A few days before Ryan McNamara’s performance piece “Battleground” premièred at the Guggenheim, last month, his cast of nine dancers had clocked an impressive six hundred and fifty hours of rehearsal. Unfortunately, they’d practiced together for only one of them. That might have caused most choreographers to panic, but McNamara isn’t a choreographer, he’s a performance artist, and fragmentation is kind of his thing. Even his description of his latest piece, which was commissioned by the museum, had a crazy-quilt quality: a “sci-fi cosplay house-music ballet-battle.” Why a battle? “Because,” McNamara told me, when I dropped by a rehearsal, “competition is how ninety per cent of America understands dance.” He has a point: think of the Sharks and the Jets in “West Side Story.” (Try not to think about “Dance Moms.”)
Since the end of the aughts, the Brooklyn-based artist has become a darling of the art and fashion beaux mondes—Picasso’s granddaughter arranged an early performance at Art Basel Miami, and Louis Vuitton commissioned a live work for its flagship store on Fifth Avenue. At heart, though, McNamara is really a populist, whose audacious career might be summed up in the words of a reality-TV show: “So You Think You Can Dance.” In his performances, he has elevated the passionate enthusiasms of the amateur to the level of art. He’s also not above a dumb joke: he once staged a Whitney Houston karaoke night at the Whitney Museum.
Boyishly handsome at thirty-six—imagine the skinny younger brother of Matt Bomer, in “Magic Mike”—McNamara was standing alone on the Guggenheim’s stage, the triumphal strains of an instrumental by the composer of the “Battlestar Galactica” theme song filling the space. (The circular Frank Lloyd Wright-designed theatre reminded McNamara of a spaceship.) Then the soundtrack went mute. “Is six seconds long enough for the eight count?” McNamara asked the thin air. A man’s voice replied, “Let’s walk it out.” Three dancers were stationed at the back of the theatre, on a small balcony.
Onstage, McNamara, power-clashing in a black-and-white sweater and green-patterned shorts, counted through a short sequence that seemed to link Bob Fosse jazz hands, Trisha Brown hand flips, and the rigid arm movements of vogueing—an exquisite corpse of choreography. McNamara has no formal dance training, but he moves with a natural-born grace. Still, when the dancers took it from the top in the balcony, I could see that their form was superior, despite their movements not always being in synch. With his erratic rehearsal schedule, McNamara seemed to have succeeded in converting professionals into gifted amateurs. (There is a rich tradition of “de-skilling” in modern and contemporary art, from Duchamp’s readymades to Warhol’s factory output.)
With the wired energy of the sleep-deprived, McNamara took a seat one row ahead of me. Bloodshot, his green eyes looked that much greener. “It’s super-seductive to get into the nitty-gritty,” he sighed. “Then, the next thing you know, I’m spending an hour on an eight count. Who have I become? I’m just a visitor to the dance world.”
McNamara likes to emphasize his outsider status, despite being at a point in his career where a museum of the Guggenheim’s calibre is commissioning work. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he studied photography at Arizona State, but art school wasn’t the reason he moved to New York; instead, he found his motivation onscreen. “I saw the movie ‘Paris Is Burning’ and thought, Those are the people I want to be around. Also the club kids I saw on ‘Geraldo.’ Who knew they were going to chop people up?” he joked, alluding to the party monster Michael Alig. Fortunately, McNamara fell in with a slower crowd and found a job, which he continued through art school, providing social services to gay and lesbian senior citizens.
McNamara no longer needs a day job, but there’s still a community-center spirit at the heart of his work. At a time when many young artists define making art as their “practice,” as if it were a daily grind on the path to perfection, one of the most radical aspects of McNamara’s performance is how seriously fun it can be. “I took my first dance class in front of three hundred people,” he said, referring to “Make Ryan a Dancer,” his breakout piece at MOMA PS1, from 2010. McNamara was in his first year of the M.F.A. program at Hunter College at the time, a student casting himself in the role of a student, in a kind of unprofessionalized mise en abyme. He enlisted a roster of seasoned professionals—from the ballet phenom David Hallberg to an exotic dancer—to train him for hours at a stretch, every day for five months, an endurance test in discipline and humility that the Times called “sweetly courageous.” It was a de-facto dance-off—a battle that the tireless newbie could never win. Endearing, yes, but also tinged with black comedy straight out of Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (In 2011, McNamara and his frequent collaborator Sam Roeck performed outdoors at a benefit in the Hamptons, buried up to their necks in dirt while singing romantic duets, putting a karaoke twist on Beckett’s play “Happy Days.”)
If “Make Ryan a Dancer” put McNamara on the map, the piece that cemented his reputation was “MEEM: A Story Ballet About the Internet,” which was commissioned by the live-art festival Performa in 2013, and which scavenged dance moves from an omnium-gatherum of videos uploaded to YouTube: Martha Graham, the Jacksons, a K-pop fanatic. “MEEM,” with its crowdsourced choreography, also featured a big surprise: the theatre’s seats were on wheels. What began as a straightforward dance piece—ticket holders take their seats, dancers take the stage—evolved into one of the most unexpected and exhilarating live works I’ve ever experienced. As an usher wheeled me from room to room and from dance to dance, I was reminded of Disney’s “Tron,” the cult sci-fi movie from the early eighties, in which a man is sucked into the digital world of a video game. To borrow some tech-sector jargon, “MEEM” was disruptive innovation par excellence.
As he spoke about “Battleground” in the empty theatre, McNamara’s ideas about this latest piece seemed somewhat randomly linked. In addition to the flying-saucer association and the dance-off component, there was a reference to the Large Hadron Collider (also inspired by the circular space). The nine performers would move with greater velocity as the piece progressed and eventually become entangled. “I sound like a science geek,” he said, “but it’s E=mc2. When things go too fast, they gain mass.” The formality of the space also reminded him of “a European parliamentary room and its breaches in decorum.” (Apparently, it’s a hot topic on YouTube.) “Battleground” was not as directly tethered to the Internet as “MEEM” was. But, when he mentioned that the squads in the dance battle would wear red, green, and blue, I recognized the RGB palette of electronic systems. There would be three squads, instead of two, he explained, "to subvert the binary of win and lose."
