Some performances can bring back the dead. Through references and recordings, through revivals and reenactments, they channel the spirit of the artists and choreography they cite and call upon the stage. Though the ontological nature of performance is rooted in its disappearance – once the dance is over, we no longer have access to the bodies that sway or stir, the voices that cry out or sing – some performances collapse and reconstruct time. They have the capacity to create, even if just for a moment, contact between the living and the dead, between those who came before us and those who will come after us.
Queerness is also a practice of conjuring. It summons new embodiments, ones we did not even know were possible, ones we are only beginning to articulate. Pioneers Go East Collective, an ensemble of LGBTQ interdisciplinary artists and dance makers, develop works that interrogate conventions of gendered identity, that bring to life and advocate for liberation from those conventions. As a site of cultural resistance, dance exists as a mobilizing force for marginalized subjects; by practicing and experimenting with various forms of embodiment on the stage, Pioneers Go East Collective knows it is not a singular effort but one that relies on an accumulation of bodies coming together across time and space. In Electric Blue, Allen Ginsberg’s queer legacy is resurrected on stage, his words echoing across generations, signaling how liberation movements are literal movements that both call towards and rely on our ancestors.
When we enter La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, Electric Blue has already begun. Three artists settle on the stage: ALEXA GRÆ hums and croons on his knees in a wooden light box, Joey Kipp crawls forward in black leather pants, rolling around Daniel Diaz, who recites excerpts of Ginsberg’s poetry to us as we take our seats. There is visible harmony between the three bodies. The utterances bind them together, the movement of one responding to the vocalizations of the other. Diaz delivers Ginsberg’s poetry over the microphone, and Kipp moves alongside him, deepening his lunges, and extending his arms outwards. Together, the performers create a shared center where Ginsberg comes back to life if only for a night, this time, just for us.
I lay in bed that night many loves beating in my heart
sleepless hearing songs of generations electric returning intelligent memory
to my frame, and so went to dwell again in my heart
and worship the Lovers there, love’s teachers, youths and poets who live forever.
A spotlight focuses on Diaz who walks up a set of stairs and stands on the banister of the balcony as he delivers “New Democracy Wish List.” the open letter Ginsberg sent to President Clinton, and “Hum Bomb!”, a sound poem by Ginsberg written over twenty years from 1971 until 1991. Though these texts serve as historical records, though they are always informed by the social and cultural moment, when we hear them read out loud by Diaz, their interpretation is altered: their original meaning is reshaped. It is impossible not to interpret Ginsberg’s texts during this performance. Director of Pioneers Go East Collective Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte encourages it. There are several ‘movements’ involved in Electric Blue, one including Lo Forte’s own dramatization of the transcripts and recordings of Ginsberg’s testimony from The Trial of the Chicago 7.
While Ginsberg’s poetry is situated within the historical context of the Vietnam War and the protest movements of the 1960s, Diaz’s recitation of “Hum Bomb!” punctures the sound poem’s historic membrane and brings us firmly into the present day. Diaz hangs off the side of the stage and repeats, “Still there building a bomb! Whydja bomb? We didn’t wanna bomb! Whydja bomb? They thought they hadda bomb!” over 60 times. Through repetition, Diaz adjusts our phenomenological sense of history. The present audience isn’t thinking of the bombs that Ginsberg was writing about but instead, the ones dropping now, perhaps in Gaza. The ones that detonate as we sit in this theatre. Interweaving his own writing with Ginsberg’s, Electric Blue demonstrates how these historical moments can also exist as contemporary frameworks of resistance and resilience.
Kipp changes into neon green sneakers, and moves into lunging poses as GRÆ operatically performs another Ginsberg poem, “A Supermarket in California.” Kipp’s feet are planted together as he jumps up and down, his body spasms, he walks into the wooden light box once again and outlines the roof of it with the palms of his hands. GRÆ moves to the back of the stage and faces a light that slowly turns to face us – the audience spectacularly illuminated. The person seated next to me shades their eyes, but I stare directly at it. I know I am implicated in this performance, in a collective effort at peace-keeping. Kipp’s body, in moving, casts shadows on the audience; he moves through a deconstructed vogue score which picks up in speed. As his breath becomes syncopated, his movements intensify, some invisible force that seems to come from within.
Layers of signification, the interplay of past and present, and their intertextual resonances bridge Pioneers Go East Collective’s Electric Blue and Arthur Avilés’ Naked Vanguard. The choreographic palimpsest is the connective tissue between these pieces. In Naked Vanguard, another conjuring occurs in the thirty-five-year archive of choreographer and director Avilés’ work restored and resurrected for us.
