Posts tagged queer

                                             By Cassie Peterson

Katy Pyle’s, The Firebird is a feminist direct action and a queer confrontation, making it anything but your typical ballet. No, this is a Ballez; a ballet-inspired theatrical process, featuring an all female-assigned, lesbian/queer/transmasculine cast, that redefines the traditional gender roles, technical expectations, and dominant narratives of ballet. Ballez seeks new embodied expression through the queering of classical forms. In order to challenge the heteronormativity implicit in ballet, Pyle deconstructs balletic elements: physical training, theatricality, and presentational performance, and reconstitutes them into a community-oriented, gender-fluid, queer utopian vision of what is possible in dance. Through Ballez, Pyle has made ballet available to untrained, queer bodies. In this process, Ballez strives for the complexity, beauty, and grace of classical ballet forms, while simultaneously breaking all the rules. Ballez allows for struggle and misfire, aiming at a standard, but missing it entirely.

In this version of The Firebird, we follow a yearning, Lesbian Princess and a Tranimal (part bird, part prince) as they seek liberation in a magically perverse landscape of polyamorous Princes and their dominant Sorceress. Accompanied by the Queer Urban Orchestra, and a cast of 15 queer performers, this work positions itself as part of a long lineage of radical, experimental ballet companies, including one of its inspirations, the Ballet Russes. Throughout her creative process, Pyle utilized the outline of the original “Firebird” ballet created by Mikhail Fokine and Igor Stravinsky in 1910. She read Fokine’s journals, which shaped her narrative structure and aesthetic choices. In this, she was particularly moved by his idea that “each ballet’s movements should be specific to the culture it represents.” Therefore, Ballez explores and communicates movements and embodiment specific to the queerfeminist culture that Pyle and her cast so unequivocally inhabit.

PERFORMING QUEER FAILURE TOGETHER, FOREVER:

I completely failed at this essay, the first time I wrote it. It was too long and it read like a string of theoretical bullet points. In response, my editors used words like “dense” and “impersonal.” I had in fact, written myself out of the piece, an act of total self-effacement. What got lost was my experience of the Ballez, the feelings it incited in me, and the effects of seeing my own community do this incredible thing together, on stage. With a pressing deadline and an overwhelming desire to perfectly document everything, my voice slowly disappeared and was replaced with a barrage of academic citations (which I have since removed). I had managed to write around the primary, organizing principle of Ballez: it’s a project of connection and togetherness. At the core of Pyle’s interest is generating and capturing community interaction; queer folks coming together for classes, rehearsals, and performances over time.

Ballez is a communal state where magic is possible and perfection is not.  It’s a place where all the awkward struggles of being a sexual minority in the world dissipate and are replaced with the nobility of queer relations. This is what you’re seeing on stage — a community in full bloom, each individual pulled out momentarily from their particular alienations and isolations and placed together like a bumpy, beautiful, jigsaw puzzle, composed of vegetarian potlucks, cats, astrological signs, and burnt sage. This is some serious Deep Lez, Earth Goddess Mother, howl-at-the-moon shit.

I had the pleasure of joining the Ballez Company at Mount Tremper Arts during their residency there in March. Stepping into a Ballez rehearsal was like a homecoming I never knew I wanted or needed. The first night I arrived, we each pulled our totem animal card from the deck and shared it with the group. A polar bear, a snake, a firebird. Yes, the firebird. There was a Reiki session going on in the corner on someone’s twisted ankle. Someone else was doing a past life reading/ritual. Someone else was processing a bad break-up, and eventually the whole scene devolved into an ecstatic dance party in the woods, snow on the ground, a shooting star, hip hop blaring from someone’s small, but effective iPod speakers. There was a wildness in everyone’s eyes, their physical fatigue turned inside out and manifest as endless laughter.

