hiya.

as some of you have observed, the performance club has been somewhat quiet this winter. part of this is that i’ve been traveling, and so there’ve been events out of town. but a larger part is that i’ve been trying to figure out how best this thing should grow and evolve: what’s important (or not) about it, what kind of space it should occupy online and/or as a social venture and, perhaps most importantly, how to either sustain something of quality over the long haul or recognize that not all things are meant to last in perpetuity, at least not in their original forms.

i’ve got a residency at headlands center for the arts this summer, and part of what i’ll be doing there is mulling over the questions above. more immediately, next week i am meeting with the club’s core contributors to discuss options, brainstorm, etc.

if you’ve got any thoughts, suggestions, questions, complaints, etc., we would love to hear them. please leave a comment, or email us at contact@theperformanceclub.org …

cheers,

clr

Stephanie Hayes, Alenka Kraigher, Nicolas Noreña, Rocco Sisto & David Skeist in “Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance),” written, directed & designed by Richard Foreman. At The Public Theater through June 2. Photos: Joan Marcus

*

End of play. We come to this now for comfort is that ok? An old man with white hair I was traveling ok ok it’s not interesting being a civilian in the theater. Are these light bulbs energy efficient? Is he from the south? Go to Berkeley make film. Do the gals get to be people? Do the gentlemen? This is like his apartment I was there once and RF said I have a bone to pick with you and it was terrifying and thrilling, he was lovely and called me out for something ridiculous I’d said about older artists, repeating themselves. But gently. Read Said on late artistic periods, M says. The entire afternoon. Vermouth. Suffering quietly. Antique apertures and argyle socks and a mirror turned on us we are unlovely are we not?

Ok. Budapest, Shanghai, Vienna now or never. I keep forgetting to write that lady back from Art NE. Shit. Which does Samuel prefer? What if neither? No foamy pits here. Languor and fallen souffles. This life thing. This word thing. Akira Kasai told me hip hop was America’s butoh. Oh my gosh. Tennessee Williams. Ravishing. Come to the verandah. Tenn is everywhere all at once here hurrah. Prostitutes, no. Whores, maybe. The hip outflung. The gentle woman waiting. She is not gentle. He needs her to be.

In another sense this is also true. Teddy bears they tie to the grilles of their trucks. They darken and grow strange. Susie comes looking for you. Ok. The author maybe isn’t dead, he’s only preoccupied by a lady caller. Mistakes always profit someone. The players arrive. No mad hatter. Alarm. Alarm. Horrible empty Sunday feeling theater tries to stop it. No. That’s the first false line. Always the soft idiot softly me. His heart is enlarged. He ties golden gloves around his neck, his physical self dissolving, he walks out into the Sunday square.

*

I busy myself with making sure the entire alphabet is there. It’s harder and harder to be wide awake. Stranger an hour and four minutes of your life is over there. Plots has he laid. Rage, rage. Try to name it. If not, why not? The day lies crumpled on the hallway runner. His face is Swedish. Hole in one. No.

Then use the back entrance. No.

Lines & scarves & old-fashioned loves. It is a desperate business, this business of having a self to hold and not hold onto. Hold it. I thought this at least. I thought it. A strong drink. A mutual subject. The no hero in his best dressed whites. The whore’s friend giggles. Ok. Time is up. Joan Didion can no longer wear her four-inch red sandal heels. It’s often difficult. The classes are held in the back room. If you don’t pass, you fail. The observer changes the observed. The alphabet and then some returns. Gently, of course. The enlarged heart bursts. Rivulets of blood in the gutter. No, false again. Count again the things one might do. This and that. Famous people. Busyness. Alarms. The hotel room alone late at night.

Waiting again. The beautiful coquette. There’s nothing special about you. The master of ceremonies awaits. He had to return to tell you this. The band is warming up. OP EN AL LN. Rainer Thompson. Now no one can. look. Now there is nothing to see again. Joe Persek. The office worker will one day be a star. hello hello. the world hangs up on you the jeweled fingers slip around your wrist no one cannot say it say it the ribbons hang limply from the sky beckett it isn’t falling yet.

*

Anna Sperber and Molly Lieber in Sperber’s “The Superseded Third” at the Chocolate Factory Theater. Photo: Brian Rogers.

