There were a few curious on-lookers, some of whom appeared as befuddled as me. Others were calmly documenting the event on their cell phones. A straggly bunch of us hovered around the edges as the dancers lunged and leapt. Finally, they seemed to have reached their destination, and they emphatically tugged open their belts and ripped their jackets off, casting them to the ground in defiance.
That was when I noticed a sleek, slightly silvery figure darting around the corner out of sight – but I could swear – it looked just like Jimmy Stewart! He was also wearing a trench coat! He kept his on – obviously, he had something to hide!
The mystery was clarified, somewhat, in the Arts section of the Times on November 11. Gia Kourlas explained that a young choreographer of Turkish origins, Nejla Yatkin, had organized this dance as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. In her public statements about this piece, she said she wanted to remind people of the monumental nature of that event. As an Eastern European, she said, she felt she had a much more powerful sense of the oppressive history represented by the wall. For her, the costuming was reminiscent of secret police, of a period of terrifying surveillance. The expressive movement of her dancers was intended to, in effect, break through the painful memories that their garments might evoke. Kourlas noted that that euphoric moment when they shed their coats might have been a tad too literal.
Of course none of this explained the apparition of that carper, the email jerk, on the Lower East Side that night. Was he just out stalking more dancers? Or was it something about this particular dance?
Was he stalking me?
And what was with the trench coat?
It occurred to me there were some fairly obvious reasons to wear a trench coat: because you were a detective, a spy, or a flasher. That is, because you had something to find, something to hide, or something you wanted desperately to show.
It was around this time that my advisor wrote me saying that she’d been contacted by the University of Malta. They were looking for an “emerging dance scholar” and she’d given them my name and an enthusiastic recommendation. This seemed like the only promising prospect on the horizon. That Academic Jobs Wiki was a daily source of mega downer updates on a grim grim situation.
Actually, a couple of people had posted that they’d already been contacted about those two long-shot stateside jobs I’d applied for. That didn’t look too good for me.
I thought: “Really? The University of Malta? Is this my academic career?”
I wasn’t thinking this exclusively with shock or chagrin. That is, there was some of that, but it also seemed a little bit like something that might happen in a dream.
In somewhat better news, though equally weird, I received an invitation from the famous performance artist, Vaginal Crème Davis, to assist her as a “choreographic dramaturg” on her performance in Bruce LaBruce’s production of The Bad Breast, or the Strange Case of Theda Lange at the Brut Theater in Vienna. There seemed to be a grant involved, and Vag had approached José Muñoz about finding a dance dramaturg, and he indicated Lepecki of course, but André had other obligations at the time of the performance so he generously gave her my name and contact information.
She wrote me an email, but in peculiarly formal Victorian prose. It seemed like the kind of invitation that should have been written on embossed stationary, and indeed, she followed it with an actual letter scrawled around the edges of a photocopy of part of her face. The heading of her email was “I am Elijah Thrush,” which I had to Google. Vag is very erudite. Anyway, the long and short of it was that through the Goethe Institute and some other unnamed resource (possibly related to LaBruce’s porn industry connections), Vag was offering me a round-trip ticket to Vienna and five nights in some Kunsthaus dormitory situation to observe the performances of The Bad Breast and offer some scholarly guidance regarding the choreography of object relations, and she added, “Darling Dr. Adams, all sources indicate that you would be a most stellar collaborator and I so hope you will grace us with your presence December 16 – 20 at the marvelous Brut Theater – isn’t the name just delicious?”
She attached a link to the video of the film version of The Bad Breast that LaBruce had already made in Berlin. The response had been excellent, but as the stage version developed, they envisioned a more significant choreographic component, particularly for Vag’s character. She wasn’t explicitly referred to as “The Good Breast,” although she did appear to be a sympathetic character. She was dressed in an enormous naked fat suit and inexplicably would tail the troubled female narrator around the streets of Berlin.
The timing was off: my lecture was scheduled for the 16th. But it struck me that if I could arrive a day late, then if I needed to make a quick escape in humiliation after my presentation this might be just the thing.