Avilés’ choreography aims to reconfigure historic works so that they speak, as he tells us, “a bit more in the direction of a heritage I find so dear to me – queer and Nuyorican.” In this archive in motion, he accomplishes that. There is power in this reclamation, as he writes himself into the dance history that has left out bodies and movements like his. Both “Untitled #5A After Ted Shawn AKA Dansé Mexicaine & Jamaïquaine Américaine” and “From the End, Let’s Begin” embody the ephemeral contributions of bodies outside of the canon, for whom so much recognition and credit is deserved. A Microsoft Word document scrolls behind the performances, laying text onto moving bodies. Throughout Naked Vanguard, narration guides us, whether it is through scrolling text on a screen or directly from Avilés himself. What might it mean to perform your own archive? To lend your own voice to the chronicling and documenting of your work? For Avilés, it is a necessary project of asserting, preserving, and celebrating his racial and sexual identity in a world that has historically denied and erased his lived experiences. “You’ll hear our voices, and you’ll see us dance!” he proclaims.
We are introduced first to Avilés’ “Puerto Rican ghetto matriarch lesbian warrior-ess” Maéva, adorned in a hot pink dress, stilettos, and a rhinestone tiara. While delivering an impassioned monologue in Spanglish, he undresses, taking off the character of Maéva, and announces, “My name is Arthur Avilés.” Maéva is left as a pile of clothes beside him, always ready to be put on again and come back to life. Aviles says, “Right now she lives right here.” We know she will emerge again. While drag and nudity are the choreographic underpinnings of this piece (the program tells us: “costume by Mother Nature”), objects, clothes, film clips, vocalizations, and texts perform as the other traces and revisions of Aviles’ work.
In “From the End, Let’s Begin,” a tribute to his first dance teacher, Jean Churchill, Avilés wraps himself in a plaid kilt, which we see on the cover of the 1988 Edinburgh Fringe festival program projected behind him. He narrates the story of Churchill vouching for him to get his first passport, and taking him to the festival; this piece, he informs us, is a collage of elements from her works. He shakes, points at us, drops his kilt, and begins to make animalistic sounds – dancing, lunging, sticking his tongue out. He uncovers a mop at the head of the stage and begins to wipe the stage floor in orgasmic joy, shouting “Oh!”. Nina Simone’s “Consummation” begins to play. And now we are one / let my soul rest in peace / at last it is done. Continuing to twirl in and around the kilt, Avilés undresses and then wraps himself up once again in the fabric, rolling out of it with a final existential scream. This tribute, this memorial piece, is a part of the archive of Avilés life, too.
In “Morning Dance” (2001), Hunter Sturgis dances nude in front of a film screen, while a 16mm clip of Avilés exacting nearly identical moves plays behind him. Morning light pours in from tall multi-paned windows as Avilés performs movements from the four phases and four exercises of the Swift/Flow technique he taught us at the start of the piece. We are to recognize the continuous movements of the wave and the seaweed (“a swirl through our backs, a twist”), as he moves through four phrases (cylinder, soft response, just beyond, and as far as possible). The layering of Sturgis over Avilés body – dancing over what has already been danced – makes the archive a doing, a movement, rather than a mere preservation of the past. This process of recording and (re)tracing steps unearths new interpretations, revealing and recovering layers of emotional and narrative meaning. While one of these performances can exist as an artifact in the traditional archive, the other is fleeting, only lasting as long as the performance itself. Sturgis’ transient dancing body mapped over the permanent and enduring recording of Avilés shows that choreographic memory transcends – for Avilés, it is both improvisational and durational.
Naked Vanguard ends
with a ritual film, an adaptation of an earlier Avilés piece from 1996, “A Jamaican Batty Bwoy in America.” A light appears on an empty chair in the left corner of the stage and a cellist takes a seat. He plays some initial notes, which eventually become a classical rendition of a Bob Marley song. A new dancer emerges – Nikolai McKenzie’s– moving, naked, in waves to the music. He begins in one direction but is then pulled towards another by an invisible internal force. McKenzie never stops moving and beads of sweat form on his body and his breath intensifies. Then, the light shuts off. We lose sight of him but we know he is still there dancing.
In both Pioneers Go East Collective’s Electric Blue and Arthur Avilés’ Naked Vanguard, we find ourselves reaching backward to move forward. The choreographic palimpsest extends beyond the material archive and to the ephemeral nature of dance and performance – the words of Ginsberg, the choreography of Churchill, drag personas, film clips, and scrolling documents. These performances pay reverence and tribute to all who came and danced before us.
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