Veins in the hand
Foot six inches off the ground

Sweat pooling
Leather fringe
You will run
You will run

These are the only dragons
Black checker board like brushed satin nickel

[Of if not, why not]

This idea of smallness and bigness all at once
“What are you doing what”
Romeo will never come
Juliet finds other diversions
She still dies young

The pipes are shaking
The scaffolding is backlit
Lunge lunge
The longer I do this the worse I get at it
I can put my leg here
It’s not important

I am the elegant blonde
Everything is whistling
Is this outerspace?
Can I hold what Atlas let slip through his fingers?

Can you?
Saeta
Miles Davis in Spain
We begin again & again & again

Speed
The will to power
Persephone, and what came after
The sight of the encounter
The jaw resolves
Puncture wound

Our politics change, not our emotions
Or is it the other way around?

We end up waiting
Our taped feet darken like chimney sweeps

If we could rise up now and float over you
[If not, then why not]

Oh right
The street lights outside
The cracked bowl
Porcelain
Filament
Aftermath
The jet roars overhead.

Vicky Shick and Jon Kinzel in Shick’s “Everything You See” at Danspace Project.

by Christine Shan Shan Hou

When we drift we dream: such awakenings demand presence or awareness of being on the other side.

In Everything You See, there is a thought to form, a decision to scatter as a means of making a whole, integrated space.

Imagine a diorama with a front and backside. They are meeting for the first time.

The women lounge on their sides looking at us from outer space.

Because they are looking at me, I feel far away, like the sea or the sun. From this vantage point, I see that some bodies are to be left alone.

There is nothing wrong with being alone, like there is nothing wrong with a dancer wearing a tutu made of plastic wrap. When she walks, she crinkles.

Olsi Gjeci and Laurel Tentindo

Newton’s cradle is reenacted with a pair of arms. Energy is transferred from one arm to the other in a single clap.

An alien appears with her hand clamped over her forehead like a claw. Her name is Vicky Shick.

A table rotates on a girl’s hand in space, specifically outer space.

Group dynamics in a costume party are often fervid & relevant: girls gossiping at a slumber party, children running around the schoolyard in a predictable yet exciting game of tag.

When the children are fatigued, they rest, leaning on each other or the parts of a church.

Leaning is never forever as waiting is a natural state of being, subjective, of course.

I name each body after each planet, including Pluto. Then there’s Vicky Shick.

Is naming a form of distraction? Do I prefer one side of the diorama to the other? Do I prefer one drama queen to another?

Behind a curtain, girls look at boys being boys. The curtain is sheer grey fabric, tree bark texture.

One cannot see through a tree, just as one cannot see through an act of intimacy. The phrase “different but equal” does not apply.

There are several girls shining incandescently, producing a drifting sensation.

Seeing dictates pleasure. Pleasure is not always clean.

Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet, artist, and critic living in Brooklyn, New York.

Me, shortly before reading this poem in “Taste,” a site-specific performance and installation by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, in collaboration with Claudia La Rocco and Davison Scandrett. Costumes by James Kidd. Presented at the BFI Gallery in Miami, in collaboration with O, Miami.

*

It’s not always easy to look at things

Well, it’s easy to look at war. Think about traffic accidents.

The concrete horizon

The white room

Don’t worry, man, the black won’t rub off on you

All that bubble gum awfulness pink
All the little boys parading around
Look at you

Your implants are perfect
I tried to hibernate in them

I don’t know what I’m doing here

I’m just so….oh. I don’t know

Getting naked is for amateurs.

This is not an official no

Those people come down here, they don’t contribute anything

They talk about the quality of the light

The all new & improved

Don’t worry, the black won’t

These two are real professionals.

They’re very flexible.

Something about that white flower, that dark hair

I saw my first hooker in Miami
Stick insect orange street lights stretch
It’s like they say, you only know what gunshots sound like after you hear one
They don’t look like anything else

It’s really beautiful
It’s really good

It’s easy to look at war. Think about traffic accidents.

Those people come down here

They talk about the quality of the light

Payment options

High rise

Low rider

Euphoria spelled wrong

Don’t worry,

That one’s white as milk

Right now they’re taking pictures

Don’t be so cynical darling
Bend over

The way the palm fronds suck their teeth
The wrongest images repeat

I’ve got a caseload of these
See? I resort to couplets

I rhyme. I take notes. I retreat.

You know I could just keep generating
The stray dogs are running through the streets

The stars are all over you

The lovers, after work, must wash each other’s feet

These two are very flexible.

They’re real professionals.

In the dream I am dressed like them.

