Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine, Fall 2008
I got a recessive jolt watching Really Queer Dances with Harps, Neil Greenberg’s intelligent, distanced new work that premiered this spring at Dance Theater Workshop. As a boy, not only was I cursed with a first name ripe for playground mutilation; I had, to quote my sister’s boyfriend at the time, a “loose walk, a result of lordosis, or curvature of the spine. It was a family trait that on my brothers manifested itself in a kind of swagger (what we called “pimping” back then), but though I tried to emulate them no amount of macho mimicry could disguise, or deter my spinal column’s descent into a suspicious undulation. Cue derision and taunts: my bobbing buttocks conveyed an androgyny anathema to the cult of hyper-masculinity in my family and our urban neighborhood. Later, subsequent attempts to straighten the spine through yoga and years of Alexander Technique did little, if anything to temper my walk, or my self-consciousness.
Maybe that “walk” telegraphed my eventual coming of age as a gay man—sometimes the body knows more than the brain, one of many intriguing conceits explored in Really Queer Dances: are butch/feminine traits learned, or imposed by nature? Who arbitrates these notions of gender comportment? Why are people threatened at the sight of a limp male wrist, or a woman whose legs fail to cross in a lady-like manner?
Really Queer Dances makes no bones about where its heart lies. From the moment Zeena Parkins and her fellow musicians enter dressed in flowing 1920’s champagne-colored sheaths, expectations of male/feminine roles get shattered. Parkins’ score for harp begins beautifully, familiarly, until it shifts, producing meatier sounds resembling buzzing radiators, dissonant pianos or an eerie Theremin. Exploiting the instrument’s percussive possibilities, the composer confounds our aural expectations.
Parkins’ score is the perfect metaphor for Greenberg’s aspirations. The movement beguiles, as jumps splay into kicks and duos, trios and quartets spill from the wings, all clad in pajama–like rehearsal clothes. Greenberg’s dancers seem bent on fracturing ballet moves—arms and turns get skewered, runs lose their dancerly prettiness, making the viewer wonder if the mandate were to make movement ugly. But no, the ultimate effect is akin to children learning to walk, as Greenberg infuses the dance with those exultant gestures of spontaneity we wear before training and societal strictures hamstring and inhibit. Early on, the sight of the company’s women spaced across DTW’s stage going about internal, intimate investigations held us rapt. I was particularly entranced by the sight of one dancer who ran upstage, repeatedly crashing against the back wall as if attempting to shatter an era’s worth of repressed sensibilities.
In program notes, Greenberg discussed the process that brought about his often quirky, mostly sublime patterns of movement. Weary of imposing his own way of moving onto his company of dancers, Greenberg culled fresh inspiration from the dancers by taping their improvisations. But this choreographer’s signatures remain, from the inimitably eloquent arm extensions to the delineation of onstage vs. offstage: Greenberg’s dancers’ tend to drop the movement like a mask as they exit, a Brechtian tact that encouraged us to watch with a more clinical eye.
The theme of gender bifurcation gets spoken throughout, though to more pointed effect on the bodies of the male ensemble, a gender-fuck telegraphed by the bright red flower each wears in his hair (so do the women). When the stunning Nicholas Dunn entered in a fey run—wrists flapping, legs kicking like a sequined chicken—the audience laughed, perhaps in recognition of their long-ago roles as either a playground heckler or one of their victims, a poor unfortunate who for a fleeting moment forgot the rules of masculine containment (guilty). There was a lovely duet for two men, all low-lunged legs and thrust buttocks that weaved provocatively. Alas, the flip side, when women comported themselves like men, made less of an impression. Perhaps it’s because women seem less subject to that type of scrutiny, or that our society is more strenuously conditioned to recognize (and deplore) the sight of men wearing female moves.
Would that Really Queer Dances made its case as strongly as what preceded it. The evening opened with 2006’s Quartet with Three Gay Men, an 11-minute piece I first saw as a prelude to the revival of Greenberg’s landmark Not-About-AIDS-Dance at DTW a few seasons back. The setting feels like a clandestine bar or a back room of the mind, and it’s as accurate a distillation of gay male poise as any I’ve seen.
Dressed in jeans and clinging floral shirts (the costumes are by David Quinn), each dancer enters, extending an arm as a single foot begins pulsing to communicate a louche state of waiting before the bodies softened into luxurious cat-like movement. Elegantly controlled spins dissolved into addled, trance-infused balances. A series of passed gestures resembling the Jerk conveyed a tribal, insular world. In Greenberg’s coded dance, the strength of the posing is undeniable, but so are the subtle hints of fey as Greenberg and his dancers show the beauty of a curling wrist or an elegant, imploring, diva-ish arm. These are men free to be themselves, glorious birds of paradise no longer hamstring by a judgmental society
But their freedom comes at a cost. These men look neither at us or, notably, especially each other, and we sense the loneliness behind the cool facades. They’ve found their release, but it’s a victory devoid of harmony, or happiness; the wall is up, negating the possibility of seduction or romance. As the dancer’s arms caress their bodies and the air around them, they unfurl an essence of mystery that seems indivisible from hiding. These are men wrapped in secrets of the well-practiced sort they’ve honed since boyhood; come morning they’ll don another cloak, one suitable for the country club, the corporate boardroom or the playing fields society constructs to test one’s manly mettle. In our country’s current climate of moral persecution where all difference—sexual, racial, cultural—is suspect, can you blame them?
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Dance by Neil Greenberg/Dance Theater Workshop, New York, June 11-21, 2008
Quartet with Three Gay Men (2006)
Really Queer Dances with Harps (Premiere)
Lighting and Production Design: Michael Stiller
Costumes: David Quinn
Music: Zeena Parkins (with Ru Paul for Quartet with Three Gay Men).
With: Greenberg, Luke Miller, Antonio Ramos, Colin Stilwell, Ellen Barnaby, Nicholas Duran, Johnni Durango, Christine Elmo, Paige Martin.