Why Judy Garland? Oh please, Mary. Judy was a cultural icon for me and other gay men of my generation. Why did my brother Jon and I, two little gay boys, listen obsessively to the cassette recording we made directly off the television of The Wizard of Oz? Why as a teenager did I have the album “Judy at Carnegie Hall” special ordered from a university bookstore? I may as well ask why the sky is blue. Judy was a fact of my life. My impulse to use her recordings for this new dance was in part autobiographical, springing from the highly personal, as well as from the shared experience of countless gay men.
But also, in Judy Garland’s singing I found some of what was, for me, an essence of performance. In this way too Part Three (Judy Garland) was an outgrowth of Part Three (My Fair Lady), delving into my developing understanding(s) of performance itself. Too, both were made to be performed on conventional raised proscenium stages, firsts for me (my previous work had all been made for black box, gallery, or otherwise alternative spaces). At long last I could sit and dangle my legs off the front of the stage, gazing directly at the viewers, as Garland famously did, explicitly addressing the performer-to-spectator relationship. While in Part Three (My Fair Lady) only Paige Martin and I got to engage in this leg-dangling practice, we all did so in Part Three (Judy Garland).
A self-centered note: The only available video of the work was recorded in 1998 when the dance was bookended by Part Three (My Fair Lady) and the new Part Three (Luck). I was ill with an AIDS-related opportunistic infection during the performances, running high fevers. So please take my dancing in the video with a grain of salt.
Credits
Support
Press
Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice, 1998
Leigh Witchel, Ballet Review, 1998