sown that day.

KAREN ELIOT JUNE 25, 2020

Wexner Center exterior walkway (left) and Mershon Auditorium (next page), photos by Laura Gaines.

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“An excellence of connection, not the aesthetics of excellence.”

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BEBE MILLER SAID THIS. We were sitting in my office last month discussing her project Vault, which is an artist-driven, ongoing conversation about methodologies for archiving and sharing dancemaking practices. (Bebe and some other cool artists will be in Columbus Vault-ing, January 18–19, 2020.) When we were almost done with our meeting, she asked about business at our center and how things are going. When I described several ways we’re trying to build our community, she responded with the quote above. At first glance, it reads like a repudiation of the old chestnut that focusing on inclusivity compromises excellence. Of course, that premise never made any sense, and while such repudiation was probably Bebe’s point to some extent, I think she was actually saying something slightly different: art isn’t just about what artists do but it’s also about what it invites others to do. Put another way, creative expression often provides great opportunities for people to connect.

So not only does next season feature a lineup of some of the most interesting artists working in performance today, it also includes projects and some behind-the-scenes stuff that provides our center with opportunities to connect with people in dynamic ways.

For example, Awilda Rodriguez Lora, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Sharon Udoh will be in residence creating new performance projects, and among them, they will be collaborating with faculty, building community off campus, and helping us provide different perspectives. In a similar vein, Miguel Gutierrez, Annie Dorsen, and Back to Back Theatre will give artist talks in addition to presenting their work. Faye Driscoll, nora chipaumire, and Radouan Mriziga will teach in addition to performing.

My performing arts colleagues, Ashley Stanton and Adam Elliott (aka The A-Team) will program additional music events over the next several months. Ohio State Professor Karen Eliot’s undergrad and graduate students will contribute writings about the season program throughout the year. I’ll work with colleagues toward

making more of our performance projects accessible online. And our new Director, Johanna Burton, already brings a fresh eye to how we do this work and how we can push ourselves even further.

Producers, curators, and other arts administrators often don’t tell people about such efforts, which is odd given how mission critical this work is. In grant proposals, we talk about being more inclusive and accessible, removing barriers to participation, and decolonizing our organizations, as well as providing multiple curatorial perspectives, collaborating on- and off-campus, providing better online distribution models, contributing more toward the creative process, and educating the next generation of artists, scholars, and enthusiasts.

While we are actually putting into place real strategies that endeavor to do these things, we often focus our communication efforts on trying to get audiences excited about “what’s next,” which can miscast live art as events that take place in the short term rather than something resulting from a creative practice with a potentially longer-term impact on a discipline, institution, or community.

“An excellence of connection.” It’s people from across our campus, city, and state experiencing provocative performances with one another while providing their minds refuge from the normal constructs of day-to-day life. We hope you will join us.

LANE CZAPLINSKI DIRECTOR OF PERFORMING ARTS WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS SEPTEMBER 2019

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Further Reading and Sources SELECTIONS FROM THE COURSE SYLLABUS, STUDENTS, AND WEXNER CENTER STAFF

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE ­— HISTORY AND THEORY Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge Press, 1999.

Bales, Melanie and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, eds. The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Banes, Sally, ed. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Carter, Alexandra, ed. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. New York: Routledge Press, 1998.

Copeland, Roger and Marshall Cohen, eds.

What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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DeFrantz, Thomas and Anita Gonzalez. Black Performance Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Duncombe, Stephen, and Maxwell Tremblay, eds. Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. London: Verso, 2011.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?

The Authority of Interpretive Communities.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the African Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Levinson, André. André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties. Edited by Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991.

Mahon, Maureen. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, eds.

This Bridge Called My Back:Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

———. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge Press, 1998.

DANCE WRITING AND CRITICISM Banes, Sally. Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Conner, Lynne. Spreading the Gospel of Modern Dance: Newspaper Dance Criticism in the United States 1850–1934. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

Croce, Arlene. After Images. New York: Random House, 1977.

Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures:Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Denby, Edwin. Edwin Denby: Dance Writings.

Edited by Rort Cornfield and William Mackay.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

Gottlieb, Robert. Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.

