a SEXUALLY SENSORIAL FOREWARD

 I waited to be fucked doggystyle, tautly pressing into the floor as pungent aromas of fecundity and sweat poured in. Roaring, white noise of static wind turbines blew from the speakers overhead as I slithered like a stealthy vampire, lurking in an abyss of monsters and demons. Cherry bloodbaths of light flooded the room as ethereal tones reverberated; crickets chirped melancholically and a seductive, electric guitar strummed away. Appearing as bleeding brawn scantily clad in black, I arched my lower back and opened my ass with a yearning thirst, like the erectly stretched skin flaps of a basilisk lizard hissing out of aggression. I imagined frothing semen concealed within my full cheeks, as I sprayed the stink of potent pheromones on my voyeurs as a feral animal captively bound. I relentlessly gyrated as knee pads swirled into the rubber floor, squeaking like metallic clangs. My weighted bottom and thick thigh meat jiggled off the bone, a buoy bobbing vigorously in a bottomless, black sea.

Submitting, I brutally received the choke and thrust of an invisible other—something/someone that is different, unknown, or outside of oneself—quaking savagely, I concentrated on a wicked penetration … taking it like a good boy. Phallic lariats of silky, white rope littered the stage, as sagging cords hung from the ceiling like flaccidly dripping, limp penises. Three industrial stools were stacked on one another, engulfed in pounds of sex-bondage braiding, thick-knotted, geometric configurations gleaming in the light. These tethers poured from the stool legs, reaching outward in kaleidoscopic formations of ivory webbing, like confetti intestines spilling from the underbelly of a satanic beast. As a tenderized bag of fuck-meat, I energetically screwed my crowd with transgressive behavior, transforming the space from concert hall into a blackened, pornographic underworld. I stimulated the room with the rub of my genitals, horny in my skin, attempting to attract a man-handler, a sexual partner, a dominant plaything … a fuck-mate.   

a PERSONAL, SORDID HISTORY

My personal history is a sordid one, echoing the pain, trauma, despair, hope, resilience, and beauty of the desperately mad and sadly romantic artists who inspire me, like Herko and McQueen. Since the age of fifteen, I have been sexually active, explicitly and promiscuously so. I have always been a wild child; a worshipper of sex, sin, grit, grunge, glamor, drugs, dance (professional/go-go/night clubs), and rock n’ roll. When I was younger, pre-coming out, I sought to continue navigating through life normatively and hopefully emerge unscathed. I was raised as a relatively good, Presbyterian boy, who vacationed at Bible school and Triple R Ranch with my adopted cousin.  I was engaged in a constant struggle with religion and sexuality. Since the age of twelve, I felt being gay and loving God were incompatible. This left me feeling lonely and unsure of myself. I used to cry quietly while sitting on the floor in the shower, as part of my getting-ready-for-high-school routine.  I experienced anxiety attacks as I simultaneously battled manic-depressive-bipolar disorder. I was never suicidal, but extremely temperamental in my charisma; maintaining a reputation as that guy on the dance team and president of the Drama Club. All the surrounding noise culminated in a very loud “coming out” by my mid-teens. When I finally came out to my best friend of five years, he retaliated by saying, “Shut up, you’re gay!” In this case, “gay” was a euphemism for “stupid.” Following that incident, I ripped that metaphorical closet door off its damn hinges.

My greater research process has been an ongoing investigation of heartache, poor judgment, and near-death experiences. These were spearheaded by cocaine fueled nights, excessive drinking, blackouts, and general carelessness—lived excesses. From age fifteen to eighteen, I gave “zero fucks,” a sentiment shared by anarchists and “bad” youths of my generation. I felt lost. My affinity for lawlessness and pandemonium were simply variations of my own feeling of raw excessiveness.  My choreographic style is laden with strife-stricken ambiguity and a dark campiness that stems from personal experiences, like the time when I was choked (several times) by an angry boy who was probably questioning his own sexuality. He was a baseball player who I had a crush on. Because of my effeminate, “gay” voice, he took his animosities out on my neck using a forest-green, electrical appliance box, in the weeds of a nearby construction site. With experience such as this, I elaborate on the frustrations letting/not letting go. Overtime, resentments and anger build, and artistically settling up with these sad facts/memories is the only I know how to cope. It is by navigating through the hardships of trauma and disappointment that I create the cruxes for my dramatic and darkly potent works. As a result, the threads of disparity, neglect, and angst have become omnipresent threads throughout my dances.

