A rabbit hole of (self-)references, revised

It’s Friday night. Black Box Theater is opening a new season and the foyer is packed with people. The scenography ofDancer of the Year – a piano

Dancer of the Year

Choreography, performance, sound, costumes: Trajal Harrell.

Dramaturgy: Sara Jansen.

Production: CauseCelebre vzw.

Distribution: Art Happens.

Co-production: Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussel), Kanal – Centre Pompidou (Brussel), ImPulsTanz (Wien), Schauspielhaus Bochum (Bochum), Bit Teatergarasjen (Bergen), Festival d’Automne (Paris), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), Museum Ludwig (Köln), Dampfzentrale (Bern).

Black Box teater, Oslo, Auugst 30.-31. 2019

bench, a small table with a computer, a large straw mat with a red carpet on it, a white backdrop – is all in place for the ‘dancer of the year’ to arrive

I saw this worka couple of months ago during Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. One of the exciting things about seeing a performance more than once is seeing how the relationship between context and content shifts with each other. Especially in the case of this dance solo, a different staging alters not only my perception and reading, but also my memory of it.

Dressed in dance-training outfit and carrying a bag stuffed with clothes, Harrell enters the stage and puts on piano music. A mask of an old white man appears and is held but not worn, before disappearing again. Then, Harrell throws some T-Shirts into the audience and for the second time I catch the T-shirt that says «MODERNISM». With a feeling of déjà vu, I carefully put the T-shirt aside, knowing that I will have to give it back again at the end of the show – a detail that sat clunkily with me after my first viewing (I’d love that T-shirt!). Harrell, still sitting on the piano bench, fumbles around with some leopard and flower print socks; a trademark of the postmodern dancer (hole in sock included). A series of dance étudesfollow.

Institutional Critique

When Dancer of the Year premiered in Brussels, it also included an installation called Dancer of the Year Shop; ‘a shop’ in which Harrell as the shopkeeper sold personal objects that were in one way or another linked to his trajectory as a dancer and choreographer. These performances took place at KANAL, a fairly new contemporary art museum that is also a branch of Pompidou. The location should not have been surprising, taking into account that Harrell’s work has been presented in several reputable venues such as the Barbican Art Gallery (London) and MoMA (New York). In this particular programming context, the reading of Dancer of the Year, is undeniably linked to a long tradition of Institutional Critique within the white cube and questions concerning legacy, (self-)value and economy.

In Oslo, the shop is not there and we are no longer in a museum. What happens when you stage Dancer of the Yearin the foyer of a black box? To some extent, it doesn’t change much, as the foyer of Black Box Theatre might as well be some kind of gallery space. But the idea of the museum is gone, there are no pedestals displaying personal objects, and in the absence of Dancer of the Year Shop,questions concerning market value in the art world have obviously moved to the background. Depending on how you look at it, you could either say that some of the critical discourse previously present in the work has fallen away – or simply that new ways of reading and interpreting the solo itself have opened up.

Jam of signifiers

With circling arms, a swirling body and fast footwork, Harrall dances with dresses without ever putting them on entirely, as if dancing with the dress is like dancing with a ghost. Watching him, the word ‘surrender’ comes to mind. Unlike anyone else, Harrall succeeds in viscerally transmitting an emotional and physical intensity that seems to go beyond the comfort of some people in the audience (here and there I hear a sigh of annoyance). For most of the dances Harrall keeps his eyes closed, while during other moments the audience is addressed directly, with seductive and at times almost provocative facial expressions and hand gestures. The colors of the dances fade into another, never lingering for long. References to what could be voguing, the cat walk, butho, modern dance or ballet are all mashed together in a jam of signifiers. Again, depending on how you look at it, this could be perceived as either a sloppy form of reach movement, or an interest in other levels of precision; a kind of precision that is maybe less visible to the eye.

Reimagining history with the aim to alter dominating dance narratives has been a reoccurring strategy in Harrell’s practice. Also in Dancer of the Yearthe references to different periods and genres in dance history are omnipresent. These canonized images are further combined with quotes from Harrell’s own body of work. This combination of ‘canon-referencing’ with ‘self-referencing’ is audacious, but it can be tricky to pull off. When it works, it comes across as a genuine attempt to reshape collective discourse. When it doesn’t it, it might look like self-aggrandizement.

Having experienced Dancer of the Year in two different contexts makes me wonder how informed a spectator has to be to appreciate or interact with a work of art, especially one so loaded with references. In Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the dance solo was presented with two adhered texts, one written by the dramaturg and one by the artistic advisor.^[1]I remember describing the texts to a friend as ‘perfect discursive writing that no artwork can live up to’. So, when I saw Dancer of the Yearfor the first time I found the accumulation of (self-)references a rabbit hole that both entertained and exhausted, and the promise of embodying the lineage of butho legends like Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno to be verging on the border of pretentious.

Grief

Without the supportive act of ‘the shop’, I thought the solo would fall on loose ground. On the other hand, it is also possible to try and appreciate an artwork outside it’s ‘discursive promises’. A friend of mine said that she allowed herself to be ‘charmed by the performer’ and just went for the feeling. So this time, I tried to follow her advice and focus on the emphasis proposed by the setting at Black Box and be open to ‘the air of fragility, beauty, vulnerability and exhaustion’^[2]of the dance. It was interesting to see how a critical (and maybe ‘over-informed’) approach can shape a subjective experience as much as distort it. For example, there is a moment in which Harrell starts to moan, expressing a sort of ‘deep grief’. This could come across as forced and artificial, which maybe I felt it was the first time I saw Harrell breaking into tears. This time, it made me think of the lack of public places where intense sorrow and sadness can be expressed collectively. I recently watched the concert film Amazing Grace(2018) in which Aretha Franklin records her gospel album live in a church in Los Angeles in 1972, and I was confronted with the fact that I couldn’t think of any place that would invite me to express such overt emotions without the fear of being judged. In that regard, if Harrell’s work aims to reflect on the circulation of work between gallery and theatre, and on the different conditions of creation, presentation, participation, and viewing these contexts represent^[3], there is no doubt that as a dancer, he both succeeds and fascinates. (02.09.2019)

^[1]https://www.kfda.be/en/program/dancer-of-the-year

^[2]https://www.blackbox.no/en/tittel/dancer-of-the-year/

^[3]Sara Jansen, ‘On Trajal Harrell’s Dancer of the Year and Dancer of the Year Shop’,https://www.kfda.be/assets/7798