My original (failed) essay was defensive, fraught with a fortress of impenetrable language. Without knowing it, I was trying to defend or protect the Ballez and myself within it. So many representations of queerness are intrinsically defensive, formed in reaction to that which is deemed normal or “right.” But the Ballez is not defended, nor does it require defense. It unabashedly exists as an open-hearted, vulnerable expression of queerfeminist intimacies. This intimacy is a fortunate residue from all the immense partnering exercises devised by Pyle: gazing into each other’s eyes every day, standing at the barre again and again, cutting each other’s hair, cooking for one another, and playing Scrabble. In this Ballez world, opportunities for intimate connection are multiple, making this performance a symbol for the ever-extending queer family that created it.

In rehearsal the following morning in March, Pyle and performers talked about queer coming-of-age traditions like softball, clubbing, and sex and found ways to have those things inform their movement, their manner, and their embodiment. In this overarching physical inqueery, Pyle has altered balletic movement to account for and incorporate two female-assigned bodies. Physical strength, power, and position are more equally distributed amongst the dancers, breaking from the more traditional gendered movements found in ballet. Inspired by modern ballet formulations, she and her dancers are working to discover and refine a kind of physics-based partnering that allows female-assigned people, of various sizes, to lift one another. Throughout this process, questions arose about how queer experience creates alternative alignments, movements and patterns of interaction within bodies, thus creating a kind of re-imagined choreography that showcases the imperfection of untrained, queer bodies.

Lesbian feminist writer, Monique Wittig, refers to society’s heteronormative schema as the “Straight Mind” whereby all social and psychic phenomena are interpreted through a heterosexual lens[1]. Ballez is a direct challenge to the “Straight Mind” but also to what we could term the “Straight Body.” Pyle uses Ballez to explore the alternative idiosyncrasies of the queer body. These are bodies “trained” and shaped via other, marginal means, revealing a virtuosity and grace, perhaps not legible through a normative gaze. Pyle wanted to know,         

       What does ballet look like inside of a genderqueer body?

       What does ballet DO in a queer body?  

These bodies are sly and slouched. They have binded breasts and a calculated way of hiding their hips. They are masculine, but petite. Years of living as sexual minorities manifest as a kind of armored resiliency, a learned toughness and campiness that is revealed in every one of their off-beat movements.

This Firebird has a campy, Do-It-Yourself, basement feel to it. It features Hedia Maron’s video installation with silhouetted, cut-out, paper figures traversing an enchanted forest and Mikki Olson’s costumes, which have both a homemade and grandiose quality to them – paper mache hats and red-painted football pads. And there are 15 queer bodies in a space together, approaching the problem of being in a ballet, while not being fully equipped to perform its original expectations. What ensues is beautiful, funny, and devastating. Ballez features many different body types, each with varying degrees of dance training and yet Pyle has managed to incorporate them all into semi-coherent patternings. But when these dancers move together, there is a striving for something that cannot be fully realized. When they stand next to one another, the lines are loose and incongruent. Uniformity is attempted, but heart-breakingly impossible. Pyle has intentionally allowed for the discrepancy between actualized formalism and the lack of dance training to be evident, front and center. What emerges in a different kind of vocabulary, where lifts are not as high, lines are not as straight, timing is less exacting. The rigor of formal ballet training is replaced with the failure to meet these standards.

BUTCH PRINCE REALNESS:

Yet, in this failure, there is a contagious, charged energy that pervades the Ballez space; not that everyone is sleeping together, but that they could be. And that, maybe you would want to join them. Ballez challenges the heteronormative gaze by bringing queer desire to the fore without any apology or reticence, without any covert coding that keeps everyone safe from discomfort or inquisition. The femme-top lesbian princess desires the tranimal in all of his various incarnations and in-betweeness. She reaches out to him in his fire red, fringe-leather jacket, and pulls him close, before lifting him up near her head. Later, with her dark, severe eyebrows and long lean body, the sorceress is like a dominatrix who loves all the princes in a crazysexycool, sado-masochistic manner. They obediently hold her up above them while she punishingly pushes them away. And finally, all the freshly shorn, spandex-clad, polyamorous princes lust after one another, unapologetically.