I’m just so…

The all new & improved

It only matters if you charge money

The taste of metal against your teeth

I mean it’s not always easy to look

This is my job and I can tell you it’s not always easy
I mean, I never give money to the homeless

I’m not that kind of humanitarian

I just like it when you do that
I like it when you do it just like that

The body works  it out

The body gets closer

Standing in the sun squinting

Of course we’re all mourning for ourselves
Of course we get uncomfortable around our kind
It’s subjective

But look at that torso
The way his pelvis slides into his thigh

Goddamn technology

What. Are you going to take a picture now?

To put it more bluntly: do you even know what you’re doing here?

High Rise Low rider

the black won’t rub off
This outfit wasn’t my idea

I like that because it’s shiny
I like you because I don’t have to think

I packed for the end of the world
What?
I’m a professional watcher
the black won’t rub off on you

the girls won’t come this way again

I mean, just look at them
That one likes to spend money

I mean, just look at him

He wraps himself in gold just because it’s Tuesday

These two are perfect. Their bodies are wrecked; they are doing that for us

We come down here, we don’t contribute anything

We talk about the quality of the light
Isn’t that something
Cherry coke remarkable
Isn’t that…

You make sense without words
The frigate birds wheel high above, sharpening their knives

I do not want to spend my life without knowing anything else

We look at war

We look at the crushed flowers from the night before

The carpet is impossibly white

The tower is a double crescent

Rubber doll, techno something

You’ve never met more awkward rock stars

There is a way in which the translator must love failure

The thin line of light splitting the morning sky

*

Jean Butler. Photo: Conor Horgan.

By Siobhan Burke

Jean stood with her back to the pillar, her profile to the audience, looking into all that empty space in front of her. She extended one arm out behind her, lightly touching the grooves of the beam that reached from the floor to the ceiling, as if assuring herself of its presence. Her posture was as vertical as the pillar itself, her stance as resolute. I noticed the loose coil of her long red ponytail—imbued with its own kind of vertical energy—and also the clean, attractive fit of her costume (a silken, deep-blue shirt and pants, made by Sylvia Greiser). Later, my friend observed, and I concurred, that it’s really nice to see a costume that looks not quite like a costume but not quite like regular clothes, either. You don’t see those too often.

The first time I saw Jean Butler perform, I was eight or nine, and she must have been in her early twenties. I was sitting in the audience at Radio City Music Hall, and she was onstage, one-half of the lead couple in Riverdance. I had been studying Irish dance for maybe a year, and in retrospect, I realize that Jean, with her elegance and quiet confidence, embodied what I liked about the oddly severe form. I’ve done a lot of thinking about why I spent 15 years immersed in a style of dance that required many unpleasant things of me, and I often come back to this image of poise and precision and control, combined with lightness and freedom and speed. It was something to work toward.

Many years later, I was in Ireland writing about the Dublin Dance Festival, and Jean was one of a few artists presenting new work at a studio showing. She shared a brief solo-in-progress suggesting that, since Riverdance, she’d been trying out some other ways of moving. (By that time, she’d earned a masters in contemporary dance from the University of Limerick.)

There are certain hallmarks of Irish dance: you keep your limbs close to your center, especially your arms, which remain by your sides. Most of the footwork happens directly underneath your hips, and while you may lift your knees and kick your legs, your torso never veers from that central axis. It’s straight-up-and-down. Even while you pound into the floor or fly into the air, you’re holding on tight, always gathering, gathering, gathering in. You look where you’re going and nowhere else, and you know what’s coming next.

In that Dublin solo, thicker than this, Jean appeared to be unpacking all of that. Not tossing it away in favor of something new, not even holding it up for commentary or critique, but rifling around inside of those constraints, asking “What more is in here?” and churning up wonderfully awkward, off-kilter curiosities. She was finding something unfamiliar, while digging further into something ingrained, something not worth letting go of. And she was claiming her place as a serious soloist, unfettered by the ostentatious male partners that have become routine in commercial Irish dance, with its many Riverdance spinoffs. Even when she performed in Tere O’Connor’s Day, a solo that, supposedly, had nothing to do with Irish dance, she brought those qualities innate to the form and her interpretation of it: an alert focus, a regal bearing, an exacting physicality.

When Jean took her place next to that pillar at Danspace Project, she arrived, in my eyes, with all of this behind her. That moment of stillness was the opening of a new solo, hurry, which she created with the choreographer Jon Kinzel’s direction. What unfolded over the next fleeting half-hour—in the porous, contemplative atmosphere conjured by Jim Dawson’s score—struck me as a deepening of the playful sketch she had begun those years ago in Dublin. At once cultivating and tearing up the roots of a rigorous tradition, she revealed her own vocabulary, one of loosely snaking foot patterns, flamingo-like poses, and windswept skitters that tumbled out in the form of figure-eights. The subtle intensity of her exploration reached its peak when, from a soundscape of passing cars, murmuring voices, and galloping hooves emerged the hum of uillean pipes (played by Ivan Goff)—a welcome nod to her past. And present. Her stammering steps, inching backward on a zig-zagging diagonal, layered urgency on top of their plangent drone.

