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Trajal Harrell: The Anxiety of Autobiography

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00629

1537-9477

Brit Barton,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Tomás Saraceno, Museo Aero Solar (2007). Reused plastic bags, tape, ventilator, polyester rope. Approx. 39.4 × 52.5 × 19 feet. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy The Shed.Dancer of the Year, a performance by Trajal Harrell, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland, March 4–April 3, 2022.One morning, Trajal Harrell woke up to find an email from the German Tanz magazine, announcing that he had been selected as “Dancer of the Year” for 2018. It wasn’t that Harrell was an unknown choreographer, plucked from obscurity—he had been around. Performance spaces like RedCat and The Kitchen were among his list of venues, but he was well known within the institutional museum scene throughout the Western world, with a residency at the Barbican Centre in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It just seemed to be an odd choice. The year previously, Tanz had selected the Cuban ballet dancer Osiel Gouneo, who had broken ground in Europe as a principal dancer for the Norwegian National Ballet and previously performed at places like the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Harrell, with his dance steeped in postwar gestures, black queer aesthetics, and racial critiques, was a significant departure from ballet.What did Harrell do that could make him shift so easily into the likes of the American Realness Festival and then Art Basel-Miami Beach? He isn’t a performance artist per se; he is a performer. He was born and raised in Douglas, Georgia, one of those small southern towns you have to mention by establishing its proximity to somewhere else; in this case, it’s about a hundred and fifteen miles from Jacksonville, Florida. He did drama club in junior high and high school, enrolled at Yale University, switched majors from theatre to dance, and made his way to New York City in 1998. After immersing himself in Movement Research, the dance organization tied to the Judson Memorial Church, his work Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (1999) came to fruition, which brought together the non-white audiences of the Harlem drag ballrooms and the academic and privileged atmosphere of the Judson Dance Theater.In one of the opening scenes of Paris Is Burning, Jeannie Livingston’s now iconic 1990 documentary on ballroom culture, the anxiety of the social separation and class distinctions is explained beautifully: “A ball to us is as close to us as reality as we’re going to get—to all of that fame, fortune, stardom, and spotlights.” The irony of the statement is that decades after the film—from Madonna’s Vogue music video in 1990, to Ryan Murphy’s television series Pose (2018–21), or every queer theory class taught throughout North America—ball culture vastly upstages any downtown scene of avant-garde dance that has been so carefully archived within art history’s white gloves. But it was this idea that became a lightning in a bottle formula for Harrell. Through voguing in the sacred modernist space of the Judson Memorial Church, the combined nature of the two worlds collided and he found immediate success.Nearly twenty years later, I was reminded of this shift in his career while sitting in the foldout chairs of the Kunsthalle Zürich, the acclaimed exhibition hall for contemporary art in Europe, broadly defined by bringing in international artists to introduce to the Swiss audience. Though Trajal Harrell is first and foremost a choreographer and now only an occasional dancer, the setup at the Kunsthalle existed primarily as an art installation. The floor was divided in two, with a partition separating “stages” for the other scheduled performance, the world premiere of Deathbed (2022). In an unfortunate but altogether unsurprising reality, Deathbed would lose out on half of the sold out and limited performances after Covid swept through the cast. This is after Harrell’s entire exhibition was delayed and rescheduled after two years of pandemic logistics. However, in what was essentially a theatrical monologue of an autobiographical breakdown through solo dances with sequential chapters, Dancer of the Year (2018) didn’t have to face the same collective concerns of a larger production.Dancer of the Year is about an hour long and in five parts. Gestures were clever allusions: the praised, raised hands and step-sway of a Baptist preacher entranced mid-sermon, an elderly woman in a 1960s-style house dress and slippers prancing, Butoh dance, a ballroom homage with a voguing sequence, and the prevailing black athlete in Adidas track pants, to name a few. Every chapter included a costume change and musical score, all done in the open with Harrell pulling each piece out of a black bag at every interlude. There was little to no behind-the-scenes magic, which felt like the largest nod to the theatricality or grandiosity, or lack thereof. During the performance, the glow of gesturing a “win” had turned to sweat pouring off him. While the artist withheld any trace of spectacle to an almost brash extent, it only made the hard work of carrying a solo ever more apparent.The primary issues that surround the Harrell performance at the Kunsthalle Zürich predicate themselves somewhat on questions of audience—a decidedly non-diverse audience, a contemporary art audience, and an anxious, perma-pandemic audience. Despite themes that can transcend borders in our turbulent times, there were moments that embodied a specific, Southern milieu of being; I had to look across the audience and wonder if anyone could grasp what was happening. Although I must admit to feeling cynical at times, as I more often than not find myself as the only obvious non-white member of an audience in Switzerland. Further, in order to see the performances, you had to purchase a ticket through the confusing Schauspielhaus website, an entirely foreign concept to the Kunsthalle visitor who more often