As for my previous work, Quartet With Three Gay Men (2006), with which RQDWH was paired in performance, I chose the title of RQDWH to bring topics of sexuality and gender into the thought-arena, asking viewers to hold different media together simultaneously— the dance and the concepts embedded in the title—and negotiate the poetics of perhaps not being able to connect them nor fully separate them, but to nevertheless experience their co-existence.
About the music: Zeena Parkins had made a score of overlaid harp tracks for my partial view solo in 2005, which sent us dreaming up the plan to realize such a score with live musicians. I can’t quite believe we pulled it off. Zeena developed the RQDWH score in a way that mirrors my movement generation and choreographic process - she recorded herself improvising on the acoustic harp and then arranged sections of the resulting tracks such that the compositions could eventually be transcribed and played live by three musicians. We dancers worked with the mockup recordings for our source movement video-recording sessions, and in performance danced around a cluster of three harpists (Zeena included).
Zeena really wanted me to include the music ultimately used for the Coda section, but I couldn’t find a way to do so - it seemed cut from a different cloth. I promised Zeena if I finished the rest of the dance in time I’d see if I could use that piece for a Coda. Happily, there was time, and that final dance became an opportunity for me to indulge in a utopian romp, an eden.
A critical note: The late Doran George wrote in “The Hysterical Spectator: Dancing with Feminists, Nellies, Andro-dykes, and Drag Queens,” their chapter within Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings,
- “Despite my queer viewer’s delight in the gay-male visibility achieved in Really Queer Dance With Harps, my feminist spectator insists that although…male and female dancers share a vocabulary, they access critical agency asymmetrically.”
A fair point, seems to me. To George’s “queer viewer” RQDWH “gives the finger to heterosexual dance establishments'' and “resists femme-phobia,” their “feminist viewer” sees the women at times functioning “as a chorus for the boys,” such that “the ‘really queer’ body is thus male, overshadowing dancing female critical agency.” Again, fair point. Though I’m more interested in the work as a queer dance than as as a representation of queer people, to the extent that one is looking at/for representation(s) of identity(ies) - which the title does put into play - I agree the dance would fall short in feminist and trangender terms.
Credits
Support
Press
Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, 2008
Siobhan Burke, Ballet.co, 2008
Nancy Dalva, danceviewtimes
Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice
Apollinaire Scherr, artsjournal
Don Daniels, Ballet Review
Victoria Looseleaf, Los Angeles Times
Brian McCormick, Gay City News
Gus Solomons Jr., Metro
Additional Links
Zeena Parkins: Three Harps, Tuning Forks and Electronics
Neil’s Liner Note for Three Harps, Tuning Forks and Electronics
George, Doran. “The Hysterical Spectator: Dancing with Feminists, Nellies, Andro-dykes, and Drag Queens.” Queer Dance, edited by Clare Croft. Oxford University Press, 2017
ARTFORUM '500 Words' Interview with David Valesco, 16 June, 2008
Excerpts from Really Queer Dance With Harps