For me, my identity as a gay man was at odds with the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s heteronormativity; straight relationships washed in the baroque love of Airs (1978) and Arden Court (1981). As stated previously, only glimmers of homosexuality were ever revealed in Mr. Taylor’s works. He was a quiet man; private when concerning his sexuality and aesthetic tastes. I was with the Paul Taylor II Dance Company for five years, where I grew exponentially as an artist and dancer. I shined onstage through my self-sabotage and emotional pain offstage; the work got me through some dark times. Mr. Taylor referred to me as “BAM.” In my audition he said “hire the one with the fire in his eyes!” I was always my rambunctiously flamboyant self in the rehearsal process, but quite often a “straight” man onstage. I am forever grateful to Taylor; he helped shape the dancer and person I am today. His voice and embodied truths live on through my corporeally visceral comprehensions as I seek to experiment with and recontextualize the modern, choreographic goods I inherited from him.

         At thirty-three years old, I have become increasingly infatuated with “non-dance,” pedestrian and sexual movement vocabularies. Exploring my own sexual history as a submissive male, colloquially known as a “bottom,” I now utilize an intimate involvement with props. Until coming to Sarah Lawrence College as a graduate student, I had never used props before in dance. Now, they are central to my work, and represent a type of life obstacle, binding, or problem to be solved. I enjoy the rush and the challenge involved with navigating through a dance with not just the use, but the entanglement of choreographic objects. I pose the elements and branches of conceptual muchness (objects, music, lighting, and other facets) as my issue, then I find ways to work around, utilize, and choreograph them. With cottonbrickNEEDle. (2019), I was fixated on truly opening my sexual self to the audience, in order to reveal a dark secret, one I carried with me for roughly ten years. After finishing my bachelor’s degree, I moved in with a combative, dominant boyfriend with whom I shared a debilitating, tumultuous relationship. The process of getting by daily relied on my sexual upkeep and a desired performance to meet his standards and satisfaction. He would police the ways in which I “should” conduct myself publicly and privately, and comment on how I shouldn’t stand like a faggot.

That relationship only furthered an addiction I wouldn’t admit to for years to come. I was a naïve twenty-three-year-old, and he didn’t like that I had a relatively sporadic drinking and drug problem. I liked partying; it was my excess, my escape. Responding to my daily breakdowns and fits of rage, I set out to sabotage the partnership, as a means of coping with the war going on in my mind. I slept with a random man from a nightclub one night. To punish me, the next day, my boyfriend angrily fucked me. Terrifying in his advancements, he choked me as tears streamed down my face, incessantly thrusting with pure hate in his eyes. In hindsight, I realize that it was rape, and that was the beginning of our end. For years, this torrid love existed as an elusive abstraction, a metaphorical skeleton hanging in my closet. In cottonbrickNEEDle. (2019), I aimed to finish the physically sexual task at hand…like a “good boy.” My ex, like many after him, called me that. Today, my excesses have served me well. I am stronger.

CONCLUSIONS of a QUEER, EXCESSIVE CREATURE

With a richly woven and complicated tapestry of experience, I have navigated through life’s colorful chaos. As a reckless, capital S-Sinner (nightclubber/wild-child), I have translated my self-induced hang-ups into art forms. A powerful, revitalizing act, choreography has provided me with a healthy outlet; an alternative to bad behavior. Unlike many of my idols and artistic influences, I have escaped death; formulating a not-so-linear path by restructuring the choreography of my life in a twenty-eight-day rehabilitation center at thirty years old. In creating Cleo, Sement. (2020), I pulled from the guts of my fantastically sloppy personal archive. Each unique chapter of the dance was filled with grotesquery and desire; it continually called out against heteronormativity, pressing an importance towards fleetingness, loss, and oblivion.

Cleo, Sement. (2020) upholds these truths and maintains itself as emblematic of my identity. I feel fortunate to have survived my lived experiences, deep and dark, and I am lucky to be able to bring these deviations to the forefront; repurposing pain in my dances. Unlike Herko and McQueen, I was able to reorient my life. In my work, I am led toward a queer futurity; a bizarrely functioning utopia-dystopia of ethereality and self-reflection. In dance, I create idealized places of agency through my performance choices, but the construction of the dance itself also seeks to evoke knee-jerk effects and “a-ha!” moments in the audience. These places of transmutation can enable metamorphosis in performance, proving like Susan Sontag, that in camp and aesthetics of queer excess, there is more than meets the eye.

