Jen 5/4/08

Please share any thoughts/questions for Jen here. This is for people that attended the 5/4 SWAP session. Please include your name when posting any comments.

8:12 PM - 7 Comments 

many thoughts over the course of this past week. will try to articulate. i might jump around a bit, but i hope a connectivity will become visible. 

because i am dancing this piece, in some ways writing this stuff down is to help aid my own understanding. rather than just journaling on my own, i believe in keeping things public b/c i think that more minds working to navigate through these questions can only be a positive thing. i do hope that there will be relevance for jen and others too.

i'm possibly going to get a bit more detailed and personal than i normally try to be within most feedback structures, b/c i know jen, i know her work, there is a closeness that cannot be denied so i'm not going to try to skirt around it. 

as we know/have talked about at various times, jen's mom is like a black belt in cecchetti and runs a civic ballet company in sarasota - so jen's history is rooted in that. i've been thinking about that history in relation to our discussion about the viewer's imagination and capacity to 'fill in the blanks' (ie: the curtain comes down, james is still moving/whistling - what happens next? makoto: "if you lift the curtain, he'd still be there...he could go on forever"). Classical ballets ask us to stretch our imagination in many ways. jen and i have talked a lot about the queering of gender roles that often happens in ballet performance: a male dancer plays the ugly stepsister or old hag, a female dancer can play an adolescent boy and the audience is willing to go there b/c the whole thing (costumes, set, etc) is so extravagant and phantasmatic. but if you step back and look at it bare bones w/o the magic imagination goggles - you can see the absurdity of it, the spectacle and drag of it. i think that TOMS 103 is about that same kind of sifting down. in fact all of jen's dances are bare bones - they are precisely what she has put in front of us. her choices are often subtle, but exact. so if it appears crude...she has made it to be crude, absurd...then it is absurd, and so on.

at some point during the feedback it was said that i (or my 'character') "...could be a little boy". but as i said before, jen's dances have less to do with "character" per se and more to do with what is actually in front of us. so what does (or could) it mean to know that i am clearly not a little boy dancing this part, but an adult and a woman? 

now this is where i may be getting into some risky territory, 
b/c like peggy phalan says in "mourning sex": 

"i cannot write 'my body' anymore than you can read yours". 

so i will pose more questions:

the resetting of this dance...from james to me. james and i are both somewhat androgynous, but i think that clearly he is a man dancing this solo and i am a woman dancing this solo...so how does this shift in gender read/translate? again, jen is specific - so it's no coincidence that james and i both have this androgyny thing going. jen made it clear during the feedback session that TOMS 103 is about a kind of queering of gender for her and has been from the very beginning. in some ways i think that by resetting this dance on me, she is now even trying to queer her original idea.if so, then the question that arises for me is: do we need to see it in it's original form before we can flip it on it's head? do we need a context before we can queer it or can this new version exist alone and still resonate in a similar way? what, if anything, would need to change if this version was to be autonomous? 

i'm now remembering ashley's comment about costume - "should it change?" later jen expressed to me a resistance to that, b/c to her - keeping it exactly the same re-queers her idea. but again, what about an audience that is detached from/has no memory of that original? 

i'm reminded...

a few years ago ashley reset a solo called "fuzzy pickles". first she made the solo for herself, then reset it on siovhon holloway and then again on jeffery bullock. much of the movement vocabulary was a direct result of ashley wearing this certain dress, but the dress didn't fit siovhon so a new dress was found and it worked. then with jeffery she tried it with the dress again, but it didn't read. this version was never formally performed, so another costume choice was never fully investigated/found, but i wonder if the dance would have been more like it's original with a different costume for jeffery. maybe it's like the movement vocabulary is learned with the dress on and then when something else takes it's place the dress is more visible b/c of it's absence. i wonder if the same could be true for TOMS 103.

all for now.
hope that wasn't too excruciating. 
danielle

Posted by Danielle on Friday, May 09, 2008 at 1:55 PM 

ashley here. 

i am painting a cabinet right now. so i can't respond to all the questions. but i can talk about some things briefly. 

as with jeffery it didn't work for him to be in drag. so i found him the "male version" of the dress i wore. in that case it was a suit the same color/period as the dress. that worked. i thought. 

in this case it's a little different because there is no "male" or "female" version of overalls. just a fundamental difference in the way the body might appear in those overalls. that is why instead of talking about gender i think we end up talking about size and stature within the outfit. the outfit is essentially non-gendered, only the person within it is. does that make sense? 

and jenny. i think it does re-queer your idea to have danielle do it. she is "differently androgynous" than jamie. surely. but when it is "re-queered" it becomes something more than just gender or just irony or just whatever buzz word we can place here. 
i believe whole heartedly that the piece just means more than that. and that the idea of "queering something" is more about having a flexible interpretation/model/way of doing than it is about whether a boy dresses up as a girl or danielle looks like a boy. and i think to want to "re-queer" your idea means to let go of the gender subtext for now and look at what you do have. 
i don't want to evaluate further because i'll just get into my own head and what i think those "subtexts" might be 

maybe if we focus on some other key words of what jenny is trying to identify by "queering" we'll get out of this kind of gender hole we are finding ourselves in. 

make sense? 
i hope. 

back to the cabinet.....

