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Choreographing a queer ethics: Between Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0740770x.2013.797805

1748-5819

Cathy Hannabach,

Cinema and Media Studies

AbstractWhat possibilities might melancholia offer for a queer ethics, and what might it mean to perform such an ethics onstage? In this essay the author analyzes mobile figurations of U.S. nationalism, violence, and visuality as theorized in the work of contemporary queer chorographers Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy. The author suggests that Jones's 1989 Untitled and Hennessy's 2006 Sol Niger evidence shifts in racialized sexuality and empire from the 1980s to the War on Terror, even as they both mark convergences between geopolitics and biopolitics. Reading these works together – despite their markedly different aesthetics and tones – elucidates a queer ethics rooted in and capable of contending with our contemporary political moment of war and U.S. empire building. Further, these works model how dance and other embodied, collective practices can engender what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performances” or possibilities for critique and transformation rooted in moving social bodies.Keywords: queerdancemelancholiaethicscritique AcknowledgementsI would like to thank the following people for their generous suggestions and conversations about the many permutations of this article: Juana María Rodríguez, Lynette Hunter, Charis Thompson, Liz Constable, Benjamin D'Harlingue, Winnie Tam Hung, and the anonymous Women & Performance reviewers. I particularly want to thank Gayle Salamon for her decade-long nurturing of my interest in queer dance, ethics, and embodiment, and Keith Hennessy for his extraordinary choreographic work, social justice activism, and support of this article.Notes on contributorCathy Hannabach is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and American Studies at Temple University, and works on queer and feminist theory, film/media studies, and cultural studies. She is completing a book titled Blood Cultures: Medicine, Media, and Militarisms which examines the politics of blood in twentieth-century U.S. medicine, military practices, and popular culture. Recent articles include “Blood Wars: Security, States, and Sanguine Futures” (Social Text: Periscope, forthcoming 2013), “Technologies of Blood: Asylum, Medicine, and Biopolitics” (Cultural Politics 9 (1) 2013), and “Anxious Embodiment, Disability, and Sexuality” (Studies in Gender and Sexuality 8 (3) 2007).Notes1. Butler (Citation2004, 19).2. Phelan (Citation1997, 3).3. Freud (Citation1915, 243).4. Freud (Citation1915, 245).5. Freud (Citation1915, 249).6. Freud (Citation1915, 245).7. Gere (Citation2004).8. Cheng (Citation2001, xi).9. Butler (Citation2004, 22).10. Khanna (Citation2003, 17).11. Butler (Citation2004, 18).12. Roach (Citation1996, 28).13. Lepecki (Citation2004, 128).14. MacKendrick (Citation2004, 145).15. Dolan (Citation2005).16. There have been a few rare live performances of Untitled. At the 1988 New York Dance and Performance Awards (the Bessies), Jones performed a portion of Untitled's choreography without music. In 1991 he performed the full piece alongside two of Zane's works; the tripartite performance served as a memorial to Zane. The 1991 performance is analyzed extensively by David Gere in How to Make Dances in an Epidemic (2004). Both of these live performances were videotaped, further blurring the line between live and videodance with regards to this work. My analysis of Untitled is based on the videotape of the 1988 performance, the videotape of the 1991 performance, and (most prominently) the 1989 videodance performance made for Alive from Off Center.17. Gere (Citation2004, 54).18. The Cock Ring, Man's Country, and St. Mark's Baths were gay sex clubs in New York. For a more detailed analysis of these citations, see Gere (Citation2004).19. This citation is not found in the videodance performance, but in the 1991 live performance and its recording.20. Salamon (Citation2010, 14).21. Gordon (Citation2008, 8).22. Gordon (Citation2008, 8).23. Gere (Citation2004, 101).24. Sol Niger was commissioned by Les Subsistances (Lyon, France), Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté (Belfort), and the University of California-Davis's Department of Theater and Dance. It received additional financial support from the French-US Exchange in Dance (FUSED), the Zellerbach Family Fund, CounterPULSE, and private donations. The piece premiered in Lyon, France at Les Subsistances in 2006, and had its U.S. debut at the Mondavi Center for the Arts at U.C. Davis in February 2007. Subsequently, the work was performed in September 2007 and January 2008 at San Francisco's Theatre Artaud, a site at which Hennessy and Circo Zero often perform. My readings of the work are based on my attendance at the February 2007 Mondavi performance and the January 2008 San Francisco performance, as well as a DVD documentary of the Mondavi show provided to me by Hennessy.25. Hunter (Citation2012, 255).26. This barking also brings to mind the chase scene from Bill T. Jones's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1994). This piece adapts Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, rewriting several characters and scenes and placing the themes in late-twentieth-century practices of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. The performance's chase scene (taken from the novel) has slaves attempting to escape while dancers dressed as dogs hunt them down while and barking ferociously. This staging also has the “dogs” dressed in football uniforms and military boots, emphasizing the transhistorical connections between different forms of racialized and gendered violence.27. Carby (Citation2004).28. Hunter (2012, 269). Hennessy's use of hooded sweatshirts is echoed in his 2008 work Delinquent, a piece critiquing the prison-industrial-education complex. The work debuted in San Francisco and was choreographed for young performers who had been