The prevailing impression in hurry was one of continuous discovery: a body’s thorough investigation of the space around it, its negotiation of what its arms and legs, its wrists and palms, its ankles and the soles of its feet can do. What does it mean to go down to the ground and stand up again? How does looking over my right shoulder compare with looking over my left? What if I balance on one leg and see where I can go from there, leaning off of center just a little?

And what would happen, I wonder, if Jean struck out fully on her own, without the input of another choreographer? Irish dance training is a system of being told what to do; that part might be worth leaving behind, just to see what lies beyond it.

Siobhan Burke writes for The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, and Dance Magazine.

Heather Olson in Susan Rethorst’s “Behold Bold Sam Dog.” Photo: Johanna Austin.

This weekend, the PClub had its first official out-of-town gig, as part of a marvelous weekend at Bryn Mawr, built around the dances of Susan Rethorst ( I got to write a catalog essay about one of my favorite choreographers. Happiness…).

Saturday was jam packed, beginning with my first time performing a John Cage score.   And in such company. Douglas Dunn, Elizabeth Streb, Ann Waldman and I all did renditions of How to Get Started, working in collaboration with the sound wizard Peter Price. In between and after our Cagean experiments in thinking, there were two Rethorst works: 208 East Broadway Part 5 and Behold Bold Sam Dog. Then those of us who weren’t art-exhausted gathered for a PClub discussion about what it is to look at art, what art asks from its audience, what our expectations are … all of those never-ending questions …

The next day I had the terrific good fortune to lead a writing workshop with the thoughtful and engaging folks of thINKingDANCE, a Philly organization (co-founded by Anna Drozdowski and Lisa Kraus) that exists to develop writing & thinking about dance. Produced in response to Rethorst’s choreography, the excerpts below offer a taste of what this group is up to. I hope there will be many more TD-PC collaborations to come:

Lisa Bardarson
Behold Bold Sam Dog

Behold Bold Sam Dog is not a dance about a dog named Sam. In fact, it’s not  about anything!  I believe it is simply about experiencing how Rethorst builds phrases of precise lines, deconstructs them and then puts them back together again. Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 provides a campy backdrop and like the choreography, snippets of this composition are introduced in kaleidoscopic fashion throughout the work.  A Beatles tune is also brought in and I’m not sure why. And maybe that’s the point.  Rethorst’s work is all about her finely crafted movement phrases getting thrown onto the canvas of the stage, Jackson Pollock style.   Wham!  Here’s  a beautifully crafted unison section.  Splat!  It’s the repeating duet motif again.  Kaboom!  The lone jeté woman is back again making me think of a prehistoric raptor looking for its next lunch.  And while I’m not a big fan of Pollock, it’s kind of cool and fun and well, why not?  Why does the art I prefer have to be linear?   Perhaps what Rethorst is offering is a chance to mix it up a little and offer some contrast to the predictability of  time’s transit through space.

*

Susan Rethorst’s “208 East Broadway Part 5.” L to R: Jungeun Kim and K.C. Chun-Manning. Photo: Johanna Austin.

Ellen Gerdes
208 East Broadway Part 5

Five women.  Poke in the shoulder.  Sideways glance.  Red couch.  Bodies placed on a table.  Silence.  Crash to the floor.  Things strewn about.  Brush of the side of the hand. Reference to Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance.  Reference to ballroom dance.  Unison gestures on olive green chairs.  Pillows under sweaters.  Ballet barre at the table.  Toss of the arms.  Gasp.  Wooden slats as guns.  Wooden slats as balancing act.  Fashion show of retro sweatshirts.  Squirming, in the light of a lamp.  Backwards walk.

Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me) plays on repeat. A projection of a park zooms in on a basketball court, where two men stretch against a fence. I’m not sure whether or not we recognize them. Two dancers shuffle around the stage as if wearing high heels, their hands lazily flopping side-to-side. Michelle Stortz presents herself to the audience with a toothy smile and a frozen pose; Jung-eun Kim lifts her thumbs, opens her arms wide, and tosses a ball across her body with her gaze.  They play with touching each other’s hearts. Stortz opens Kim’s arms, gently hugging Kim with just her hands.

