Sis-Gendered

  -- By Tom Phillips 

Portrait of Thoreau attributed to his sister

Most men, wrote Henry David Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation."  I read these words as a teenager, and immediately resolved not to be one of those men.  I was desperate, haunted, frustrated, insecure, confused, irrational and contradictory.  But quiet?  Not while I could draw a breath.  The world soon began to hear my complaints against injustices large and small, personal and political, real and imagined.  

There was just one subject that cowed me: sex and gender.  I participated gingerly in what was called the sexual revolution, but couldn't bring myself to speak out for sexual freedom.  Quickly and prematurely, I slid into a lifestyle of a heterosexual, cis-gendered, homophobic husband and father.  I opposed same-sex marriage on linguistic grounds, telling my children that you couldn't just change the meaning of a word that goes back to biblical times.  But of course, you can.  

Groovin'

 LaMama Moves/Online

Tamar Rogoff with Merri Milwe
"Wonder About Merri"
Kevin Augustine/Lone Wolf Tribe 
"Body Concert"
Tamar Rogoff with Mei Yamanaka
"The Yamanakas at Home"

-- By Tom Phillips

The Yamanakas at Home 

 It's not that often that three disparate dance pieces fit together so well that they seem to be subtly referring and commenting on each other -- but last night's trio of experiments from LaMama seemed to have been made with each other in mind.  The bookends were two short pieces by Tamar Rogoff --  one set in downtown Manhattan, the other in a residential neighborhood of Tokyo -- with entirely different characters and themes, but a single groove -- a Motown beat that gets you on your feet, and won't let you do anything but dance. 

Bloomsday in America

This article was originally published online, in slightly different form, in  ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews  12/28/2020. 

-- By Tom Phillips 

Geography is destiny in two modern masterpieces – James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) – but these destinies point in opposite directions. Joyce’s Dublin faces East across the Irish Sea to England; Malamud’s fictional Marathon, Cascadia west over the mountains to the Pacific.  Cascadia is green and fresh, the air clear, nature an “esthetic satisfaction” so overwhelming that art is superfluous.  Dublin is “snotgreen”, reeking of dead men, dead dogs, poor old women, “general paralysis of the insane” all seen through Irish art, the “cracked lookingglass of a servant.”                                                                           

"Poldy"  -- from Joyce's notes 

Enter into these opposite landscapes a single archetype, the wandering Jew -- outsider, observer, “chief critic of everything”. The aim of this essay will be to point out the direct relation between characters and episodes in these two novels – notably Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Malamud’s Seymour Levin. This link is repeatedly suggested by Malamud, beginning with the epigraph of A New Life, a quote from Ulysses: “Lo, Levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland’s western welkin."  A New Life can be read as another variation on Homer’s Odyssey, a bid by Malamud to extend the epic of human civilization to America’s farthest shore.  Spiced with biblical references, it is also the story of American Jews’ liberation from cyclical tragedy in the Old World, and the hazards of their new life in the New.    

Two Mamas at LaMama

 LaMama Moves/Online 
Annabella Lenzu & Kari Hoaas 

-- By Tom Phillips 

Ida Haugen in "Rise" 

Inauguration Day and the Pandemic both played into the hands of artists at LaMama's annual festival of dance, this year on video instead of downtown in New York.  Norwegian choreographer Kari Hoaas and Argentine-American Annabella Lenzu had to adapt work originally meant for LaMama's theater space.  And while their creative solutions narrowed the scope of their pieces, they may also have sharpened their focus. 

Le Coup pour Rien

 -- By Tom Phillips                   

The first rule of a revolution is that you need to win it; because you'll be harshly punished if you fail.  

Mao Zedong, who won the biggest revolution of the 20th Century, wrote:  “A revolution is not a tea party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery...  A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

President Trump has been impeached for "incitement of insurrection," but it wasn't a real insurrection, and had no chance of winning.  It was just the the final episode of play-acting in a show that's been running for four years, a fantastical grand finale in which five people actually died.  Mr. Trump lives by appearances, and can't cope with realities -- e.g. the Coronavirus, or the election results.  He keeps thinking he can fix things without doing anything about them. 