Howard, Theresa Ruth. “Op-Ed: Why We Need to Confront Bias in Dance Criticism.”

Dance Magazine, August 3, 2017. https:// www.dancemagazine.com/op-ed-we-need-toconfront-racial-and-cultural-biases-in-dancecriticism-2468342343.html/.

Jacobs, Laura. Celestial Bodies: How to look at Ballet. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Johnston, Jill. Marmalade Me. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

Levinson, André. André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties. Edited by Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991.

Siegel, Marcia. Mirrors and Scrims: The Life and Afterlife of Ballet. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.

———. The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Theodores, Diana. First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance Criticism. Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996.

Warnecke, Lauren. “One Dance Critic’s View on Choreography and Criticism.”

HuffPost, April 14/June 14, 2014. https://www. huffpost.com/entry/one-dance-critics-viewon_b_5140918/.

WRITING, INTERPRETING, INTERVIEWING, AND CRITICISM Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Random House, 1997.

Brown, Ismene. “Only the Artist Can Save the Arts Critic.” The Guardian, August 2, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/cultureprofessionals-network/culture-professionalsblog/2013/aug/02/only-artists-can-save-critics.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?

The Authority of Interpretive Communities.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

Williams, Gilda. How to Write about Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

FURTHER EXPLORATIONS ONLINE Black Dance Stories: https:// www.youtube.com/channel/ UChAdMkDQCaGWCIaBoSZirTg/videos/.

Brooklyn Academy of Music Digital Archive: http://levyarchive.bam.org/.

Brooklyn Academy of Music Hamm Archives: https://www.bam.org/about/history/bamhamm-archives/.

Contact Quarterly Rolling Edition: https://contactquarterly.com/cq/rolling-edition/ index.php/.

Dance Films Association: https://www.dancefilms.org/resources/.

Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive: https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/.

Movement Research Critical Correspondence: https://movementresearch.org/publications/ critical-correspondence/.

National Performance Network: https://npnweb.org/.

OntheBoards.tv: https://www.ontheboards.tv/.

UbuWeb: http://www.ubu.com/.

hooks, bell. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New York: Holt, 1999.

MORE WRITING BY THE STUDENT AUTHORS

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “A Critic’s Manifesto.”

New Yorker, August 28, 2012. https://www. newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-criticsmanifesto/.

Wexner Center for the Arts: Read,Watch, Listen: https://wexarts.org/explore/writingabout-performing-arts-ohio-state/.

Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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The People Behind the Project MORGAN AMONETT is a second-year student

studying classics (Ancient Greek and Latin) and mathematics. She is a research assistant with the Herodotos Project, an Ohio Stateled digital humanities endeavor seeking to establish an ethnolographic database of groups, individuals, and geographic locations mentioned in the Ancient Greek and Latin corpora litterarum. She is also a volunteer survivor advocate with the Sexual Assault Resource Network of Central Ohio (SARNCO) and a manuscript editor for the Journal of Undergraduate Research at Ohio State (JUROS). Among other things, she is interested in powerful ancient women, backpacking, and specialty coffee. Amonett is originally from Toledo, Ohio.

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From Cincinnati, Ohio, RANI BAWA is a third-year undergraduate honors student majoring in neuroscience and minoring in dance and in clinical psychology. She is the President of Project HEAL Ohio State, a nonprofit organization that raises funds to provide eating disorder treatment grants and awareness of eating disorders.

Bawa is a dancer and has been dancing for seventeen years, training in multiple styles and teaching dance. She has a passion for teaching that she discovered through dance and hopes to carry that into her work in neuroscience. She is currently working on her honors thesis and hopes to earn a PhD in neuroscience.

JACQUELEEN BORDJADZE is a fourth-year undergraduate at Ohio State, majoring in Dance and English. She has performed in works by Ann Sofie Clemmensen, Susan Van Pelt Petry, and Calder White, and her choreography has been produced in Columbus, Ohio, and Odense and Aalborg, Denmark.

She works as a consultant at Ohio State’s Writing Center and has work forthcoming from The Dollhouse Mag (Issue 3). Bordjadze is from Columbus, Ohio, and will graduate with distinction in December 2020.