There is always cause and effect.  There is only cause and effect.

*

Kristen Gillette
208 East Broadway Part 5

We enter the through a side stage door. Dancers are lounging on chairs and lying on tables as we sit on the side of the stage. We’re part of the set, hanging out in their living room. At first, we see only four dancers, until one begins removing the cushions from the back of a futon: voila, a fifth dancer appears.

*

Patricia Graham
Behold Bold Sam Dog

Behold Bold Sam Dog… Women water straw folding saw.

The first time I see this piece I can’t collect my thoughts. I see it again and wonder.

What motivates this movement? Not restlessness, even though it keeps coming and coming. There is so much; yet it doesn’t gush up from a well either. Like the description of enlightenment from Buddhist writings, describing the ineffable by saying what its not.

The six women dance with loose-jointed precision. Their hands are soft, gaze unaffected. Calm and casual, they measure the outline of one another’s shoulders and the narrow space they define comes to life. Rethorst is continually framing and reframing the action and our attention; moving from the personal boundaries of the body out to the skin of the dance. We follow from small to big and back again.

Each moment comes forward to me in immediacy if I can stay on the edge with it. I am in the practice, with the choreographer, of being present.

*

Kirsten Kaschock
208 East Broadway Part 5

208 East Broadway Part 5 is a well-crafted thing with beguiling moments, gestures that very nearly point to meaning and then don’t.  Absolutely don’t.

In Buddhism, there is a phrase: “the closed hand of the teacher.”  It is used to talk about the withholding that happens in the name of mastery.  Humans are meaning-making creatures.  I can interpret this dance endlessly.  The dancers are Rethorst’s neurons firing; it’s a retelling of No Exit or commentary on rental prices in Manhattan for women seeking rooms of their own.  I can find poetry on shampoo bottles. “Infused with/sea algae extract/and vitamin E” scans beautifully.  Its vowel progression is almost melodic.

*

Lisa Kraus
Behold Bold Sam Dog

The tremors shaking Jodi Melnick’s delicate frame toss her around a velvety dark space now this way now that, sending her flame-red hair flying. They appear as the readout of a changeable mind, a registration of her desire, her repugnance, her consideration.

This and the other happenings in Susan Rethorst’s Behold Bold Sam Dog read less as a narrative than as a musical kind of framework – Rethorst hits a bunch of tones and qualities with emotional resonance, whether of aching aloneness, dear tenderness or goofy grandiosity. In the course of Behold Bold many sequences recur, changed, amplified or fractured. The dance reads like a careening carousel—we come around again and again, each time on a different horse.

Jodi Melnick in Susan Rethorst’s “Behold Bold Sam Dog.” Photo: Johanna Austin.

John Cage

i did this thing

this weekend, as part of this

something i had never done before … tried to make a poem in public, as a performance, a poem that was criticism too, with no preparation as to what words i would use

it wasn’t my idea, it was his

i had really great help

after i got over being terrified, it was the most fun i’ve had in ages….

By Ryan Tracy

Most of the critical response to Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, has centered primarily on the film’s treatment of American slavery and the prolific deployment of the word “nigger.” While these are, obviously, well, obvious entries into the work, I would like to add to this body of racial-historical critical response to Django a queer analysis, or, an analysis of this film from the perspective of normativity and what I will eventually call queer assimilation.

(Pre)conditions

First, allow me to say that I am not suggesting that a queer analysis per se would be at all or entirely distinct from, a racial analysis. Any queer thinker worth her salt knows that notions of race, sexuality and gender comprise an epistemological knot of Gordian design. I only wish to consider how a queer theoretical approach to  Django might illuminate certain aspects of the social logics and performative implications of racism we might not otherwise notice through a solely historical or social-theoretical framework.

Second, it will no doubt be difficult to overcome the lingering association between “queer” and “gay,” or “homosexual.” I am not disavowing this connection, and it will come up (if only tangentially) in Django. But the “gay” of “queer,” I would argue, is most likely key to why queer theory and queer theoretical practices have not found more mainstream reception, and has no doubt stunted (at least in the early days) queer theory’s application to areas of inquiry that seem not to deal explicitly with sexuality. Endemic homophobia probably precludes much popular investment in the term “queer”; both from those who would rather just keep using “queer” as a handy epithet to hurl at weirdos, but also from LGBT people who still associate the word with a fairly high degree of negativity. We could argue that “queer theory,” in this way, is already unintelligible, or, is already queer. With this essay, I hope to make queer theory somewhat more accessible to cultural analysis that does not center on sexuality, and also to perform a slight intervention on what we think is queer, and what we claim to be antithetical to queer projects.

