Trajal Harrell is a thinking choreographer. Ten years ago, he asked a question: What would have happened if, in the early sixties, drag queens from Harlem had brought their voguing downtown, to Washington Square, to perform with the pathbreaking postmoderns of the Judson Dance Theatre? Not long before, he had presented a minimalist solo at the Judson Church based on posing and voguing, and then discovered that the Harlem drag balls and the Judson collective started at around the same time, fifty years ago. He wondered why Judson was an accepted part of dance history and voguing wasn’t. For the past several years, he has been mining this lode, in canny ways. The title of the work he presented at New York Live Arts recently, “Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (L),” hints at the lengths he’s gone to in examining the imagined meeting of these worlds. But it in no way prepared me for what I saw. I’m not sure anything could have.
In the theatre before the show began, an air of informality prevailed. Harrell was walking up and down the aisles, talking to people, and the four other men in “Antigone Sr.” were milling around the stage, in rehearsal clothes. Harrell stepped before us and explained a few things—this version of “Twenty Looks” was really meant for a bigger space; the artist Sarah Sze had been working with him on the project—most of which gave the sense that this was a work in progress. Harrell is making “Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church” in different sizes, so that it appeals to a variety of presenters—he’s up front about dance’s commodification; “Antigone Sr.” is the large size, the “(L)” of the title. (The piece exists, or will eventually exist, in XS, S, M, and XL forms as well.) But Harrell wasn’t making excuses; he was whetting our appetite for a future “Antigone Sr.” that would be even better. Then we were asked to stand for the house anthem.
As anyone who has seen Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” will know, in drag-ball culture a “house” is a kind of family, a group of men who participate in the balls and compete in their various categories. I was unaware that houses had anthems, but was curious to hear what Harrell had dreamed up. He and the other performers stood on the stage, facing us, then Thibault Lac, tall, slender, with model looks, solemnly began intoning lines from Britney Spears’s first hit: “Oh, baby, baby, how was I supposed to know / That something wasn’t right here / Oh, baby, baby, I shouldn’t have let you go / And now you’re out of sight, yeah.”
The stage was minimally, but provocatively, dressed. (Erik Flatmo did the set design.) The wings had been taken away, revealing the lighting trees. The floor had several intersecting, three-foot-wide lanes laid out on it in gray and blue paper, held down with orange and green tape. Three very slightly raised white rectangular platforms hugged the downstage edge; a larger platform draped with gray fabric occupied an open space between the lanes on the left part of the stage, with two microphones on stands placed in front of it. Upstage on the right side stood a tall columnar sculpture, which looked as though it was made of pleated paper. A black curtain hung several feet in front of the theatre’s back wall, creating a crossover and (we would soon discover) a dressing area; toward either side of the curtain was a large opening, and set back in the right-hand one of these was a full-length mirror.
The stage went black, and a spotlight came up on the far-right rectangle, where Ondrej Vidlar, in black shorts, a white shirt, and a black jacket, opened with an athletic solo. Taking turns, other dancers in similar costumes, shoeless, did solos on the white rectangles, lit from above, to a mix of songs. (The “Antigone Sr.” soundtrack—a diverse array of pop, rock, rap, and instrumental music, was put together by Robin Meier and Harrell. Jan Maertens designed the lighting.) Whether fast or slow, the movement was visceral, personal, with an element of abandon. Dancers could be seen in the background, adjusting their costumes before the mirror as they prepared to come on, and at one point Harrell, in the half-dark, carrying an iPad, walked from the audience and into the crossover/dressing space. A few moments later, he emerged from the other side and again traversed the stage and walked up one of the aisles. The pre-show informality had become mid-show transparency.
Then: “Stop the show! Stop the motherfucking show!” Harrell, crouching a few rows below me on the aisle stairs, was looking at the iPad screen and holding a microphone. The phrases he read were desperate, challenging, and put us squarely in the world of the drag ball: “Give me legendary face! There’s an icon in the house! The icon is here to battle!” Harrell pitched all of this perfectly, in a sort of chant, increasing the intensity until: “That’s Antigone, bitch! It’s about to be a Greek tragedy in here! The House of Thebes is in the house!” The House of Thebes… the House of Dior… the House of Ninja, the House of LaBeija, the House of Extravaganza… Sophocles, meet high fashion and Harlem drag culture.
