If we are to honestly appraise the people’s history (those we refer to when we shout “power to the people!”), we must acknowledge the unceasing, if ever-evolving, presence of violence. A sense of scale inspired by looking up into the cavernous arches of St. John the Divine showed me the grandiosity of the human capacity for destruction, each stone in the vaulted ceiling became a way we had harmed ourselves along the way. This meditation on grief is for those marginalized people who wake daily to see themselves being written out of history, often in their own blood.
Somehow the dance continues. The youth of every generation fights, for a time, to have the rights we know we each deserve; that we must try to provide for ourselves. Art, along with healthcare for people of all genders, are two of those rights. It is hard to speak to power, there is still much to lose, but young people continue… out of naiveté or the brazen courage old age often destroys. Aging past my own fearlessness, I am now amazed by young creatives’ ability to take and make space for their truths.
St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side is a cathedral, not a church. It wings expansively over allotted ground. Nestled behind its main sanctuary are so many chapels dedicated to Saints, they seem to extend exponentially. “Angel Visits,” the inaugural performance of the Body Artifacts dance production company, took place in St. Martin’s chapel, which was lit both reverently and irreverently with the blue-pink of “bisexual lighting.” It was like finding an opal in the dripping echoing depths of a cave. The performance came in four pieces, each meditating on the afterlives of belief and trauma in their own ways: two prior to the intermission, referred to here as the worship dances, and two after: the communion dances.
The first of the worship dances was “Joan’s After,” by and starring Chloe Sonnet Brown, the show’s producer. Joan of Arc is said to have once prayed in a chapel dedicated to St. Martin and this piece offered a reconsideration of her (or his or their) story: of a much maligned but unshakable faith in God’s Love. Joan and God (Alicia Steeves) danced in tandem, voyaging from determination through torture to ecstacy. Layers of sheer white fabric floated in the cold air, with Joan’s movement weighted by added armor. What is queerness, the dance asked, but a refusal to be damned out of the right to worship? What if they had let Joan believe, the dance asks.
The next piece, “Yoke” by Morgan Gregory and dancers*, is rooted in histories of Black sonic and somatic faith traditions. They too wore sheer white fabric but theirs was shredded into long strips, pointing to both the fraying destruction of systemic racism and the continuous rituals of resistance and resilience. About the piece’s title, “Yoke,” Gregory spoke of something her mother and grandmother would say to her: “May your yoke be easy and your burden light,” a blessing that carries within it the complex history of Black faith. Gregory centered the evocative binary of “excess/lack,” speaking of yoke’s phonetic twin, yolk, as “the core of sustenance, that which is both alive and unalive.” In this formulation worship is a form of sustenance that both gives life and takes life away.
Gregory was inspired by how “gospel and hip hop (being a descendant of gospel) intertwine in Black spaces.” The “excess/lack” binary again came into play: “Through physical and vocal taboos, [the dance] asks how we can forge the appearance of excess within social structures of continuous lack.” The dancers’ movements were unyielding, rhythmic and confronting. It seemed to speak about the efforts of faith under duress, a meditation on the Afrofuturist “position and trajectory.” In the dance’s last moments, the “rapper/preacher” character approached audience members to offer something pinched between their fingers; no one moved to take the offering, they seemed to be holding their breath. The dancer cackled and exited, leaving the audience humbled and awed.
While “Yolk” was certainly about worship, in which an individual strives to translate their beliefs into a shared choreography, the last two dances had something to say about communion, where a group unanimously rejects anything beyond its own sanctity. Although, truthfully, I think “Yolk” did both, inviting the audience into the legacy of Black world-building, while affirming Black autonomy. I use communion to partake in the queering of religious austerity these last two dances celebrated. Here it will mean a social celebration of a group’s own joys and pains, as opposed to a ritual remembrance of divine sacrifice.
“Do You Still Believe,” by Noel Olson and dancers**, gave us a liminal queer clown burlesque rave. The dance blurb told of another binary tension at play: the “liminal space between the club and the church: Saturday night into Sunday morning.” The dancers wore red, black, and white and took the stage to tell us their stories: a charismatic transmasc emcee, a forlorn ballerina, star-crossed lovers, an athletic jester. Perhaps we were in Purgatory (the great queer club or the mythological place) and these fine, if undead, players had come to show us, not what they worship, but the communion of a shared excommunication.
One would think it impossible to dance “The Rite of Spring” by Stravinsky in a new way, it has been choreographed many times and particularly well, for instance, by Pina Baush. “Lord Give Me Gills So I May Weather The Storm” by Lulu Munteanu and dancers*** proved me wrong. They deployed the score to show the “fear, strength and humanity“ of contemporary Trans identity. Members of the very exciting trans-led theater troupe Gesture Theater played three suited power-goons, who bring (back?) to life seven Queer titans only to subject them to punishments. One is selected, the beautiful and sad-eyed Lluca Huatuco, as bride for the king of the goons. When she is killed, the other titans, one by one, choose to die.
Worship (striving) and communion (releasing) together show us where radical thought finds itself at this time: somewhere in between war for the moral good and an investment in utopian separatism. The Divine, both as a physical structure or institution and as a personal construction, is something to be wrestled with in this way for marginalized people. In the afterlife of brutalization do we fight to turn the Big Eye of God or History or Belief our way, to make it see the way we do, or do we find a way to live in the afterworld? These dances show us there is never just one way to answer a divine question.
Full Program Details:
* “Yoke” by Morgan Gregory
Dancers: Arnel Wilson, Macaelina Carter, Rachel Yoo, Charrie Burke, Julienne Buenaventura
** “Do You Still Believe” by Noel Olson
Dancers: Jules Assue, Ava Eriksen-Oertle, Nyah Malon, Nic Potes, Isa Segall
*** “Lord Give Me Gills So I May Weather The Storm” by Lulu Munteanu
Dancers: Erika Michelle Davis, Theo Dulco, Matt Gal, Sienna Hamilton-Thibert, Lluca Huatuco, Katie Lehoty, Noel Olson, Max Prehn, Lou Sydel
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