Posted by map dance collective on Friday, May 09, 2008 at 5:25 PM 

yes! all of that makes perfect sense. and i agree with all of it. you've said the things that i was feeling in my gut, but couldn't articulate b/c we haven't just been discussing "the body" in an abstract way - we've been discussing My body in an abstract way, which has totally been freaking me out.

and i should also clarify that when i (and i think it's safe to include jen in this too) talk about "queering" -
i'm using the word in a theoretical sense - much like what ashley started to touch upon.

"queerness" in this sense should not necessarily be attributed to gender and sexuality alone. it's more about a "between-ness" i think. it can't be pinned down successfully with the vocabulary of language that we have to work with. we certainly can't talk about it using binaries. if we try to talk about "queerness" in a fixed way... we have already lost it. ashley's use of the word "flexibility" maybe helps. so does the word "resistance" i think.

it especially gets sticky when identity gets thrown into the mix, b/c everyone in that room who watched and discussed jen's dance knew that both jen and i identify with queer sexuality and the glbt community. so, once we started using the word "queer" in a theoretical sense to discuss jen's dance, the conversation got caught in gender and sexuality and didn't really dive into what jen was really trying to ask us, which is more about the "re-queering" of her original idea (again, in the theoretical sense).

some texts that i have read that use, or (better yet) perform queer theory include:

"passing" by nella larsen

"mourning sex" by peggy phalan

"the melancholy of anatomy" by shelley jackson

"oranges are not the only fruit" by jeanette winterson

and while these texts certainly include ideas imbedded in both gender and sexuality, it is the Form in which this subject matter is approached (rather than the content itself) that makes these writings "queer".

i think that the same can be said of TOMS 103.

danielle

Posted by Danielle on Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 4:51 AM 

This is Jen McGinn:

For me, TOMS 103 is about displacement and loneliness. Rather than showing this in an emotionally dramatic way, I made the “character” (for lack of a better word) flat. The “character” doesn’t evolve throughout the course of the dance or allude to anything before or after. It is up to the audience to put the “character” into whatever context they want and to make up whatever they want about him/her. I created this one dimensionality through repetition of sound and movement/actions.

The use of the lipstick and overalls directly relates to the ideas of displacement and loneliness. So does the 2:30 min of stillness at the beginning. These themes are imbedded in my choices regardless of what gender the “character” is. I do realize that lipstick is a gendered signifier however. For me the use of lipstick is more in question than the costume. I still like the juxtaposition between the overalls and lipstick that I believe exists whether it’s a man or woman, but I wonder if the displacement is not as visible. I think there were questions when Jamie did it not only about who this person was, but also where he fit in? Is this as evident with Danielle? That is the question I am debating with the re-staging.

Thanks for all thoughts, they are greatly appreciated.

Posted by map dance collective on Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 1:39 PM 

some time and space has allowed more clarity for me. i think that it's important for me to say that TOMS 103 has many layers - displacement and loneliness, queer theory, and Yes queerness of Gender and Sexuality. none of these layers has any more weight or importance than any other. they all exist and inform each other. the initial way that jen constructed TOMS 103 was rooted in queerness... queering in its many un-namable forms is inherent to this work and will be visible no matter what. it would be a different dance without it. and i want to reiterate that while queer theory does encompass more than gender and sexuality alone, the inception of queer theory began with gender and sexuality and so this history cannot be negated. for jen to re-queer this dance could mean that other subtexts will be explored/made visible, but we also have to be careful not to make this an evaluative idea. meaning that to re-queer could never mean to detach from gender and sexuality entirely, and also i'm now afraid that we border on the false idea that to move away from gender and sexuality implies some type of evolution in jen's dance making. this thinking is potentially dangerous. had to bring it up.

danielle

Posted by map dance collective on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 5:37 PM 

danielle. i totally agree that acknowledging those roots is clear and important and it would be dangerous to say "it's not about gender" but i find that after acknowledging those roots it's equally dangerous not to be super upfront that queer theory in this case is being applied and considered pretty liberally. i feel like i can say that because i know jenny and all of us have sort of read the same books and are on the same page. so i find it interesting...how do we balance the conversation to acknowledge the context but also to accurately and completely represent what is actually happening during the now?? 

did funstival audience/feedback/etc reveal anything else??

Posted by map dance collective on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 12:53 PM 

hey ash. yes, i think that we just had to publicly acknowledge the many aspects as you said. in reading our comments, i started to get a bit worried b/c we can all talk so candidly with one another and pretty much know that we're all on the same page. since this is a public forum that is (hopefully) reaching a community outside of ourselves - i felt we had to address these issues. it is a difficult thing to wrap our minds and bodies around (largely b/c we don't have a language that suits it). judith butler talks about this. found this on wikapedia:


"Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics, and having no stake in its own ideology, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. However, it is in no position to imagine itself outside the circuit of problems energized by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations attract, queer allows those criticisms to shape its - for now unimaginable – future directions. "The term," writes Butler, "will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized." The mobilization of queer foregrounds the conditions of political representation, its intentions and effects, its resistance to and recovery by the existing networks of power."

the funstival went well i think. people seemed interested/wanted to talk more about the piece for sure. mostly everyone felt that they wanted to see it in a different setting - we were essentially in a cabaret ..style.. nightclub/bar. the lighting options were a little funky, etc. we've been asked to show it again at Studio Series on May 31st. i think that will be a good time where we can all revisit these questions and dive back into a dialog. maybe we can get a video and post it so you can see it.

miss and love you.
danielle

Posted by Danielle on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 3:45 PM