#this was actually the first time i can recall trying to shade a true dual light source situation and i kinda like it tbh

[timey-fandom-stuff]

I liked how my art for Monsterswap Kris's valentine turned out enough to just slap that into its own post and throw it out there, so here! one goofy critter that is definitely a totally normal dog.

they might not care for the romance part of Valentine's, but they are excited about the prospect of impending discount chocolate. and, as it turns out, being able to point and hearts shoot out is actually kind of on theme for this holiday. who'd've thought.

[riting]

Zena Bibler and Barry Brannum on An Instance of This

[Editor’s note: In the spirit of Jennie Liu and Alana Frey’s reflections on Water Will by Ligia Lewis, Zena Bibler and I exchanged questions, notes, and insights about An Instance of This. We were both reeling after the performance — described as “an ephemeral micro-community” by creator-performers jose e. abad, Carlos Medina-Diaz, Justin Morris, and Randy Reyes — and wanted some time to process what we’d seen. What you see here is a lightly edited version of the ideas we generated together (via email) in the subsequent days. -BB]

BARRY: A lot of people we'd lump under the umbrella of 'postmodern improvisers' claim they're interested in the erotic. To what extent do you believe that's true? For yourself? For the work you're interested in? For this piece?

ZENA: A lot of things come up for me in response to this question. When I was watching An Instance of This, I remember thinking about an "erotics of giving oneself over." I actually scrawled it down in a little notebook in the dark. I'm thinking specifically of a moment early on in the piece when I saw Justin standing on top of the stairs, taking big bites out of a rose. His mouth was near a mic, so we could hear the crunch of the petals and hear him sort of fluff/spit/blow them out of his mouth onto Randy who was below on his hands and knees arranging little pieces of paper that Justin had dropped earlier. The petals floated down to the ground and Randy gathered them one by one, making them into a ring to encircle some other materials he had collected. Later Justin drank from a bottle of wine and spit it/dripped it/let it fall down onto Randy's back. It soaked his white shirt, which he removed, rung out, and added to the little altar he was making.

I remember registering the spatialized and qualitative power differentials that at play—Justin standing on high, raining things down on Randy; Randy on his knees, doing what seemed to be both mundane and magical labor. But I think the eroticism I'm talking about is more about the voluntary state of being ready to give oneself over, or to make oneself permeable to something or someone. It also seems to be about the ability to receive the something and turn it into another thing, like when Randy removed his wine stained shirt and squeezed it until it released a few drops onto the paper and rose design he was making.

Of course, this is not the only way to define eroticism, nor is it the only presence of the erotic that I felt when watching An Instance of This (shapeshifting, repurposing body parts and objects in service of connection, dancing between categories of pain and pleasure, softening, feeling oneself, covering, revealing...). But I think the thing I'm most fascinated by in relationship to improvisation and performance-making in general is the possibility that I might be able to practice becoming more affect-able, more permeable to possibilities that are yet unnamed. And this might happen through very ordinary, repetitive actions, like gathering paper or putting on clothes. It especially happens in collaboration with other dancers and even objects, whose desires and pathways and possibilities are different than my own. I think the idealist and activist and the dreamer in me loves the fact that I can practice being in service to a possibility that hasn't arrived yet.

B: What languages do you have for describing, understanding, imagining, etc. your own body in improvisational practice? What counts as 'body' for you?

Z: I think this question relates to the definition of erotics I played with in your first question. When I'm "practicing" my body is always a little unstable in terms of where it begins and ends (or maybe this is the time when I'm most able to acknowledge the trueness of this aspect). I can make my body more permeable with my attention and intention. Maybe it's all the Donna Haraway and relationality theory I've been reading for my day job as a graduate student, but I have been thinking of the poetic connections between the different types of mesh that we have holding our bodily materials together, the symbiotic relationships between organisms that are actually part of our bodies (bacteria! viruses! fungi! archae! did you know that only 43% of our body's total cell count is human?) There's also the mesh of the histories, institutions, and identities that I am constantly moving among and trying to account for my positionality within them. There's the mesh of other people's ideas and actions that help shape what I do and how I understand it.

So yeah, when I'm improvising, it often feels like my body is this little weathervane for a lot of (potentially a totally overwhelming amount) of noticeable stuff. It's sort of comforting because it relieves me of the need to make up content. I like improvising as a way of experimenting with relationships, for training my sensitivity to things I tend to overlook when I'm not in the state of "practice."

And then that somehow also coincides with a very material, finite body with specific capacities and aches and appearances. Maybe my practice is the place where I hold open the possibility that it is both/and.

B: What image or moment in this piece made you feel most aware of yourself as a viewer? Why?

Z: I wish I had tried to answer this question right after seeing it. I'm not sure if this will be a direct answer to the question, but I remember two specific moments in An Instance of This when I was struck by what I was not seeing. Throughout the performance, the cast seemed very generous in their willingness to be seen. Beyond the literal revealing of their bodies, they also let us see the work in a state of just-having-come-together. It wasn't very rehearsed, and confidently so. They let us see them sort of figuring things out. At the same time, I remember two moments when everything I seemed to be seeing was framed by two quite mundane things that were shielded from view: Randy's face and all of the performers' feet. Randy kept his face turned towards the ground, or shaded by sunglasses, or partially obscured by a wig, which was really striking in relationship to the way we were able to see Justin, Carlos, and José, and in relationship to the vulnerable quality of Randy's performance. The other thing that drew my attention was the fact that the performers were almost naked at moments, but never took off their socks. The modesty of this was almost comical and felt tender.

