RMW (A) & RMW from the Inside Out

RMW (A) & RMW from the inside out.

Jennifer Monson

______

Interior prologue – the warm up

Dark room, blue light, fishing around for ground.

Last minute wig adjustment and make-up. Holly Hughes is ready for lesbian deer hunting big guns, big eyes.

The backs of the audience, pressed against chairs. I’m waiting for the empty.

Walking on the stage the audience adjusts to our wigs, our legs, our frumpy sex affect leaning in towards them.

RMW (A)

a space

I start to dance following the quick adjustments of being seen. Leaning into DD’s watching, making something for her, abrasive, hitting back what the audience sees.

You are my cipher, my love, my cook, my combatant, my advisor, my bed, my protagonist. I am your heat, your smell, your eyes, your interpreter.

The timer goes off. You join me, take my stance, my move, myself and move it on. I watch you titillate, swivel, arch an eyebrow and a lip, become more beautiful, become me, become unholy. I’m seduced.

The timer goes off I tread across the space to you. Fill you, imagine you, and head off.

another space exterior (the audience) –

I look at as many of you as I can. Look you in the eye. You are hot, I want you, I will have you, I want to be on you, in you. Fuck you hard, and then I’m turning. Face, turn face, face up, face down, face in DD’s ass. Hair slapping her ass cheeks. I’m on my knees. She has always allowed me to beg. She is the empire state building, a vast dark lake, my ripple, a quiet sound from underneath, hunting me on.

We intermingle. We shine each other up. And slap our bare backs on the dark. DD is always better than me. Her music is everywhere. darkness, transition. Changing into levis and t-shirt

I’m on the floor, like something hit me, waiting. You pick me up by the edge of my coat, I grab your hands and together we throw me away. Down stage left. It happens again, pulled, longing, thrown, bounced, shirt sleeves, slippery.

I hunch into the weight of my own body and compress it into yours. To help you toss me, slide me, putty in your pink hands.

I’m careful with you. Remembering instructions. Following technique to send you where you need to go. I crash onto you and roll to the side, pull at your jacket and devour you. Holding, squeezing, sliding up your belly, rolling you. You attend to me like a starfish, multi legged, extending in and out.

Till you stop atop me. Unzip and decoat me. Roll me like taffy up to your lips we kiss for a long time with so much movement it’s a circus.

Our lipsticked lips locked together, feet pad up and off the floor as pants sail off the legs. I’m your beast of burden. Will hold onto you, hold you up, hold you out. Till you tower above. The stage on my back.

Down we fish flop around, bellies lifted, music of skin and floor, paying attention to sound only, throats closed.

I lift you up over my body, you sink and rise. Your weight settling my nerves, my bones.

______

In 1993 DD Dorvillier and I were commissioned to create a collaborative work for the Movement Research Sexual ID series curated by Jaime Ortega. At that time New York was a powerful seat of queer activism – Queer Nation,1 ACT UP,2 WHAM,3 Lesbian Avengers.4 George Bush Sr. was president and people were taking to the streets and demanding changes in drug laws, fair treatment of people with AIDS, access to abortion, and freedom of sexual expression. RMW was made in that spirit of immediacy, activism,

2 3 and sexual openness. It played with a sensual confrontation between tenderness and brute force, and an ambiguously gendered sexuality.

In 2004, we were commissioned to re-create RMW for the HOWL Festival at Performance Space 122 in NYC. The necessity for us to absorb and articulate the artistic, personal, and political shifts in the previous decade gave way to a second part, RMW (A). In the press release for the festival we wrote “ Now in the age of Obama, internet organizing, and digital communication, the piece evolves into an exercise of listening and witnessing. The exterior space of the streets has been replaced by the interior space of the internet.” Since then we have continued to perform the work as a diptych almost annually. The piece is a tool for calibrating the shifting landscape of desire, sexuality and gender in both our individual lives and those of our larger cultural and political contexts.

Both sections of the work continue to evolve over time and in relation to each other but in distinctly different ways. In RMW (A) we continue to use the body as a means to effect social and political readings through an immediate and reflective improvisational score. RMW keeps a steadier form through set, choreographed material. As time passes I experience RMW more like an object, a choreography, that DD and I enact with detailed precision but that changes with necessity as our bodies and our audiences change. RMW (A) is a structure of timed improvised actions and responses that gives space for new material to emerge. As the nature of queer evolves over time I see the queer “object” and the queer “action” of the two sections responding to an evolving and mutable understanding of queer- one that, in this case, continues to destabilize the terms of gender and sexuality as our two differently female bodies move in and out of overt and covert movements of desire. Both parts of this diptych illuminate a particular kinetic sensibility evolving out of the time they were conceived.