DEMETRA CHIAFOS is originally from Iowa, where she grew up homeschooled. She is a member of Ohio State’s class of 2020 with a BFA in dance, with a focus in performance and choreography, and a BA in Japanese.

Following graduation from OSU, she will be attending SOAS University of London to pursue an MA in Japanese translation.

In the future, she hopes to work in Japanese translation and interpretation and as a dance researcher, writer, performer, choreographer, and/or filmmaker.

LANE CZAPLINSKI started his post as the director of performing arts at the Wexner Center for the Arts in June 2017. Prior to his move to Columbus, Ohio, he served as the artistic director of the contemporary performing arts center, On the Boards, in Seattle for fifteen years. Under his leadership, the organization commissioned and produced over eighty new multidisciplinary performance works and nurtured regional artists to make new works that garnered national funding and touring opportunities.

One of Czaplinski’s signature initiatives, OntheBoards.tv, expanded the audience for On the Board’s programming through HD-quality performance films, attracting an international subscriber base of universities and arts enthusiasts.

Professor in dance at Ohio State, KAREN ELIOT danced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the 1980s. With Daniel Roberts, she staged Cunningham MinEvents at the Wexner Center’s Leap Before You Look exhibit (2016) and the Parallel Connections concert (2017).

She is the recipient of Ohio State’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016) and the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award (2018) to oversee a student-led publication of criticism and responses to the Wexner Center’s 2019–20 Performing Arts season. Her most recent book is Albion’s Dance: The British Ballet during the Second World War (2016). She has served as a co-editor of Dance Chronicle.

LAURA GAINES is a second-year statistics

student at Ohio State with a minor in dance.

Gaines has danced for seventeen years and is a cofounder and executive board member of Momentum, an on-campus contemporary ballet club. Outside of the dance world, she works at the Ohio State Honors and Scholars Center, is director of scholarship in her sorority, Phi Sigma Rho, and loves to rock climb, paint, and watch movies in her free time.

SAM GIUSTO is a second-year student at

Ohio State, studying zoology with a minor in Korean. In addition to her studies and work with the Wexner Center, she participates in the Women’s Glee Club at Ohio State, where she enjoys singing alongside her fellow women. She hopes her work with the Wexner Center for the Arts will spread a resonant message for readers.

KAIYA GORDON (tw: @ayobaio) is a poet and

essayist from the San Francisco Peninsula.

Currently, they are working on a multimodal manuscript considering archival representations of trans people and movements, pursuing a PhD in Feminist Studies, and learning how to develop networks of care and safety divested from state violence. Gordon’s work has been published by poets.org, Cosmonauts Avenue, Split Lip Magazine, Empty Mirror, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and others. Their favorite karaoke song is “Basket Case” by Green Day. LAVINIA HUANG was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a first generation Chinese-American immigrant, she attended Whitney Young Magnet High School, where she first discovered a passion for dance. She joined her school’s pre-professional performance dance company, Guys and Dolls, at the beginning of her sophomore year.

Lavinia is currently a second-year honors student at Ohio State studying psychology with a minor in dance. She is part of Stylez Dance group, which performs hip hop at events throughout campus.

EMILY KILROY is a fourth-year student in Ohio State’s Department of Dance. She is also pursuing a BA in arts management and a minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research and interests circulate around feminist theory, the blending of performance genres, choreographic inquiries, and movement exploration. As a performer, Kilroy has performed works by Kirven Douthit-Boyd, Edward Taketa, Ann Sofie Clemmensen, David Covey, André M. Zachary, and many more. Her choreographic works have been produced by the Department of Dance in several concerts, and she has participated in the Dance Denmark study abroad performance program. Kilroy was born and raised in Boston.

ALANA RYDER joined the education de-

partment at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016. She oversees the center’s annual endowed lectures and serves as a liaison with faculty and university students. Alana received her BA in the history of art from the University of California, Berkeley; MA in history from SUNY Buffalo State; and MBA from Fisher College at Ohio State.

Prior to the Wex, Alana held positions at the Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. She has curated exhibitions on Charles E. Burchfield and John Cage and presented on academic museums at conferences in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Tokyo.