In one scene, The Corps de Ballez — the cast of twelve “butch princes” enter the stage after the opening solos, with fruit/phallus in hand. They proceed to dance in a line, touching each other’s fruit, picking it up and dropping it in each other’s tights, smelling, tasting, affirming one another’s desire. The first time I encountered these princes, I was overwhelmed with both excitement and pangs of grief because it is such a rare experience to see female masculinity[2] afforded so much space and attention. The princes are soft, handsome, funny, and full of faggotry. They are adoring and adored. They exert a gentle strength, holding one another’s heads, lifting, carrying, and attending to one another. The princes’ choreography inscribes a kind of tender, vulnerable masculinity that at times takes on maternal qualities. In this welcoming tenderness, this Corps de Ballez offers a soothing, pedestrian relief to an otherwise intense story of love and loss. They function like the queer commons; it’s a place to see ourselves reflected back with a kind of kinetic mirroring and twinship. Yes. We are all princes. We are all Ballez.

It is through this unmitigated eros and community recognition that Ballez undermines the normative, buttoned-up, ethereal aspirations of traditional ballet and replaces them with queer elements of perversity, marginality, fluidity, and failure. Queer challenges the strive for universalities and disrupts the order of things. It is antagonistic and provocative. It complicates the ease in which we come to “know” things. Queer is the failure to adhere or assimilate to social mandates. It fails. Queer is already always failure. And Pyle and company have created an epic spectacle of this queer failure. These performers fail time and time again at balletic expectations. The fail at compulsory heterosexuality. They fail at socially constructed gender binaries. And they fail at normative, narrative resolution. Ballez performs on its own failed set of terms while also revealing the failures of the forms that try to constrict it.

After failing at my original essay, I then felt empowered to write whatever I wanted. Similarly, Pyle and company are free to create something different, something way out of bounds. This is the unsanitized queer experience. Failing so good, together forever.

                               A Queer Reading of Queer Dance  

Please read my essay/review/love letter to Jen Rosenblit and Vanessa Anspaugh’s newest performances at New York Live Arts — originally published on the performing arts site, Culturebot.

                                              Excerpt/Teaser:

At the beginning of the piece, five badass performers – Aretha Aoki, Niall Noel Jones, Molly Leiber, Lydia Okrent, and Mary Read – mark up the theater in grid-like gestures. They produce literal lines and divisions on the walls and the floor. They create these divisions with chalk and flour and then spend the rest of the performance skewing the lines in the most exquisite and grandiose fashion. They roll around in their own ephemeral boundaries — disrupting them, blurring them with a total abandon and taking unabashed pleasure in their demise. The dancers queer the lines that they themselves have drawn, making a beautifully depraved mess of themselves and the space. It’s an ecstatic refusal to be bound — and a celebration of the parts of self & other that can only exist in the queer, in-between spaces that arise when ‘The Known’ crumbles.

                                                Return the Critical Gayze!

Dear Editor(s),

My name is Cassie Peterson and I am a conceptual collaborator for Vanessa Anspaugh’s new dance piece, entitled Armed Guard Garden, which is premiering at New York Live Arts on February 15^th. This morning, Vanessa and I noticed that in your brief preview of the show, you have changed the phrase “queer body” (from the original press release), to perhaps a more socially acceptable signifier, “gay body.” First, I want to acknowledge and empathize with your hesitation to print the word “queer” for a more general public. However, your decision to change the word erases the ways in which queer has been linguistically re-appropriated and reclaimed by many sexual minorities as a source of great power and pride. The word queer represents a kind of pluralistic (un)identity that works to unsettle and undo fixed sexual and gender identifications. Queer understands all binary categorizations to be socially constructed and contextual. In this way, queer is underpinned by a radicalized politic that is more interested in challenging historically (hetero)normative expectations, power arrangements, and practices, rather than simply joining them.

Additionally, Queer Theory/Queer Studies has become a very well-known and legitimate theoretical framework within the Academy and supports critical thinker and writers like Judith Butler, Judith “Jack” Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz,  just to name a few. It is no longer just some pejorative hate speech. What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t just belong to the master anymore. It’s ours and we want to use it.