February, 2012, Ann Arbor, MI

At the performance of RMW (A) & RMW at the CORD Conference –Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance at University of Michigan there was an entirely queer audience arriving at the end of a dense and sophisticated co-mingling of academic, performative, social, scholarly, philosophical, political conversation and exchange. In the performance this allowed for a certain space to open up that gave me a completely new experience as a “queer” performer. DD and I start the performance with RMW (A), the section of the piece that was created in 2004. Our costumes in RMW (A) are built around large wigs, drag make up, and clothes that expose our legs. At the conference - where the assemblage of drag would be well worn, well known and well critiqued - I came into my own. Barefoot, big white legs, long blonde wig, bright red lips, long, languid eyelashes. I stabbed my gaze out into the audience and for the first time ever didn’t wait for the audience to stare back or accept me or my invitation to come on in. Instead I went directly out - straight out on some limb that took me up close to every person. I had an overpowering feeling that I could “have” each one of these people - that I could want them, seduce them, hold them in my desire in a way they couldn’t turn back. I wasn’t afraid of the stakes of being taken up on it.

RMW (A) performance at University of Michigan, 2014. Photo by Sarah Nesbitt. (Copyright secured.)

The strategies that I use to access vulnerability are particularly DYKEY I think. They are about a specific kind of power and physical prowess, about endurance and obstinance that demand a physical risk taking that is not precarious, but it is unstable. I find at the edge of the vulnerability an energetic frequency that pushes beyond representation into a different kind of desire that for me often exceeds the human, and at times also drops me into the bucket of erotic humor. The beyond human is explicit in different ways - Surging up through the dancing. The erotic humor feels like an uncanny return that I didn’t even know I could return to. Improvised eroticism is comedy. It is titillating, unsettling, the seducer/seduced is in flux, a constant negotiation and surprise.

These strategies push past the subjectivity of the ego and the personal. Once that level of vulnerability has been passed the stakes are raised. It’s no longer about me, or even my relationship to the audience. The borders have been crossed in order to map out the possibility of mutually constitutive experience. It is a bit like building trust but it is also like clearing the brush with a machete and we are taking turns with the swing. 4 5

RMW (A)

RMW (A) is a structure of time. The DD and I take turns dancing while the other holds a timer and witnesses the dancing. The time score is set in advance and fluctuates from five to one minutes. We exchange roles three to four times. (In the performances so far, I always begin. DD always ends.) At the end of each designated time segment the performer with the timer enters the dance by replacing – taking the place of - in the fullest way possible -the other performer. The new performer continues the dance from the moment the timer goes off while the other performer becomes witness. Roles are switched each time the timer goes off.

The structure of the piece is built around the triangulation of the roles of witness, doer and audience. We watch each other, we let the audience watch us watch each other, we watch the audience watch us watch each other and we watch the audience watch us. The transmission of information comes from the witnessing between DD, myself and the audience. This exchange of witnessing and being witnessed both projects and absorbs the fleeting handles of personae, identity and/or thingness alive in the dancing. It keeps multiple emerging desires on the move.

Practice and Preparation

There is a particular kind of preparation for the piece that is about looking in the mirror. DD helping me with the eyelashes and the eyeliner. We touch each other’s faces. Put on nail polish and often remove it. Sew, comb out wigs and iron shirts. I spend more time in the dressing room than for other performances. It is a production. The wigs come on last, slid over hair tucked under a wig cap.

This prepares us for the open-ended nature of the “practice” of the piece. It is a way for us to practice knowing each other and loving each other in the way of aesthetic intimacy that exceeds any notions of sentimental or romantic attachment. We are in conversation about ways in which we are making sense of the world through dance and that conversation can only be had in the dancing itself and in the witnessing of the audience. DD and I often talk about the piece as being like a folkdance- a kind of folklore that persists, bringing along histories, ways of knowing places and people that change over time as we continue to perform the piece. It is distinctly different than a piece in repertory. It restores me to a past and a historical way of moving and simultaneously lets me be in the present. And lets me imagine a future somehow.

There are multiple kinds of spaces or stances created between DD and me and the audience. There is an intimacy in the space between DD and me that we are discovering through the structure of the work as well as through our decades old history of dancing together. We are, in part, revisiting our relationship and inviting the audience in to witness, but we are also reliant on the audience to help us address each other. The intimacy is not sentimental. It is based on years of hard earned trust - of testing and

5 6 accepting each other’s aesthetic questions and demands as well as a shared commitment to use those questions to respond to the political contexts we find ourselves in. The work is about desire -the recognition and mobility of desire is constantly shifting in the spaces between the performers and the audience. We stand, sit, move, pose as a way of taking a stance toward each other and the audience. This allows all of us to be becoming lovers, strangers, critics, drag queens/kings, beasts, friends, toys, desires and pure image and movement.