I had not made a lot of progress in preparing for my talk. In fact, none at all. I basically had no idea whatsoever about what I was going to say.
I wrote Vag that I’d be delighted to accept her invitation, but that I had a commitment on the 16th. She indicated that this would not be a problem as surely two or three viewings of The Bad Breast would give us plenty to discuss. Shortly thereafter I got an email in slightly stilted language from a staff member at the Goethe Institute confirming my itinerary. I was flying out bright and early on the morning of the 17th. I wasn’t sure how qualified I was to dramaturg this piece, but the Academic Jobs Wiki indicated that if a person could add any professional credit to his or her CV, he or she had better do it. Besides, I kind of liked Vienna. And Vag seemed so nice to work with. I wondered if she had any interest in semaphore, or ballet positions. When I asked her, she answered, “Oh, Dr. Adams, I have the utmost respect for a truly dedicated scholar of the classical dance such as yourself, but I’m afraid everything I know I learned from the divine Kay Ambrose and her charming little volume THE BALLET-LOVER’S POCKET-BOOK.”
Of course I immediately got on Amazon and ordered a used copy. The first edition was published in 1945. I found a 1972 edition for $6.00. When it arrived, I saw that even Miss Ambrose admitted that this was not a book for specialists such as myself. It was directed to the “thousands of Americans who have recently learned to love ballet.” The author bio read:Kay Ambrose, brilliant English artist and balletomane, has illustrated many books, several of them written by herself. She has given exhibitions in England and Australia, has lectured on the theater and ballet at Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham, and Reading universities, and has worked with Technicolor films. For the British Army Education Scheme she taught six-foot pupils from the Grenadier Guards and painted ballerinas on bombers and mermaids inside a French submarine. She has worked – and toured – with the National Ballet of Canada. Miss Ambrose was born and bred in Surrey. Her hobbies are cats, playing the guitar, sailing, and going to the theater. She visited the United States for the first time in 1948, and has returned often since then. Her small books on aspects of ballet have become standard throughout the English-speaking world.
Her drawings were very lively – they showed not only positions and physical maneuvers, but also costumes and cosmetic effects. In the opening set of sketches, she shows the make-up tricks for Pétrouchka (“a doll’s face painted by an absent-minded craftsman – yet he must be tragic – not comic or grotesque!”), the greasy “Dago” from Façade, the Chinese maiden from L’Épreuve d’Amour, and the “Faune” of the famous après-midi.
Of course I already owned the classic coffee table book of ballet technique, Kirstein, Stuart and Dyer’s The Classic Ballet: Basic Technique and Terminology, and I had any number of academic tomes on the history of classical dance, from the stodgy to the poststructural, but I must confess I found Miss Ambrose’s text, with its catty little references to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of dancers, oddly captivating. And because it was a “pocket-book,” it was very easy to carry around.
I started to carry it around.
How did the next five weeks pass? In an inexplicable bl
ur. My daily routine was consistent (breakfast reading the Times, barre exercises, some comma excisions and replacements, lunch, an outing to the gym, a shower, a trip to the library to check on a reference or photocopy a bibliography, a quick chat with Dan, Fang, or Ellen, an occasional beer or film or performance event, a text or email to Sven, maybe a little sudoku to make myself sleepy, and lights out. Sometimes I’d flirt a little in a bar. To be honest, once I had slightly desultory hand sex with a guy I met. More typically, I managed to take care of myself. Once in a while I’d jot down some notes about possible plot devices for the novel I was thinking of writing. I was keeping them in a file. Periodically I’d have a panic attack, with visions of the moth, the carper, and a sea of beige, belted drones.
And then it was December 15.
I was, as the colorful expression goes, up shit creek without a paddle.
Ramon had posted the announcement for my talk on the departmental list-serve, and at my request had just put the title of my dissertation and the short abstract, as I figured I’d be pulling something from that. But as I stared at the bloated chapters, bottom-heavy with their rambling endnotes, I knew I couldn’t go through with it.