I think I'm mentioning this moment because I was really aware of the non-separation between (A) the characters and archetypes the performers were activating for us, and (B) the performers themselves. Seeing the socks still on made me somehow see the performers in this dual role, and made me recognize the labor that goes into creating this two-hour spacetime, and maybe let me feel a little of the personal stakes of a performer's vulnerability onstage. That the socks never transformed was like an anchor holding two worlds together.

ZENA: A lot of the questions you asked me spurred me to ask you a question that maybe can sit with the socks. I'm curious how you use performance to play with the terms of your own visibility and/or display. What feels difficult or risky to share? How does that connect with the power you might feel from revealing? Does this connect to your sense of the erotic?

BARRY: I keep returning to Randy and the towel. In my mind it’s a duet: the towel moved Randy as much as they moved it. Submerging the towel in a tub of water, feeling their bones get heavy. Wringing it out, seeing them warp tightly onto themself. Flicking the damp towel in an arc that slams into the ground—space is loud, time stops. Watching this piece sometimes felt like looking in a mirror, because so much of what Jose, Carlos, Justin, and Randy did confirms what I need and want from performance. I want it to remind me that there are serious stakes in inhabiting/tending/being a body. Having spent so much of my dance life as a Black/gay man trying to disappear from what I was doing, this way of working acknowledges and even revels in my irrefutable presence. I want dance to keep me ever mindful of the physical body’s fleshiness, its resilience, its malleability, its susceptibility to impact.

I’m recalling Randy’s slow crawl through the space with the towel, and the evaporating trail of moisture it leaves behind. I think about the role that sensuality has played in my development as a dance artist. Ten years ago ‘line’ and ‘shape’ were all (I thought) I knew of dancing; these days, I know and work with and learn from people who are all about ‘feeling,’ ‘sensation,’ ‘weight’ and ‘gravity’ and ‘organs,’ ‘muscles,’ ‘soft tissues.’ Seeing the line of water disappear on the warm marley, I imagine moisture on my skin and tongue. This is an experience where the body—Randy’s dancing body, my viewing body, some imaginary average called ‘the human body’—exists not only to watch or to be seen, but also to feel and feel-with what it experiences. Just as Randy learns something about the towel’s density, just as they surrender to the heaviness of pushing an object while on hands and knees. Just as I feel myself as an empathetic viewer.

And yet, it’s so fascinating to see where that empathy runs out. After Randy returns to the tub, repeating the careful act of dipping and wringing and slamming, their conversation with the towel slips into inscrutability. They leave the towel behind, careening down their own snaking, warping path. Sliding along the floor, rising airily, buckling to their knees, Randy expands and collapses in a long stretch of time, riding a rhythm and force I can only barely track. So much of the piece’s activity unfolds this way: initially in conversation with an object, the environment, or another dancer, but gradually escaping from any easy ‘narration’ or ‘recognition’ as it unfolds. I think of Jose and Carlos during the first part of the show, using microphones to fill the space with their breath, then to scrub one another, then finally to knock, clumsily, persistently, against one another. With the shifts in their relationship to one another and the microphones, I’m tempted to ask: why? Where is this going? As if I need to know. But that’s the thing about this sensual body—which I could refer to as somatic: For all its joy in ‘feeling’ and ‘experience,’ it senses with the goal of continuously returning to the body and its boundaries as such. Its constitution depends on a careful management of feeling, of sense neatly meted. It doesn’t easily allow the excessive, erratic, or erotic.

What is (the) erotic? Audre Lorde describes it as “[the] measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” That definition necessitates expansion and unraveling. It even hints at destruction. What would happen to a dance and its dancers if the boundaries or definition of ‘body’ kept changing? There was no taking for granted what counted as bodily surface in this piece: here, Justin waterfalls cheap wine onto Randy’s back from on high; there, the quartet hide themselves (even literally) in layers of clothes; now they all appear in nothing but g-strings; now Mylar comes pouring out of their outfits, seemingly with no end. Who can say what ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ them? Wherever their attention goes—and however far it stretches—is where they will dwell. Between the dancers’ ever-shifting layers of body and the show’s luxurious two-hour sprawl, I find myself forced to commit to the joyously messy expanse of feeling. Turns out it’s not as easy or definite as dance teachers would have you think.

Long after the fact, I think about this slow burn of a dance, its slippery negotiations between solo movement, its intimate duets, and its visceral group work. I sense the erotic, I feel sexuality, but don’t quite grasp where they live and how they circulate. I ask myself: Where is sex here? What is sexual about this? If ‘body’ becomes something ever-expanding, ever-responsive, maybe its diffuseness—like a cloud—is the point. This is something like the salvation I’ve been seeking. Many artists and writers have borne witness to the dangerous tangle between race, gender, and sex/uality. They’ve developed their own strategies for combating it: acceptance, disregard, evasion. But what happens when, as some Black feminists recommend, queer Black and brown performers dive right into that tight place? What viewers are left to wrestle with is the fact of never knowing exactly what they are seeing, indeed, having to accept that seeing is not the only way through a dance, and more, that there is no way through a dance so much as there’s a need to resign oneself simply to being with it, however it morphs. No definite boundaries. No neat separation between body and mind, doing and understanding. There is only this, in this instance.

Zena Bibler is a dancer and current PhD student at UCLA. Her studio research and current writing projects engage perception as a choreographic structure.

Barry Brannum is a dance artist, researcher, and teacher based in Los Angeles. 

An Instance of This happened at Highways Performance Space on November 1 and 2, 2019.

photos by Zena and Barry