In Harrell’s hands, the collision of the piece’s disparate elements began to make sense. Haute-couture runway shows provided the inspiration for the drag balls, and that high-low juxtaposition was reflected in the pairing of Judson and the Harlem voguing world—the upper-class and white side by side with the poor and black. By incorporating the story of Antigone—about a strong, willful woman in a male-dominated society—Harrell commented on the history of men playing female roles, and also drew a connection between the stylization inherent in Greek theatre and voguing.
At different points, Harrell (as Antigone) and Lac (as Ismene, Antigone’s sister) related the plot of the play; later, the performers, dancing energetically, with vaguely voguish hands, said “Work!” over and over, interspersing names and words from the Antigone story, as well as random Greek-related terms (“Thessaloniki!” “Kalamata!”). A mention of Eurydice, the mother of Haemon, led into a runway competition whose category was “Mother of the House.” From the audience, Harrell m.c.’d the proceedings. “Do you know what realness is?” he asked us, then explained. (It’s the point of many drag-ball competitions, getting as close as possible to a certain type—straight urban youth, European fashion model, etc.) To an accompaniment of piano and strings, the “models” emerged from behind the curtain, tiptoeing in invisible high heels, wearing motley arrangements of humble items: acid-washed jeans, a yellow-and-brown afghan, a white paper bag, and many other pieces were recycled over and over, each configuration as absurd as the one before, and each prompting a comment from Harrell (“This is not Rei Kawakubo. This is the myth of Asian people loving the avant-garde”).
For a “serious” artist, Harrell doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously. His fellow-performers follow his lead. In the men’s runway competition, the category was “The King’s Speech vs. Prince of Tides,” and the dancer Rob Fordeyn, droll and languid, was the mistress of ceremonies. He’s already a tall man, but, in a black minidress that revealed his long legs, and wearing extremely high heels, he towered over the models he introduced. Fordeyn spoke into a handheld microphone, whose cord he flipped around as though he were absent-mindedly playing with a whip. The clothing concoctions were as ridiculous as those in the “Mother of the House” competition, but, when it comes right down to it, they were no odder than some of what’s trotted out in Paris and Milan.
Harrell’s original question about the relationship between Judson and voguing reverberated through the performance. The Judson Dance Theatre reconsidered what constituted dancing at all, resisting modern dance’s traditional compositional and presentational structure and characteristics. The idea of what a voguing drag queen from Harlem would do if plunked down in an environment that eschewed presentation is amusing to contemplate. The Judson adherents were concerned with “authenticity,” opening dance up to pedestrian movement and nontraditional venues, and authenticity would seem to have some relation to realness—although, for drag queens, realness involves plenty of artifice. Harrell’s transparent approach to the entire evening could be said to be “authentic”: the performers sat in the audience from time to time and were often visible walking past the openings in the upstage curtain, which removed the distance between them and us. A performance that was, to some extent, about illusion contained precious little of it.
“Antigone Sr.” was so theatrical, with so much speaking and acting, that when any of the men simply danced it almost came as a surprise. By including moments of pure dance, Harrell reminded us that he was, after all, a choreographer, and that he was part of the continuum of dance. He knows how to build a phrase, and his dancers executed his compositions beautifully and passionately. The dancing very often had a gravity, matching the sad tale of Antigone (she hangs herself), and at odds with the madcap frivolity of the parts of the show given over to the runway.
As the piece concluded, it seemed to follow the downward spiral of Sophocles’ play. Fordeyn came onstage wearing a getup that looked like it contained every scrap we’d seen before. But the mood was sombre, the lights dim. Slowly, he removed the clothing bit by bit, and he and the other dancers, who had been changing their clothes in the aisles, traded solos in the white rectangles. To a mournful song, in the near-darkness, the dancers moved fluidly in their confined spaces, their ghostly limbs and white Grecian garb shimmering. Gradually, sobbing could be heard. It was Harrell, dancing by himself on one of the rectangles, Antigone to the end.
Photograph by Ian Douglas.