Different from RMW, in which we are dressed in similar clothes of jeans and t-shirts, in RMW (A) we wear distinctly different costumes but each are posing and perhaps practicing different strategies of drag. The costume provides a foil for me to literally dance myself into and out of any convention of gender or sexuality. DD spurs me on. In attempting to become her in that moment of transition when the timer goes off, the possibility of becoming anyone or anything opens up. Our costumes hold the signifiers of female, dyke, drag queen, poser. Temporality, authenticity and/or representation are not legible or stable in these outfits. We find ourselves inside the external destabilization of the costume – it both physically dislodges us from a normal stance through the extra weight of fake eyelashes on the lid of the eye, the wigs on the skull that shape the use of the head and balance, the nakedness of the flesh on the legs, the smell and taste of lipstick, hairspray and newly ironed clothes and through the play of becoming each other through taking on each others movement.

I feel unlocatable in the wig, make up and dress until I start dancing. The dancing is where I make love, where I access the threads of desire shot across the stage from the many eyes and feeling bodies in the room. My body picks up on the waves and vibrations of this uncertain desire and rapidly makes it into an unfolding dance. For DD I am on display. For the audience, I haven’t figured that out yet.

1993 – DD and Jennifer at the Matzoh Factory

DD and I had been living together in the Matzoh Factory at 319 Bedford in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for about two years when we made RMW. We were both somewhat active in the burgeoning queer activism of the time – participating in ACT UP and WHAM actions and I was a fairly devoted member of the Lesbian Avengers. The Matzoh Factory was the place we lived, made work, had parties, had sex and held workshops and performances for our friends and community. Other influences of the time included Circus Amok, Jennifer Miller’s queer outdoor summer circus; Open Movement and Music Dance at Performance Space 122,5 and the work of Yvonne Meier, Ishmael Houston Jones and John Bernd, Mark Ashwill and the Spitters, as well as some of the work that I was developing (primarily “Tackle Rock” and “Finn’s Shed”) that was based on physical limits of impact between bodies that was simultaneously fearless and vulnerable.

DD and I had been dancing together for five years or so. Although we had been dancing in a variety of contexts ,RMW was the first time we solely collaborated on making

6 7 something with each other. The intimacies of our relationship were forged through dancing and living together. When Jaime asked us to create a work for the Sexual I.D. series it was both an invitation and opportunity to articulate and structure the collective influences that were shaping our artistic interests at the time.

Due to the AIDS epidemic, the early 90’s were a time that demanded an eruption of sexual liberation. Gay sex was defined as a death sentence, lesbian sex was barely visible, any kind of sex was dangerous and immoral, abortion rights were at stake as well as access to sex education. DD and I were exploring our sexualities with different partners and configurations and the energy of the erotics of that time fueled the choreography of RMW.

RMW rehearsal at the Matzoh Factory 1993. Photo by Carolina Kroon. (Copyright in process.)

That year I had presented Tackle Rock, Hinge of Skin and the Lesbian Avengers Pounding Dance at Danspace Project at St. Marks Church. One of the performances was a benefit for Treatment Alternatives Program (TAP), an organization that Jon Greenberg had helped found. We didn’t know each other well but Jon had reached out to a wide range of folks to think of ways to fundraise and bring awareness to the projects TAP was working on. We were doing what we could to expand our resources and networks to support the cause of fighting HIV however possible. It is hard to imagine that

Jon died so soon after that event. He was such a powerful force to me in our political community and was fearless and generous as an activist.

On the hot day of July 16th, I remember standing next to my friend, the choreographer Neil Greenberg, Jon’s brother, in Tompkins Square Park after we had marched there with Jon’s coffin from 1st Ave and 1st Street.6 We were amidst the throngs of enraged, devastated mourners. The energy of collectively creating a space for public mourning through defying the police and moving in the streets together gave us a charged sense of joy. In that moment we were calling on each other to create a ritual that could contain the multiple layers of feeling and respect for Jon’s and the many other lives unnecessarily lost.

The moment with Neil was like a pool of water. It was quiet and reflective. We stood in the space as dancers, sensing the movement around us, highly aware of emotional currents sweeping around us yet protected in the private, personal sense of Neil’s loss. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to experience one’s dead brother’s body in this public space that was activating, moving and rallying so many people. It was one of the few times I have seen a dead body in public. It was wrenching -that moment, and I felt so honored to be there with Neil feeling his privacy and his responsibility to his family and to his community. There wasn’t anger. There was an almost palpable joy at being able to celebrate together and witness and honor death together at the same time igniting our will to stop the dying and find a cure.

I don’t want to be righteous or romantic or superimpose my own personal feelings about that time on this piece or on this writing. I was 32 years old – 5 years younger then Jon Greenberg. My first good friend with HIV had died in 1988 when he was 35. (John Bernd- an amazing artist and choreographer) This was our life then - to watch our friends and the artists in and around our community gradually sicken and die or take their own lives. We demonstrated in response. We took over streets, we yelled, we chained ourselves up. Many other people have narrated this story and were more involved then I was. I feel like I was on the periphery of ACT UP, showing up at demonstrations, going primarily to Lesbian Avenger meetings because I wanted to be around more women and that was also a very hot and sexy time. DD and I had been living in the Matzoh Factory for two years and were both more or less single and having a lot of sex.

