Tag: dance

Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight

Boca Tuya dance company presented a gay pas de deux that left me buzzzzzing tonight. It was so good.

Here’s a video of a performance from Jacob’s Pillow last year. “Like Those Playground Kids At Midnight”. That’s the choreographer in the pink shirt.

I love the slouchy outfits. I love the inclusion of gestures from various sex activities. I love the familiarity of grabbing each other’s arms and waists and necks ❤️

It’s a tiny section but I love how tight their unison is. I noticed it over and over in the whole program tonight — unison that good tricks your brain when you watch it. It makes the dancers seem physically connected

I have been going to at least 5 or 6 dance performances a year for the past 15 or so years and tonight was I think only the second gay duet I have seen?

Of course I have seen many same-gender pairings in many dance performances, but actual gay romantic dances? I think only two

And I go to gay dance shows! But often it is camp and drag. The sincere romance is pretty rare. I would attend an entire dance festival of gay romantic duets

The other actual gay romantic dance was in The Missing Generation by Sean Dorsey, an AIDS memorial piece that you can see part of in an early episode of Sense8.

My strongest memory is a section that fused contemporary dance and 80s house/club dance, set to house music and a recording of a survivor recalling pre-AIDS closeted hookup culture. Made me cry.

But it’s so important to see gay sex and romance outside of tragic AIDS stories too. Of course you know that ❤️

Extensive abstract physical evidence

There’s a moment in Kidd Pivot’s Revisor where someone exposes an atrocity by presenting “extensive abstract physical evidence” in the form of a dance solo, and it works. When I watch someone move their body, I can sense in my body how that would feel. We can communicate abstract things that way, and we can have a shared understanding without language.

I knew this before, but the phrase “abstract physical evidence” comes in handy surprisingly often.

(Revisor is streaming on Marquee if you need some dance theatre about corruption, comedy, and the relationship between language and the body.)

Anyway I think about “extensive abstract physical evidence” in relation to ME/CFS a lot.

A disease that doesn’t even have a satisfying name so we put two flawed names together with a slash, a disease where it’s not defined by specific symptoms so much as the meta pattern of how symptoms come and go, a disease where nobody knows the root problem or how to explain how all the symptoms and patterns fit together. A disease where we have fatigue “but different from normal fatigue”, where “malaise” can be life-threatening and “exertion” can mean something as small as perceiving light.

Just a trainwreck of inadequate language, and yet, people with ME manage to know so much about the situation in, like, an abstract physical way.

Something that helped me to process a divorce and then later to transition into long covid and disability life is a dance theatre performance I saw in 2016. I mention this because it is streaming on Marquee.

It’s about trauma and grief, so use your judgement. But even now i exhale so much tension when I remember that second half, how the giant pillar is still there on stage.