That’s when I clicked on YouTube.
On December 16, I arrived in the department 15 minutes before my talk. Ramon asked me if I needed help setting anything up. I said no, thanks – I was just going to screen a couple of YouTube videos. He said, “Okay, Gray, you da man!” He meant this in a friendly, joking way. He seemed to believe, however, that I could pull this off. Why? I prepared the video links on the projection screen and shuffled my papers at the lectern. People started to filter in. Fang and Dan, of course, were there early. They gave me smiles of encouragement. Several eager-beaver MA students, who were gung-ho about nearly everything, took their seats toward the front. To my surprise, a few faculty members actually showed up. Schechner was there. He was already sketching in his notebook. I thought I also recognized Mark Franko, the famous dance scholar. Talk about pressure. Franko had recently taken over the editorial reins at Dance Research Journal. I wondered if I was going to make it through this. Just a minute or so before I was scheduled to start talking, both Muñoz and Lepecki slipped in. I overheard them deferentially offering to let each other introduce me. Muñoz got the hot potato, I guess, because as the clock ticked in at 5:05 p.m. he gently came over to me and whispered, “I’m going to do a quick introduction.” Lepecki slipped into the seat beside Franko.
I stepped a bit to the side to make room for Muñoz at the podium. He leaned over it and read from the boilerplate bio I’d given to Ramon in preparation for this day. My heart was starting to thud distractingly, but I was able to follow, barely, the brief account of my artistic and scholarly training and the reiteration of the short abstract of my dissertation that everybody had presumably already read on the list-serve, at which point he looked up from his script to add, “which, I believe, will be the basis of his talk today. Please join me in welcoming our distinguished visiting scholar, Gray Adams.”
The twenty-odd people in the room clapped politely.
I cleared my throat and said, “Actually, I have a new title for this talk. It’s called: ‘Stalkers, Spies and Flashers.’ ” I thought I sensed a pricking up of certain ears in the room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Schechner making some hatch marks on his sketch.
I began, “November 1, 2009 was the opening ceremony of Performa 2009, the biennial performance art festival run by RoseLee Goldberg. The festivities were supposed to start at 8 p.m. in Times Square. Arto Lindsay, the sound artist, had collaborated with the choreographer Lily Baldwin on a kind of parade.”
I clicked on the video, which streamed behind me as I continued. I narrated the set-up, the execution, and the after-effects of what I’d seen. I gave a brief summary of the history of the “flash mob,” and the ways in which it demonstrated from its inception the complicated relationship between anarchy, choreographed spontaneity, and commercialism. Of this particular performance, I said, “It may have had indeterminate political goals, but it certainly did feel representative of the political and aesthetic moment, one that Lauren Berlant has characterized as ‘a space of abeyance.’” I’d found this essay by Berlant the night before, Googling “the politics of lurking.” Need I say, I was thinking not only about this choreography, but also myself. I continued: “In the desire expressed by various political factions for ‘less filter,’ Berlant notes a yearning for a certain kind of intimate public sphere. An intimate public, she says, ‘promises the sense of being loosely held in a social world.’ ” Here I quoted Silvan Tomkins about how you might enjoy a particular kind of embrace… Perhaps a loose one, rendered by a social world… I returned to Berlant: “ ‘You don’t have to do anything to belong, once you show up and listen. You can be passive and lurk in an intimate public.’ Lurking, Berlant tells us, means our communications are increasingly constituted by what we overhear. Ambient sound, she says, engenders ‘ambient citizenship.’ ”
I went on to describe Yatkin’s choreography, and projected images of her belted, dronish dancers pirouetting through the Lower East Side. I tried, vaguely, to parse out the differences between the ambiguous anti-commercialism of the Performa pseudo-flash mob and the equally confusing anti-Communism of Nejla Yatkin’s self-disrobing secret police. I said something about sentiment, and nostalgia for a time of political and economic clarity. And I considered the trench coat.