Lesbian Love Lounge at the Gay Pride March, 1993. Photo by Dona Ann McAdams.

RMW (A) is RMW - Action is Object

RMW (A) reconceives the original RMW, adapting to what couldn’t be conceived of in 1993 and to the unaccountable histories our bodies hold in relation to each other. The structure of the piece organizes meaning and memory from the frequencies that are resonating in the space between us and the space between the two of us and the audience. This is a practice of transmission and reception delivered out of the obstinate structure or object of RMW.

Unlike in RMW (A), in RMW we are always moving together in proximity and almost always touching or in a unison energy. We wear similar clothes; we do the same or related movements. We are the object that is a duet. The dance feels like a thing. It has a beginning and an end. RMW is the object from which the action/transmission of RMW (A) was born.

The sensibility of risky physicality is embedded in RMW. We were bent on making a thing – this thing I now call a queer object because to me it feels like you can pick it up and look at it and identify certain signifiers of a particular queer history. We wear the ACT UP uniform of Levi 501’s and white t-shirts. We are obvious in our desire, like the queer kisses that were on display on the sides of buses in the safe sex education campaign of Gran Fury’s “Kissing doesn’t kill: Greed and Indifference Do,”77 as well as their “Read My Lips” campaign. These images were gorgeous and sexy, the bodies kissing were

9 10 sensual, exceptional and the scale of them on the buses hailed us with our own erotic potential.

For me RMW has that same kind of graphic presence. It skirts a kind of representation of the erotic at the same time as the materiality of our bodies, sweating, bracing, sliding, throwing and sucking construct a kinesthetic object that the audience both sees and feels.

An object has a structure that reproduces a shape of erotics. It is a physical relationship that depends on being in the right place at the right time. The technical articulation that DD and I create is precise and we shape each other’s bodies through touch. Whereas, in the action of RMW (A), we shape each other’s bodies through a transmission of presence. This queer action of transmission has a structure that reimagines a space and a shape of intimacy every time. It is a becoming; it is about a transmission of shape shifting, a moving in and out of the transition of one being to the other or others. There is an echo of possible presences made available as the audience watches us transform the movement of one dancing body to another. We take hold of the existing desire in the other’s dancing and move it somewhere unexpected.

In RMW, we start with an almost violent sequence of throwing each other helter skelter across the floor. Picking each other up by jeans and jackets. Slamming and spinning in and out of the floor. Eventually I tear off DD’s jacket and we devour each other until she stops, sitting on top of me and takes off my coat and spins my head until we end in a kiss that we playfully extend into a contortionist duet, we get almost naked, we show our sweat. We create anticipation and erotic charge through falling and releasing, devouring and baring, opening and closing in a legible language of dyke desire. This scaffolding of choreography - this morphable queer object holds the history and potential of our changing bodies each time we revisit the piece. It is a moldable object, fitting back into our bodies as they have moved through time – a bit more delicate, a bit more stiff, a bit more sophisticated, a bit more worn and husky, a bit more sexy. The lights never dim. When the piece is finished, I release DD’s back on to my belly. We pause. We roll to the side and get to our feet.

11 1 Queer Nation is “a direct action group dedicated to ending discrimination, violence and repression against the LGBT community.” It was founded in 1990 by activists working with ACT UP in New York City. Queer Nation, accessed December 22, 2015, http://queernationny.org. The manifesto is available at historyisaweapon.com.

2 ACTUP, founded in 1987, is “a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” ACTUP, last modified August 8, 2015, actupny.org

3 Women's Health Action and Mobilization, or WHAM!, was “founded in 1989 in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services of Missouri, which granted states more power to restrict women’s access to abortion.” “Women’s Health Action and Mobilization,” last modified August 15, 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women %27s_Health_Action_and_Mobilization.

4 The Lesbian Avengers began in New York City in 1992 as a direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility. Accessed December 22, 2015, http://www.lesbianavengers.com.

5 “Open Movement” was started by the artists who founded Performance Space 122 and was a weekly space for open improvisation. “Music Dance” was similar but included improvising musicians and dancers. The process was more rigorously structured. Specific improvisational scores were created, tried out and discussed. At Open Movement, discussions were informal and there was no music and no decided upon score. It was purely open space to move in.

6 “ACTUP Capsule History 1993,” ACT UP NY, accessed December 16, 2015, http://www.actupny.org/documents/cron-93.html.

7 http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/1989/Kissing/Kissing.htm. Image that was posted on busses June – December 1989 as a project of Creative Time, NY.