Ex/abs/traction

We get our first taste of the queer, not through the film’s titular character, but through the dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Cristoph Waltz) who frees Django (Jamie Foxx) and draws him into the family business, eventually helping Django find his wife, Broomhilde (Kerry Washington). The excised tooth atop Dr. Schult’z  wagon cart, bobbing through the “straight” landscapes of the Wild West, should remain a delectable and indelible icon of queer representation in cinema. Its utter failure to adhere to classic Western sensibilities of manly directness and spinal rectitude is a stroke of queer genius, signaling the first eddy of “something isn’t what it should be” that begins to disturb the hegemonic logics of white supremacy and slavery that ostensibly serve as the film’s premise.

But it is through language that Dr. Schultz’s queerness is primarily marked. His unintelligibility to “Southern” folk is produced not only by his ethnic foreignness (he’s German and speaks with an accent), but also through the “highness” of the English that he does speak. It is toward Dr. Schultz that the phrase “fancy pants” (a true Tarantinism) is first deployed. Fancy is coded both spatially and in terms of race and gender, suggesting superiority, effeminacy, and an aristocratic and etiolating brand of whiteness. Dr. Schultz is often asked by his (Southern-white-racist-slave supporting) interlocutors to “speak English.” In the context of Django, a command of occidental English is queer to the point of not being “English” at all. (It might behoove us to question the persistent association of Southern speech and ignorance in Django, especially in light of the American liberal backlash against the South after Barack Obama won presidential re-election.)

Language is constantly being negotiated as a site of power in Django. In a slightly syrupy passage, Dr. Schultz teaches Django how to read from a “Wanted” poster. Django is then able to assert his power when a white man asks him if he knows how to spell his name; and he does: The (queer) D is silent. (We might also interrogate why Django must accept that his name begins with a silent letter.)

Django’s assumption to power is not only what primarily defines the queerness of Django, but more importantly illustrates a kind of queer doing that constitutes a process of assimilation. Now. In (most?) queer circles, “assimilation” is anathema. It is expressly not the goal of those who understand queerness as an always oppositional or oblique strategy to achieving new possibilities of difference. Yet it is here that I would ask us to examine what is queer about assimilation, and in so doing dislodge queer theory’s claim to categorical alterity as the end of queer theory. While certain queer theorists might argue that queer theory is not deterministic and is in fact “open-ended,” the simultaneous and frequent calls for queer inquiry to lend itself to radical leftist or social justice projects suggests otherwise.

“Is that a nigger on a horse?”

Said (more or less) twice in the film, this proposition—”a nigger on a horse”—summarizes the queer assimilation of Django. When Dr. Schultz frees Django, he gives him a horse and enables Django literally to assume a position of authority and, provisionally, equality with white folk. The upwardness of this move, physically and subjectively, is key here; consider the “up” in the racialized epithet uppity.. In this way Django’s rise to power embodies precisely the kind of assimilationist politics of the supposedly “main stream” LG(B?)(T?) movement(s) with which many queer thinkers and activists take issue. Like gays-fighting-for-marriage, Django-on-a-horse does not upend the tyrannical system of binary racial oppression. Rather, it allows our hero to assume a place at the table of oppressors.

This strategy produces an undeniable and uneasy tension in the film. When Django poses as a “Mandingo trader” (I have not the will to explain this; please use the internet), he has to witness, allow and participate in cruelty toward slaves. This choice is justified in the film by Django’s ultimate goal of reuniting with Broomhilde, who is being kept as a slave at Candy Land, the plantation of eccentric Mississippi slaver Calvin J. Candy (Leonardo DiCaprio). That Django’s choice to do this is predicated on the re-constitution of the heteronormative institution of marriage (the fact that Broomhilde is Django’s “wife” is used to buttress Django’s at-any-cost effort to reunite with her) should give us pause. But this and the assimilative nature of Django’s move should not foreclose our understanding of this move as queer within the limited vector of racial relations.

