Deniz, on the phone, lets off a groan hidden in a giggle: “I just need some people to say ‘I don’t know.'” “At least begin with ‘Not sure but maybe…’,” I add. In the midst of an inflation of digits, words, unknowns, cases, exceptions, possibilities, and conspiracy theories, we both feel that this is a cognitive crisis more than anything. Yet there is perhaps one silver lining to this problem of knowing: Everything that existed previously before the planetary pause has now a different dimension, space, and uncriteria to be contemplated. Other kinds of counting and reading have become possible, if you can get over a rushed nostalgia, that is.
During the third week of February, when “virus” still had the distance of a metaphor for my part of the world, I was to facilitate a workshop for dance and ballet students on undoing and reconstructing the dance history. I was particularly seeking a way for us to tell multiple stories for dance through the cracks in its unproblematically institutionalized, unsurprisingly Eurocentric, appropriating, and progressivist narrative; trying to fill the gigantic gaps across, say, louis quatorze, dalcroze-delsarte, petipa-fokine-nijinsky, duncan-fuller-denis, graham-lemon-cunningham, rainer-paxton-brown, laban-wigman-jooss-bausch, atdk-vandekeybus, forsythe-mcgregor, bel-le roy… which is, the entire world? I don’t want to sound smug, it has been a challenge for me too to articulate what makes a dance theatrical or concert dance, what kinds of choreographic practices are considered critical-conceptual-artistic-experimental enough, and what my criteria and terms are for locating any dance that is not these. I use shorthands but I always feel their thorns and dents.
That same week I saw Queen Blood by Ousmane Baba Sy a.k.a. Babson and Paradox-Sal crew and it touched on all these sore points in my stretches to get another way to think about dance history: How they begin with an open, improvisational preamble and formalize gradually. How the choreographic structure allows us to familiarize the house vocabulary through the duration of the performance, but how each body is unique in the way they interpret-inhabit-increase this vocabulary. How complex, intricate, and well-codified that vocabulary has grown across decades in the ways it mobilizes the feet, legs, hips, torso, spine, and neck. How robustly it allows one to modify a gesture or improvise a state of un-knowing. How these bodies are dealing with pure movement too, whatever that is, from within “unrecognized” languages and punctuations that stretch at least an ocean. How the design and lighting techniques render the bodies hieroglyphic and two-dimensional at times, how they give back their density and volume, and what these shifts can mean about being a body versus being an image. How the house music provides various possibilities to movement, such as emotional commentary, polyrhythmic framing, temporal anticipation, rupture and layering. How beautiful it is to watch bodies watching each other dance. How wondrous it is to watch women watch each other dance separately and dance together. How moving it is to see them call and respond in movement and in shouts of dare and swag. How pleasurable it is to watch virtuosity without shame(ful appropriations and memories of violently disciplined bodies).
How do you transform the condensed collective energy of a “popular” dance to concert stage? How do you dramaturge its movement repertoire and micro narratives for theatrical space, time, and spectatorship, while respecting its authenticity without stultifying it into a timeless form and without fetishizing its living contexts? Queen Blood is the best answer I have seen so far to these questions, and of course more. And we no longer have any reason why we should consider a work like this in a distinct category from an ATDK piece, given they are all thinking about what else bodies can do, how else movement can converse with music, and how choreography has become a layering practice full of chance encounters.
Maybe these questions are useless and I am behind the curve. Maybe it is only me, my own mental habits that I am forcing to un-learn. Maybe everybody else is already more flexible and fluent in aesthetic code-switch, and can find an equivalent vitality and criticality across the embodiments of north south east west theatre street studio bedroom. Or maybe not, and maybe all these gestures and swings of limbs will implode into our collective body and mix together and by the time we emerge out from our quarantines we will be ready to flatten the vertical HIStory of dance and Queendom will lead the parade.
All this rumination on history aside, Queen Blood‘s house extravaganza returned me to the mad ends of my passion for dance. The watching part and the doing part both. What else does a choreographic performance have to do, for real? Thanks to my angelic hosts I was given three bacchanal nights with a hundred amazing dancers from all around the world. I would perish in this narrow body-room by now if I hadn’t taken all of them.
For streaming the full performance of Queen Blood, use this link until Dec 2020.
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