I said, “There are three reasons to wear a trench coat: because you have something to find, something to hide, or something you want desperately to show. The garment that seems to beg you, ‘Don’t notice me!’ is also begging you to take notice, whether the wearer wants you to see what’s underneath, or whether he wants you simply to fear it. But part of the contract is for the wearer and the witness – who is also being watched – to maintain the fiction of the non-theatricality, of the non-spectacularity, of the extreme understatement of the performance.”
As I said this, my mind shot to the image of Jimmy Stewart scurrying around the corner in all his beige minimalism.
I concluded somewhat lyrically: “We increasingly move through a soundscape both overheard and understated. It emanates from the earbuds of the iPods and cell phones of our fellow passengers, who may or may not be fellow travelers – or perhaps they’re indicating to us what it means now, maybe always meant, to be a fellow traveler, an unacknowledged intimate in a political sphere that attempts to cover itself in discretion even as it exposes itself.”
There was a beat.
Then Fang, unable to contain herself, said, “This is, after all, how ideology works.”
I stared back at her. There was an awkward pause, and then I looked up and said, “That’s it.” People clapped. Actually, they clapped quite enthusiastically. It was a big relief. I’d nearly filled my allotted time slot. The party was about to begin.
José Muñoz stood and faced the audience and said, “Great, umm, I think we have time for maybe one question or so – and we hope of course you’ll all stick around for our holiday party which starts in just a few minutes up on the 12th floor in the Dean’s Conference Room. Any questions? Comments?”
Another brief, awkward pause. I think people had liked the talk, but it was the end of the semester, they were tired, and they were all thinking about the holiday punch and other refreshments awaiting them upstairs – so Dan Ferguson just tossed out a fake, jokey pseudo-question to give us an excuse to break: “Okay then, Gray, what about you? Do you have something to find, something to hide, or something you want desperately to show?”
Everyone laughed nervously, and I said, “I’m not sure.”
The holiday party was great. I don’t know if it was Ramon’s famous coconut punch or if it was the relief of having made it through my talk, but I got smashed pretty quickly. There was some greasy fried food and there were some retro baked goods that students, staff, and faculty members had entered in a competition. There was a pineapple upside-down cake, s
everal items involving marshmallow fluff, and a spiked Jell-O fruit mold.
There was a disco ball and a karaoke machine, and before long people were crooning embarrassingly to “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” When the dancing started, I worried somebody was going to get hurt. Some people were very expressive movers.
I saw a guy I’d been meaning to speak with. He was a Greek PhD student who wrote about experimental sound. His particular area of expertise was the electric guitar. He had black-rimmed glasses and a tidy goatee. He was small and compact, concentrated, and vital. His name was Stefanos. While I’d seen him making many acute theoretical comments at academic talks, he was quite the wild man on the dance floor. After a while he took a break to get another glass of punch. He wiped the sweat from his brow as he stood in line. He was next to a beautiful blonde woman who stood several inches taller than him. I walked over to say hello, and he looked up and said with great warmth, “Gray, have you met my lover?” He gently put his arm around the blonde woman. She politely extended her hand so I could shake it. You might say her bearing was regal. In a nice way.
I meant to ask him if he could give me any bibliographic leads on the electric guitar, since this was an increasing preoccupation of mine. But I was so taken aback by how gentlemanly he seemed that night, and how beautiful his “lover” was, I didn’t ask him. I was also, as I mentioned, drunk.
Later Stefanos sang a karaoke version of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” He also wiped out spinning a girl around on rollerblades and got a little blood on his shirt but just kept dancing.
The morning of the 17th I had a bad headache, but I managed to make it to JFK in time for my flight. Sven and I thought for a minute about meeting in Vienna, but I already had my ticket to go to Stockholm in January and besides I thought I’d be busy working on The Bad Breast. And it’s true, as soon as I got there I threw my bag in the austere dorm room and Vag’s friend Ilhan took me over to the Brut Theater.
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