This week, as he summoned a mob and sent it against Congress, he failed to understand that a show of force is not the same as actual force.  Actual force performs work, as in one class overthrowing another.  A show of force is just a photo-op.   

Trash Talk of 2020: The Year in Quotes

-- By Tom Phillips 

2020 was an epic year for news, but not for noble speeches. The Quotes of the Year were more like the oaths of warriors in combat: bravado, trash talk, mayday calls, dying gasps and pleas for mercy.     

What they said: 

"It is what it is.."  Donald Trump on August 31, downplaying US deaths from Covid-19 ".. because you are what you are."  Joe Biden, blaming him in the first presidential debate September 29.

“I can’t breathe.”  George Floyd, as he lay dying under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin May 25.  When Biden was declared president-elect November 7, CNN commentator Van Jones broke down on camera, weeping for his children and friends.  "It wasn't just George Floyd," he said through a flood of tears.  "A lot of people …felt they couldn't breathe."

 "Kill me!"  Luis Vasquez, a neighborhood resident who fired gunshots into the air in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, following a Christmas concert on the Cathedral steps December 12.  Police shot him dead.  The gunman's sister said he'd been "damaged" by prison time in the 1990s, and his mental state had worsened in the pandemic. 

Junk Dances 2020

"Plastic Harvest" 
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020

By Tom Phillips 
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

Anika Hunter in "Plastic Harvest" 

In the early 1960s, choreographer Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.

 ''I looked at rooms and rooms .. waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.''  Shortly after, Louis attended a country auction where he bought a bundle of old umbrellas. He opened them up: ''They were all completely eaten away. It was wonderful.”  He had one thought: “It all turns to junk.”  

Out of this, in 1964 Louis and Phyllis Lamhut made a wonderful duet, set in an alley that steadily filled up with the detritus of a shopping spree – heaps and piles of paper bags, filled with goods destined to decay and disintegrate.  They called it “Junk Dances.”  Fast forward to 2020, and choreographer Jody Sperling is on the Down escalator, contemplating the end times of our long national shopping spree.  She calls it "Plastic Harvest." 

---

Today a tsunami of accumulated junk is filling up the whole earth.  And instead of paper bags full of ephemeral objects, we have mountains of plastic bags, filled with plastic products that will not decay or go away.  In 1964 our consumer products all turned to junk.  Today they start out as junk, and turn to toxic waste.      

“Plastic Harvest” is a Covid-era virtual work in progress, a video featuring four dancers in costumes fashioned from plastic bags.  Anika Hunter opens in a tub, taking a bubble bath in a sea of crackling plastic.  As she periodically disappeared under the surface, I thought of the warnings on some bags – danger of suffocation.  Hunter begins and ends her bath reading a book – “So You Want to Talk about Race.”  It’s a crisis, for sure, but not the one that’s immediately surrounding her.  Like the American consumer she appears unconcerned, even as she slips under the waves. 

Maki Kitahara follows in a wide-sleeved kimono made of bags tied and hanging from her outstretched arms as if from a clothesline.  This too is a disappearing act, through a trick of Sperling’s camera that shoots her in a split-screen mirror image.  Turning toward the center she disappears, turning outward she splits into two.  An identity crisis – is it a person, two persons, plastic, or nothing at all? 

Andrea Pugliese-Trager

The grand finale is a whirling balletic folk dance in swirling tutus and puffed plastic sleeves, intercut between Frances Barker on a suburban street and Andrea Pugliese-Trager in New York.  Both wind up crossing an intersection – Pugliese-Trager through a construction zone, Barker past a Stop sign into a weed-strewn vacant lot.  

Obviously, more questions than answers in this work-in-progress, but that’s as it should be.  The camera work is sharp and the split-screens stunning.  It’s all kept driving by Matthew Burtner’s repetitive score, which sounds like the infernal combustion of some satanic micro-mill.   

Besides the dancers, the most striking visual was the unheeded sign that said STOP.   Hey, it's not too late… 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips                                 

Junk Dances, 1964

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