My evolutions of dance use transgression and conceptual muchness to go beyond.  I create dance as a form of relief from this “shitty” world that we live in; to step outside of a prescribed realm of normalcy and let my freak flag fly. Using choreography, created landscapes, artistic sets, and elaborate costumes, I cultivate and curate a creative ministry of defense where I can explore the decadences of hideousness and fabulousness.  There is beauty in all of these ugly hang-ups, whether they are self-induced or externally caused. The stage has become my canvas for visceral, dystopian performance spectacles that derive from my experiences. In my projects, I feel that the effects of excessive campiness have allowed me to follow my intuitions in order to claim a position in this world; in order to claim agency and a full autonomy over the queer spaces I create and occupy in performance.

With the massive spread of the COVID-19 virus, and the immediate close of Sarah Lawrence College, the thesis performance of Cleo, Sement. (2020) was performed with my three dancers, Sophia Cutrubus, Sabrina Leira, and Lily Padilla, in front of my videographer Harrison O’Clair and his assistant at the Bessie Schonberg Theater on Thursday, March 12th, 2020. We performed the work with a sense of desperation, loss, and affliction; we all knew something terrible was coming. This state of chaos and overwhelming sense of the unknown placed my mind in a very sad but perfect frame of intention. I stayed in the theater till 11:00pm the night before shooting, suspending ropes from the grid system rafters and placing florescent lamps around the perimeter of the space; immaculately setting up the piece as a MoMa-style art installation equipped with industrial white/blue hues of horizontal light.

Additional footage taken on a 35-acre farm in Manakin-Sabot, VA has been incorporated into the final film project, as a means of applying a rural setting to the mechanical, metallic sheen of the original, master footage. This aesthetic feel continues to dirty the sterile quality of my previous, theatrical stage setting; applying dirt, dust, grit, and glamor-filth to my over-the-top saga project. The thesis is now complete with film-edited abstractions – slow-motion, closeups, speed enhancement, layering, superimpositions, site-specific locations, weather effects, etc. – and a deeper involvement/narrative of the original, choreographic objects. The video now features me as creature-messenger who struts through barren, black fields entangled in the seaweed-like movements of drippy plastics wrapped around my variationally outfitted body. I have incorporated mangled, pedestrian articulations in colonial dress and heels, flailing movements in wet, clay fields with zombie finger articulations, and anthropomorphizing personality traits of the rocking horses, dildos, and doll.

I froze the dance in time to capture it in a state of complete otherness, so it could breathe an original intentionality of “fear and loathing combined with lust” (Jasperse, 2020). With the added, additional footage, the work is emulative of a whimsical nightmare that juggles the surreal realities of a gay, tormented nightclub-factory and a thriving, dystopian limbo. I hope for this piece to exist as a driving abstraction of sinful desires, and an aversion from historical, personal trauma alongside the world’s seemingly collapsing exteriority. Now, the dark and phantasmal integrity of the work will never be lost as it has been expanded upon and excavated more thoroughly onto a section of my website. I have produced twenty-plus versions, variations, and iterations of the newer and original footage, all ranging from six to thirty-six minutes. The related projects have been created in an eerily stylized manner where consistent quotes from Grey Gardens (1975) narrate the newly amorphous, pagan layout. The text paradoxically threads together the glossy, experimental films with works of art that portray fancifully grotesque imageries of demonology/witchcraft (13th century to 18th century) from European and Eastern backgrounds. The intention is to create an abstract thread of coherence that brings absurdity, spirituality, and religion further into a conversation on internalized strife and sacrifice. This dives deeper into the psyche of the many faces of Cleo, Sement. (2020).

In this current social climate, amid the hysterical health crisis, this dance (for me) stands as a beacon of hope for what is misunderstood and overlooked in this world. Cleo, Sement. (2020) rises like the phoenix from the ashes, calling out with shrill cries against impending doom. The piece beckons towards a lost love, honoring a longevity and commitment to experimental dance. It works tirelessly through modes of trauma that yearn to be witnessed in the glory of righteously agential embodiments. There is a visceral need for the conveyance of desperation in my dances; an offering of the self that is especially evident in this work. My thesis project was made possible through my transgressions, and I have carried the dance successfully to its end through performative excessiveness and overarching ideas of conceptual muchness. These conceptions have spear-headed my actions as the fearless doer of my doings; and only I can get it done. In my performance-based constructions, and most importantly, Cleo, Sement. (2020) I echo the words of Daniel Lismore who, like Alexander McQueen, lives his fashionable life in the aesthetic of conceptual muchness: “The only rule is that there’s no such thing as too much…more is always more.” (Lismore quoted in SCAD FASH 2016, 22-23).