Originally from Texas, MICHELLE SIPES is a choreographer, educator, and arts administrator. She will graduate in 2020 with an MFA in dance from Ohio State University and also holds a BFA in dance from Belhaven University where she was awarded merit for “Great Artistic Achievement.”

Sipes performed, taught, and choreographed for five seasons as a company member with Inlet Dance Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio.

During her time at Ohio State, Sipes also has worked as a grant writer at the Wexner Center for the Arts and was an artist-in-residence for two Wex education programs: Pages and WorldView.

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Afterword

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UPON RECEIVING THE PRESTIGIOUS Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award for 2018, Dr. Karen Eliot set in motion an exciting new collaboration between the Department of Dance and the Wexner Center for the Arts. As a professor in the department, teaching both dance history and criticism as well as studio courses, Eliot had worked to deepen students’ critical thinking skills through writing and analysis of dance. She developed this project with Wexner Center partner, Alana Ryder, Manager, Public and University Programs, as an opportunity for students to hone their research and writing in a professional setting.

The collaboration that became the Writing about the Performing Arts at Ohio State project continues a decades-old connection between the Wex and Ohio State Dance. This resulting publication results from three semesters of student-generated interviews with artists, program notes, previews, reviews of performances, and critical essays, as well as countless edits from Eliot and Ryder. I’d like to thank Wexner Center Director Johanna Burton, Wexner Center Director of Performing Arts Lane Czaplinski, and staff Ashley Stanton and Adam Eliott for their support of this project.

As an artist-teacher, I applaud education that connects the classroom with the professional field, that gives students opportunities to see their learning applied in “real-life.” This professionalization of the curriculum prepares students for a range of careers in dance, the arts, and the wider culture. As you enjoy this beautiful compendium, join me in celebrating the work of our students and their inspiring mentors.

SUSAN HADLEY CHAIR AND PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF DANCE APRIL 30, 2020

Acknowledgments RISK IS A RELATIVE TERM would not be complete

without a final note of gratitude to Deborah and Ronald Ratner, benefactors of the teaching award that provided the foundation of support for this publication.

Their support helped me to refine my interest in teaching students to write about the arts and gave the students an incentive to think creatively about how they might respond to the challenges of writing about contemporary performance. All those involved in the project join in my thanks to the Ratners and also in my deep appreciation for the students who participated in the project and so in the creation of this book.

KAREN ELIOT PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF DANCE JULY 22, 2020 101

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

SPONSORS

Gary R. Heminger, Chair Abigail S. Wexner, Vice Chair

RONALD AND DEBORAH RATNER DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AWARD

Cheryl L. Krueger Brent R. Porteus Erin P. Hoeflinger Alex R. Fischer Hiroyuki Fujita Alan A. Stockmeister John W. Zeiger Elizabeth P. Kessler Lewis Von Thaer Jeff M.S. Kaplan Michael Kiggin Anand Shah James D. Klingbeil

MADE POSSIBLE BY:

WEXNER CENTER FOUNDATION BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Leslie H. Wexner, Chair Bill Lambert, President t r u st e es

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY

JENI’S SPLENDID ICE CREAMS

KAUFMAN DEVELOPMENT

CARDINAL HEALTH FOUNDATION

NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK

ARTS MIDWEST TOURING FUND

JOHNSTONE FUND FOR NEW MUSIC

David M. Aronowitz Lisa M. Barton Jeni Britton Bauer Shelley Bird Johanna Burton Paige Crane Brenda J. Drake Adam R. Flatto Russell Gertmenian Michael Glimcher Brett Kaufman Elizabeth P. Kessler C. Robert Kidder Nancy Kramer Mark D. Kvamme Ronald A. Pizzuti Pete Scantland Joyce Shenk Alex Shumate Abigail S. Wexner Sue Zazon ex officio

Ann Hamilton Bruce A. McPheron Gretchen Ritter Bruce A. Soll, Treasurer Mark E. Vannatta, Secretary (As of July 24, 2020)

WRITING ABOUT THE PERFORMING ARTS AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY AND WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS 2019–2020