Gerard and Kelly, Reusable Parts/Endless Love (2011)
Performance, 75 minutes
Performance still, Danspace Project, New York, November 2011
Reusable Parts/ Endless Love
Reusable Parts/ Endless Love is a research-based project that critiques notions of progress through a series of experiments of the body in time, and the spectator as subject. It is realized through multiple visual platforms, including photography, video and performance, and considers the possibility of thinking choreographically through these forms as a way of producing fluid and fluctuating discourse.
Performance still, Danspace Project, New York, November 2011
We made this piece as a tonic to an earlier work of ours, which was itself a response to another artwork—Kiss by Tino Sehgal in which a man and woman perform a long, languorous embrace.
We first encountered Kiss at the Guggenheim Museum where it was exhibited in the museum’s rotunda in 2010. Struck—and with very little but a hunch that we might eventually do something with the material—we visited the museum several times and started to learn the choreography of the couple. We made an audio score of the work by speaking into the voice memo function of our cell phones and notating the dancers’ movements as accurately as possible and in real time. We deciphered the work consisted of a roughly 12-minute choreography, performed on a loop.
Performance still, Danspace Project, New York, November 2011
When we discovered the work’s casting never deviated from a man and woman, we were uncannily prepared to respond. We re-performed “the kiss” around town, replacing the male/female couple with same-sex pairs (and trios).
Friends sent notes of gratitude for this “correction.” A curator asked us if all our work was identity-based. We became uncomfortable with the choice to simply swap one representation for another, without addressing the frame of representation. This move too easily reflected the logic of the modern gay movement—a rights-based platform that strives for LGBT people to be free to marry and fight in the military without questioning those structures or antagonizing their grip on how we live our lives.
Performance still, Danspace Project, New York, November 2011
This reflection led us—ourselves a couple of ten years—to start thinking about a work that could use Kiss as a springboard for approaching issues of how representations of intimacy and narratives of love are produced, circulated, and consumed. We wanted to destabilize a representational order that puts one thing on top of another by using a procedure that would put one thing after another—from the hierarchical to the horizontal. We needed to get away from compositional choices, from choreography as such, so that our own subjective designs and desires might be inhibited. We wanted to bring into the process a radical contingency that would fail at every turn to reproduce a standard, a norm, and, perhaps, a commodity.
Digital chromogenic prints, mounted on museum box, (4) 16" x 24"
We devised a system that would produce narratives and representations beyond that which we could imagine writing ourselves. A system that would function like a machine—coolly and analytically—but nonetheless would index and be affected by the minimal differences of its producers. In place of a fixed choreographic object that moves fluidly through the dominant systems of exchange that exist in the world today, we wanted a fluctuating stream of images, themselves the product of a shared, common experience. If as Douglas Crimp proposes, “We have to begin to imagine possibilities for human relations that are not based on the model of the couple, the two-coming-together-as-one, the you-and-me-against-the-world model,” then it is no less true that we must find new systems of exchange to produce those alternatives. If we listen closely we can hear the drumbeat two miles south of here, where such experiments are already taking place outside the incubator of art. A new world is closer than we think.
Multiple channel video installation. Installation view, UCLA, December 2011
Multiple channel video installation. Installation view, UCLA, December 2011
Production Credits:
Danspace Project, New York City (November 2011): Performed by Niv Acosta, devynn emory, Yve Laris Cohen, Ryan Kelly, Todd McQuade, Roger Prince, and Jose Tena. Scenic and lighting designer: Marcus Doshi. Costume designer: Camille Assaf. Sound engineer: Trent Wolbe. Co-production Moving Theater.
University Art Gallery, UC-Irvine (Februrary 2011): Performed by Ryan Kelly, Politeia Le, Todd McQuade, and Jose Tena. Costumes and styling by Aaron Valenzuela. Sound engineering by Trent Wolbe. Co-production Moving Theater.
Video production: Editor: Javo Basques. Camera: Eugene Wasserman.
Moving Theater's programs are made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties. Moving Theater's 2011-2012 projects are supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