Moreover, your decision to replace the word queer with gay is also just very inaccurate. There is nothing about Vanessa’s piece that is “about” gay bodies. This is a far too literal and specific summary of her work. Whereas, queer in this context is not referring to LGBTQ-specific content per say, but is rather a meditation on a kind of embodied resistance and transgression. It is more of a strategy than a total personhood. Queer is more a reference to process and practice than content.

This is not just some minor semantic quarrel. Your choice has bigger implications. To conflate “gay” with “queer” and vice versa is to do neither one of these signifiers justice. Though they are related, these identities have different political connotations and agendas. Queer is an anti-normative framework(s) and consciousness that is a purposeful departure from a more mainstream, assimilationist gay and lesbian agenda. In the thinking, writing, and creating of the project, Armed Guard Garden, we have very deliberately chosen to use the word queer to communicate and represent a set of principles and way(s) of knowing. The choice to use the word queer was an incredibly political, conceptual, and aesthetic decision. I request that you please change it back to restore our original intentions and the integrity of our disruptive and transgressive queer vision(s).

Respectfully yours,

Cassie Peterson

**Post Script: The editor replied, apologized, but still refused to change the words back to the ways we had written them. They also refused to publish my letter so I have done it here, myself.

              QUEER/QUEERING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS   

by Cassie Peterson                

A queer theoretical framework and method is a particular Poststructural mode of analysis, focusing primarily on the effects of reified, binary constructions of gender and sexual identities.There is no essential queer object or subject. Queer is not an objectifiable identity, domain, or dwelling, but is rather produced as a contrast against which normalcy is established. Hence,queer never is, it never fully arrives. It is always, disrupting, refusing, and resisting the ever-shifting power of (hetero)normativity and dominance.

Thus, grounded in queer theory’s postpositivist position of anti-normativity, queer discourse analysis operates as a mode of textual analysis that examines heteronormative phenomena through the problematization of binary constructions rooted in the notion of fixed or stable gender and sexual identities.

This contestation, a queering of dominant cultural norms and referents, imbues queer methods with the potential to create the causes and conditions for alternative epistemes to emerge.

                                                     Abstract (Teaser) 

The social work profession has an enduring history of commitment to American families; in fact, it has often led the way in embracing alternative family arrangements within the discipline itself and for society at large. Currently in society at large, LGBTQ families are gaining more political visibility and lobbying for rights and protections from which they were previously excluded. Therefore, this study is an analysis of social work’s contemporary, defining representations of LGBTQ families. Twelve LGBTQ “family” research studies were culled from the database, Social Work Abstracts, and subjected to queer discourse analysis in order to illuminate how these alternative family forms are being constructed within the discipline. This analysis details the multiple ways in which heterosexual norms are privileged throughout the research studies. For example, the heterosexual family is often constructed as an unchallenged index for psychological health, appropriate partnering and child rearing practices, social acceptability, and general normative behavior. Therefore, LGBTQ relationships often earn their “family” designations by their ability to approximate these legible, heteronormative “family” characteristics. As such, this queer discourse analysis indicates that LGBTQ families are ultimately invited to join, but not to change the traditional terms of “family,” thus making the social work research less of an exploration of alternative family forms and more of an endorsement of same-sex, nuclear families. By clinging to (hetero)normative, nuclear family features, social work misses out on the richness, creativity, and diversity of the queer family/kinship laboratory and also fails to validate or make available alternative relationship possibilities for everyone.

Keywords: heteronormativity; queer theory; nuclear family; discourse analysis; kinship

THE BURN, October 2011.

OTHER:

Can you bear my imperfectly perfect reception?

Love,

An Other

OTHER Again, (unprompted):

I revisited my response to your poem—it’s inadequate. I had the feeling in my chest as I wrote it; frankly, though, you are speaking about forces so great that take great living into over many years.  Inner heat, and tranquility—the abyss of alone and so forth….I read something in Faust almost immediately after responding to you and was struck with how queerly the themes are so similar…they are great themes—please, forgive my paltry response.

Love,

An Other

SELF:

Sorry for the delayed response… we’ve been without power since the great NorEaster. I also just sat in line for 2 hours waiting for gasoline… reminiscent of a time, way before my time. Well, not way before my time.. but a moment before.