If we understand queerness as a fundamentally relational phenomena—that is, as the product of social relationships—then we must conclude queerness will be produced, and therefore, intelligible, only through interactivity. The queerness of Django’s position on top of a horse is continually illustrated by the agog of Southern white people. The double-take is perhaps the ultimate signification of queer intelligibility when registered in the normatively wired mind. “I have to read that again because I can’t believe what I read at first.” The if-then logic of white, racist mentality goes something like, “If black, then a nigger. If a nigger, then a slave. And if a slave, then walking.” The corresponding inversion would be, “If on a horse, then not a slave. If not a slave, then not a nigger. If not a nigger, then white.” The horse-mounted Django upends these logics. And it is that upending that, I am arguing, constitutes queerness. In other words, in the antebellum South, a black person, per se, is not queer. A black person in chains is normal, which is to say that a black person as a slave is normal. What is not normal, or, what goes against the normative paradigm of the racism-slavery intersection is: a nigger on a horse.

But Django’s ascension to the horse (in oblique facsimile to Kehinde Wiley’s “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps”) is not—I repeat, not—a leftist project of social justice. It is a liberal project of equality in power over others, realized through a queer performance of resignification, otherwise known as revolution. By revolution, I mean not the destruction of a normative apparatus of power then replaced by an alternative and non-normative apparatus of power, but, rather, the rearrangement and accommodation of variation within a normative apparatus of power plus a re-establishment of normative operations. In this view, assimilation would seem more a process of revolution, and less the antithesis of what is queer. The achievement of gay marriage can be understood as a limited queer project of upending if-then heteronormativity. It is limited in that it upends only the “if married, then heterosexual” logic. The heteronormatively wired mind performs a double-take when confronted with two brides planted atop a wedding cake. However, what gay marriage does not upend is the if-then logic of “If married, then powerful,” which is the same normative assumption of power that Django-on-a-horse also fails to contest. The horse as a super-positional signifier of normative power remains. Django has achieved provisional equality with white folk, but he has done so as an Individual, for the sake of conjugal love, and at the expense of others left feet in mud.

Django as a film embodies this limited, individualistic queer revolution. Tarantino has said that one of his goals in making the film was, in effect, to give the genre of the Western a black hero; in other words, to raise a black character into the dusty echelon of Hollywood’s Marlborough men. In this sense, Django is what Django does. Queer mission accomplished. Even if, to a neo-liberal project of individualism, this particular mission remains indelibly chained.

Ryan Tracy is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer currently studying in Budapest, Hungary.

By Siobhan Burke

I am sitting at the threshold of the Expo Hall, where the performing artists (or their agents and managers, representatives and administrators, depending on what’s in the budget) have come to peddle their wares. My outpost, a bench across from the escalators, abuts the “Relaxation Station,” where weary convention-goers can lay down their iPads and rest a moment, indulge in a shoulder rub or one of those vibrating foot massages. An imposing row of kiosks and skirted tables lines the long, glossy corridor. Here, the unregistered hand over their credit cards, and the registered form lines according to first letter, last name.

“IMAGINE,” “WELCOME,” read the signs above the double doorway leading to the Expo Hall. “DON’T MISS THESE EVENTS,” “IT’S ALL HAPPENING IN THE EXPO HALL,” urges a flashing flat-screen monitor nearby. The carpeted expanse beyond beckons. At the moment, though, I really can only imagine. I’m just a few strides away—but to get any further, I’m going to need a badge.

I should have known: you don’t just drop by the “global performing arts marketplace and conference” that is APAP/NYC. You don’t just show up at the midtown Hilton in a spirit of unfocused curiosity, as if embarking on some sort of art project, to check it out or get a feel for what goes into the buying and selling of live performance. It’s like Christmas; people have been planning for this since it ended last year. “You . . . didn’t register online?” asks one of the six genial young women whom I encounter in my 90-minute effort to secure an orange slip of paper, sheathed in a plastic case, dangling from a lanyard. “Just so you know, our web registration was open for quite some time.”

My badge-acquiring mission begins at a crescent-shaped counter and takes me figure-eighting between name-tagged personnel ensconced behind similar counters. I progress from “Information” to “Onsite Registration” to “Special Inquiries” (I think it’s called) to “Press,” just an arm’s length away from where I started.

While filling out a form that asks me what I’m doing here, waiting for the person who (I’ve been assured) possesses badge-granting authority, a depleted-looking woman wanders over. “Do you have any information about the conference other than this?” she asks the assistant in the blazer, holding up a wafer-like Pocket Guide to APAP/NYC. “Are you registered?” the assistant replies, looking up from her page of ornate doodles. The woman shakes her head—“It’s too much, I can’t afford it,” she confides—and walks away empty-handed.

“Sorry for the wait!” says the assistant.

“That’s all right!” I say, glancing at her doodle, which has evolved into a nice cartoon etching of an alien-robot.

