Extracts from...
Where now folks?
Commissioned by Dance Art Foundation upon the occasion of Arrangement by Joe Moran at Sadler’s Wells, November 2019.
Joe Moran’s Arrangement arrived back on the Lilian Bayliss stage this last December, five years after its premiere. In revisiting this work, we were also invited to revisit Moran’s problematisation of straightforward celebratory displays of conventional masculinity in and through dance. We might hope that this work has dated somewhat, because of its subject matter, and yet it feels apparent that not much has changed since its opening five years ago. Moran’s choreographic questions are still apt and appropriate; contemporary dance still persists in its obsession with ‘masculinity’.
Arrangement parodies masculinity, un-does masculinity, does masculinity differently. Arrangement performs and un-performs what it means for ‘men’ to be in a system of heteronormativity, specifically heteronormativity in contemporary dance. What happens when we witness this doing/un-doing/performing/un-performing? It is made clear to us that masculinity itself is a performance; when we engage and dis-engage with the modes in which our bodies are inscribed, we realize that they are inscribed, and in the case of ‘masculinities’, inscribed as part of a structure of oppression. If we can perform and un-perform masculinity, then there is no real ‘biological essence’ of masculinity.
Photo Credit: Rocio Chacon
Moran’s work makes transparent the un-truth of masculinities, and more specifically, that masculinities are performative as opposed to biologically determined. This subversion of sedimented ideas about gender is part of what makes this work queer. The act of queering takes hegemonic structures and points out they exist, working against them, finds the loop holes and exposes them. Is Arrangement queer in this sense? Can queer dance be performed in mainstream institutions? Does queer dance, by definition, become something else when inside an institution?
I consider what ‘Queer Performance’ in London looks like in London 2019, and I see Queer Performance as East London. Queer Performance as Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Queer Performance as The Yard. Queer Performance as abjection and uncertainty. Queer Performance as confronting. Queer as Inferno. Queer as Dalston. Queer as £5 entry after midnight. Queer as chains. Queer as translucent lilac fabric with nipples peeking through. Queer as concrete floors. Queer as people in strap-ons on a podium. Queer as at the margins. Queer as the margins.