incarcerated in the juvenile justice system. In the performance, a black hooded sweatshirt with a white skeleton painted on the front is used by various dancers to signify the proximity to violence and death that U.S. prison practices rely upon and produce.29. Past works utilizing hoods include Chosen (2005) and Mercy (2005). Mercy explicitly references the torture and photography at Abu Ghraib through staging the scenes of U.S. soldiers arranging and photographing dancers/detainees clothed black hoods and underwear.30. The DVD version of the 24 February 2007 Davis performance includes an auditory close-up of Leap during this solo, and viewers can hear her ragged and labored breathing in a way that was only possible from the first few rows of the audience during the live performance. This foregrounding of labored breathing is similar to that in the first part of Untitled, where a lack of music allows for viewers of the video to hear Jones's breath, emphasizing the affective and corporeal labor of the various losses and violences the piece works through.31. Hennessy's aerial choreography most often uses manual pulley systems for trapeze work, as can be seen in A Cabaret of Danger and Compassion (2003) and Delinquent (2008). This foregrounds the labor required to hoist bodies into the air, and contrasts with most aerial choreography that seeks to conceal such an apparatus. In some works, Hennessy even calls verbal attention to this manual labor, as in A Cabaret of Danger and Compassion (2003) when he invites 20 audience members onstage to help raise in the air a performer who is scared of aerial work. Hennessy then places this act in a capitalist economy of labor, telling the audience that such an invitation causes some insurance companies to deny coverage to the dance company, which prevents Circo Zero from performing in certain venues. By foregrounding the means of production needed to lift a body off the ground, and placing this practice in larger systems of capitalist labor relations that prevent participatory/interactive theater, Hennessy utilizes dance as a means of political and economic critique.32. Carby (Citation2004). Carby notes that lynching photographs in particular were made into postcards that were used by white U.S. subjects as advertisements for photography businesses (“here is an example of my photographic work”) and as personal communications between friends (“wish you were here”) (Carby). In this context, we might read the production and circulation of the Abu Ghraib photographs as functioning similarly – as both advertisements for U.S. military services (“ready for hire!” and evidence of a “job well done”) and personal communications (the waving and smiling U.S. soldiers saying “wish you were here” to their friends and colleagues while standing beside tortured prisoner bodies).33. Nicholas Mirzoeff characterizes the use of torture, specifically sexualized torture, as itself forming a type of international coalition policy among imperial and colonial powers that links “the torture of IRA suspects in Northern Ireland, Palestinians in Israel, and indeed to Kenyan prisoners held by the British colonial forces during the Mau Mau rebellion of 1953” (Mirzoeff Citation2006, 27). Jasbir Puar demonstrates that such torture techniques are similar to ones used by U.S. prison guards against inmates, further illustrated by the fact that many of the U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib had prison-guard backgrounds (Puar Citation2007, 79). What I find remarkable for the purposes of this analysis of Jones and Hennessy is how central visual representation is to this genealogy of racialized violence, producing stock images of brown and black bodies tortured on screen, in frames, and onstage.34. See for example, Marriott (Citation2000). However, as Kobena Mercer admits in “Looking for Trouble” (1993) this reading is complicated by the unwieldy structures of desire and identification that frame these images, and by the models' own articulations of their role in this process.35. As Angela Davis has noted, this reduction of black men to pathologized genitals has been a key trope in the myth of the black rapist, as well as mass lynchings and other racist and nationalist violences legitimated through such a figuration. Hennessy's work has addressed many of these frameworks over the years, particularly through his critiques of the prison-industrial complex, and activist and artistic work on prison abolition.36. Mercer (Citation1993, 354).37. Jones (Citation1995, 74).38. Holland (Citation2000, 14–15).39. Holland (Citation2000, 16). Emphasis in original.40. Gere (Citation2002b, 52).41. Gere (Citation2004, 41).42. Phelan (Citation1997, 16).43. Kaplan (Citation2002, 1).44. Puar (Citation2007, xii).45. Butler (Citation2005, 8).46. Freud (Citation1915, 247).47. Davis (Citation2002, 27).48. Bakhtin (Citation1984, 34).49. Hunter (Citation2012, 265).50. Hennessy and Circo Zero directly address pleasure and humor in response to failure in A Cabaret of Danger and Compassion. The performance includes a song about the failure of the U.S. Left to adequately mobilize against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and prevent the reelection of George W. Bush: “We tried everything but it didn't work/ We lobbied politicians but it didn't work/ We signed petitions, a million names in 5 days but it didn't work/ In the city streets we marched over 10 million people on the same day around the world, but it didn't work/ […] We tried voting but that never works.” This song of Left failures and disappointments was performed during the 2003 San Francisco performance of Cabaret and was accompanied by dancers clad in bright and sequined costumes tumbling across the stage in physical pleasure yet political weariness. Hennessy's characteristic refusal to separate pleasure and critique, or circus humor and political failure in the context of war and imperialism, speaks to a corporeal ethics beyond the positive/negative affect binary and might even provide an alternative political model for mobilizing.