When the bearer of badges arrives, she swiftly assembles her iPad and wireless keyboard so I can prove that I am, in fact, a writer. I Google my own archive of blog posts and scroll through a few of them. “Thanks,” she says. “It’s just, we have a very limited number of badges.” When she asks what I plan to write, I tell her I’m not really sure. I spend a lot of time seeing performances, I say, but I don’t know much about the industry surrounding it all, and I want to start by just getting a sense of “the ambiance” in the Expo Hall. “Maybe focus on the business side of things?” she suggests. “Since that’s where all the business deals go down.”

But as it turns out, even once endowed with a badge and supplementary materials—a coveted spiral-bound program book, an APAP membership pamphlet that teases “Imagine Belonging: Association of Performing Arts Presenters”—I won’t make it into the Expo Hall that day. “Sorry, no media allowed,” says the stern man (grey hair, navy blue suit) at the entryway. “The exhibitors are setting up their booths. There’s nothing to see. Come back at 2 o’clock, or tomorrow.”

When I return two days later, I sail right through the Expo Hall doors, into the fluorescent-lit maze of booths sporting banners and stacks of brochures, staffed by dutiful servants of the arts. The scene is at once terrifically colorful and tremendously banal. Every conceivable kind of arts organization has staked out its territory: family theater bumps up against commercial entertainment bumps up against regional music and culturally specific dance. Folklore Productions International, The Mystical Arts of Tibet, Dutch Performing Arts, Double Grande Entertainment, Cirque-tacular Entertainment, The Paul Taylor Dance Company, Gilday Magic Show, Nebraska Theatre Caravan, IMG Artists, The New York Neofuturists, The Broadway Boys: it really is “all happening” in the Expo Hall.

As I saunter up and down the aisles, I get the feeling that eyes are feasting on my orange badge, a hunch that actress-singer Penelope later confirms. “If you have the white or blue badge, people are like, Oh, she can’t get us work.” (These colors, I gather, are reserved for exhibitors or volunteers.) “But if you have another color tag or no tag, people are like who are you?”

Penelope is manning the booth for The Construction Company, a nonprofit based in the Flatiron District that presents contemporary music, dance, and visual art. For the five days of APAP each January, she tells me, The Construction Company serves as an umbrella organization for 10 small modern dance groups. This structure allows artists to pool their resources, sharing the cost of a booth ($850 to $1870, depending on the size) and the work of putting on a showcase. It also eases the hustle of getting presenters’ attention. “You can cross-pollinate,” says Penelope’s fellow booth attendant, Rachel, who directs one of the 10 troupes, Racoco/Rx. “There might be a presenter who clearly, what I do is not right for them. But I know that my colleague would be perfect, so you get more out of it than you could if you were just by yourself.”

But what of the eye-rolling cynicism that so many artists seem to feel toward APAP and its meat-market atmosphere? Penelope describes the conference as “equally inspiring and frustrating or demoralizing, because you have this sense of all of these opportunities and ideas about who to collaborate with, and then quickly the reality is that they’re not the opportunities you thought and they don’t happen quickly. You can have the greatest tour on earth, and it can fall apart, and it happens all the time.”

She goes on: “It’s very expensive, and it’s time-intensive. Small dance companies that are paying dancers but don’t really have operating funding, they have to rehearse all through the holiday break to prepare work for this, so you gotta get your publicity materials together and —”

“—make all your color copies,” Rachel interjects, “and then you get here and realize that you forgot to print out a certain thing and you only have enough for three press kits and then some guy comes to the free showcase and eats the food and takes your press kit but he’s just some guy who comes all the time.”

At a panel discussion two days ago, Rachel says, “I quit and then restarted my company about 10 times in my mind.”

Penelope adds: “The pressure that’s already on choreographers to do every job in order to keep a company running is really intense over these few days. But they do it. That’s the amazing thing: year after year, people do it.”

We get to talking about the pressures on presenters to please their audiences, to shy away from “riskier” work. “I hear presenters saying they can’t lose money on ticket sales right now,” Penelope says. “Post-recession, things are coming back, but they have to fill seats. I’ve had so many say, ‘My aesthetic for what I want to program is something so different from what I have to do to keep my theater right now.’ They’ll come by and be like “I love this kind of stuff! We’re bringing in The Nutcracker.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with The Nutcracker.”

At which point Rachel exits the conversation to chase after a presenter she’s been courting, before 6 p.m. comes and the Expo Hall load-out begins.

Siobhan Burke writes for The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times and Dance Magazine, where she is an associate editor.