than not can get into a gallery, at some point of an exhibition, for free. Moreover, an average meandering museum-goer rarely spends more than thirty seconds in front of an artwork. But there we sat, silently shifting in uncomfortable seats, in close proximity and with masks on, for over an hour.In the final chapter, he paused the music, broke the fourth wall, and addressed the audience with an acknowledgement: “This last piece is very difficult, very physically demanding. I may not be able to do this.” When Harrell spoke, I found it hard to believe the performance was near its end or to even anticipate an ending cut short. It wasn’t until then that, regardless of all the trappings of a captive audience, I realized I had fully given in to the performance. It was a demanding last dance, and I think the warning created a heightened tension that the last few years have been more challenging on Harrell physically. It concluded with a prolonged scene of blown kisses to the audience and the artist moving to the doorway of the Kunsthalle, waiting to shake hands with every attendee.The staging was intended to be modest, personal, and at eye-level with the artist. Each of the five performances was sold out, with a small and intimate audience of around thirty people. A red carpet was laid out over a reed, or Japanese-style Tatami mat, that would be rolled up again when a performance wasn’t taking place. Otherwise, the installation remained the same; on special days and times, it would turn into the retail boutique, Dancer of The Year Shop #4 (2022), complete with shopkeepers in designer labels or lab coats, and an annotated price list. Surrounded by several sleek, matte black vitrines, cabinets, and shelving that housed all the items, the inventory was a visual example of the artist’s modest background and a critique of his quotidian life as an artistic practitioner. It was all up for sale but prices varied between three hundred euros to two hundred and fifty thousand euros, depending on the object’s importance to the artist.The shopkeeper I spoke with, a grungy German actor from the Schauspielhaus Zürich, had trouble explaining some of the object’s materiality and their resonance that included a passed-down family quilt from the artist’s enslaved ancestors, notes on previous performances, a laptop with the artist’s “life work until 2019,” a Members Only jacket and Lacoste sweaters, U.S. Open Tennis Championship towels from 2007 to 2009, a reworked, knock-off edition of Vogue magazine that features the artist, his collaborators, and his friends. Though most objects were coy towards their meaning within the brutal history of Americana—sometimes a tennis racket is just a tennis racket—the artist’s collection was a powerful display that signified the dimensional experience of African American culture, queer dynamics, and artistic labor.Harrell’s layering of references has been a thoughtful and poetic form of collage that collapses timelines and racial narratives. In the case of the shop in Zürich, the empty gallery remained inactivated compared to the time of the artist’s sold-out performances, yielding to the kind of apathy that happens when commercialism becomes an overwrought part of the artwork’s concept, turning it into a space for a specific kind of collector. Although, there were some beautiful pieces and moments, like the three small marble sculptures that were openly displayed instead of hidden within the cabinets. I realized later that they were “blocks,” or abstracted cranial forms, meant to be sold with his mother’s wigs. In elevating his personal memorabilia into art objects for sale, every object can potentially exist beyond his possession and into safe-keeping that outlives the artist. The trouble can come from who can afford anything on the list—not every art collector can be counted on as a custodian that navigates work with detail and nuance.The beauty of contemporary dance is that it can shift in meaning depending on the concept and context. The heavy rotation of performances has taken place mostly outside of the United States, during and after the Trump administration, the pandemic, and Black Lives Matter protests. But the dance wasn’t overtly tied to the political melodramas of U.S. citizenry; if anything, the issues of class, identity, and politics create a foundation that make it easy for the performance to exist elsewhere. Since the debut of Dancer of the Year, performances in Edinburgh, Belgium, and Paris have cast a wide net of meaning for the artist and audiences. The performance created another space for dialogue, for example, within the 34th annual São Paulo Art Biennale in 2021, when it posed broader issues of privilege and place while the pandemic raged on against Brazil’s own complicated landscape of class and race while under the fascist presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. But in the case of 2022 Zürich, I wasn’t fully convinced of the initial weight or curatorial reasoning behind the performance beyond a collaborative effort with the Schauspielhaus where Harrell holds a directorship position.I return to the question that initially entrapped Trajal Harrell in 2018 and continually mystifies me today. What does it mean to hold the title of “Dancer of the Year”? As vague yet validating as it is, does it really matter? It is an obvious privilege to even get the chance to ask oneself. In inverting the temporality of the award into a performance that has lived well beyond a year, Harrell created a structural form that encompasses an autobiographical analysis, while examining the role or even the necessity of competition and awards. I wasn’t sold on the location of the Kusthalle, but that didn’t stop the affect of the performance or the substantive conversation around art’s power to question an object’s value, meaning, and memory. It was flawed and fragile in the way that a human being is. In retrospect, Dancer of the Year extends beyond the timeframe and poses the living, ephemeral question of what it means to exist across institutions, especially when you inevitably become a part of it.