This is No Substitute for a Dance. This is Dance and Process 2020–2021. This is our webpage. It will change, morph, grow and shrink every month, for the next four months. This Process will unravel onscreen until it doesn’t. It will end at Queenslab in May 2021.

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December | January | February | March | April | May

Alex Rodabaugh

Break-up Tunnel Vision Infinity, 2nd Edition

Watch the 1st Edition here.

[Kris K. Q. Pourzal is here and also he is not. While at the University of Maryland College Park pursuing a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies, he finds himself in the middle of so many things, including this very extended Dance and Process.]

January 15, 2021 

Dear Human, 

This is ongoing. This monster is growing.   

This began in March 2020 when the future we had imagined disappeared and a well of time and uncertainty took its place. 

Onscreen and Process. Not Dance and Process. Restrictions and Process. Elmhurst and Process. Weeks of Rain and Process. Be Still and Process. Stand Up and Process. Rage and Process. Go Outside and Process. Hunger and Process. Fill Up and Empty Out and Process. Process and Process. Dance and Monster. 

Alex did the best performance of the year for us from his bathtub. Leslie recast her inquiries on identity, family history, and dance history as videos and written scores. Kris spoke about improvisation as a suspension bridge between process and material. There were many, many text messages about the doves nesting on Yve’s fire escape. There was Moriah’s indomitable passion and commitment. I set about moving performance from exterior to interior, or someplace else. 

In the Spring we compressed pieces of Dance and Process 2020 into a black-and-white poster/mailer. 

Through May 2021, Leslie, Alex, and I continue our Dance and Process here on screen. 

Someone joked that DAP 2020 will become DAP 2039 which would make me 59 when we wrap this up with a performance where an audience is there to see it.

Limbo and 

And anyway dance vanishes

The monster said, “Pick up your camera!” So I did and in place of performing live I used it to chronicle experiments with somatic practices, ritual, and trance. I rehearsed, made sets, and documented by day and by night how the camera and I merged while conjuring bodies, objects, and light in motion.

foxtrot, the title of the series, is taken from the nautical flag appearing in some of the images.

foxtrot 

simple 

slow

a signal spells out a message 

we are waiting 

(break)

it took months to cure the grass

slow, slow, quick, quick

(break)

E or Echo, “I am altering my course to starboard”

what in reality is one-two, three, four is counted four-one, two, three

F or Foxtrot, “communicate with me I am disabled" 

the forward step on the right foot formerly one-two is now just two

G or Golf, “I require a pilot” 

Light in an un-phrased dance

(break)

reverence and ceremony 

without the need for multiple sets 

C for Yes 

(break)

Watch Your Step

a hoist is in code

a body unfurls lengthwise

(break)

pattern and color transmit messages rapidly

even change the hidden atmosphere 

(break)

which body

now sketched in motion 

an expression of light

Yankee Oscar Uniform Romeo Sierra Uniform November Delta Echo Romeo Sierra Alfa India Lima, 

Xray Oscar KH

With Marion

Leslie Cuyjet

1 / Reorientation

Our first meeting under the fluorescent work lights of the black box theatre, we arrange stacked chairs in a circle like it is another kind of meeting, late on a Sunday past the elevated tracks on the west side of the city. These kinds of circles are a summoning driven by those who are its make up. Circles that are familiar and instinctual even outside of a church basement or assembly hall. Coats draped on the back of metal frames, steam rises from a thermos of tea, a snack opens, the tick tack of the pen cap hits the floor, nervous chatter. This imperfect orientation is a preparation, a confession. A cell phone with a timer set to 45 minutes is slid into the center of the circle. Your turn, go.

Ok, this dance is private. It forms new pathways to allow the unexpected to emerge. It is also a constant practice of letting them all disappear quietly into nothing. I say it out loud for the first time. Everyone’s attention is at once thrilling and menacing, like a hunk of rock teetering on the edge of a cliff. I am woefully unprepared for what falls out of my mouth and into my ears. Grasping at identifiers that say who I am, that prove I’m an artist deserving of being here. The lighting grid above us is black and silent as I squirm in the illusive spotlight. With each turn we create a loop that mimics my practice: show up, invest, interrogate, write, let go. Here we are, committing to these solos, speaking on our own behalf, intimately defending our work to a room of our peers. During his rant Kris explains, there’s “no solo in Blackness,” quoting Thomas DeFrantz. How hearing that fucked up his work in productive ways. Within this orientation I feel our social duet emerge as it does with other Black artists I share rooms with. These rooms. And the proximity to which I hold varying degrees of insecurity. 

Rooms with good and bad floors, littered stranger’s hair knotted with my own, or settled dust that used to snow in the theater lights. Rooms with chairs like these that are used for butts in talk backs and shows, and to reach a stack of gels in the storage closet. In March of 2020 these rooms shuttered and collapsed into one, an apartment in Brooklyn, in one fell swoop. My life, my work, and my foreseeable future are all within a single tight periphery, simultaneously. With each email cancellation my inbox is a deadly weapon. This Tonya Harding blow lays me out and creativity doubles over to a crawl. I can still write. Mostly a series of lists: to-dos, how many times I cried. Then short musings on the evolution of ambulance sirens to fireworks, or smells coming from my neighbors’ culinary exploits. Facing this new solo, the orientation to my home grows into focus like the first time. I have never used my own toilet as much as I do now. 

---

With Marion comprises materials kept at my newly formed and adolescent home studio. The virtual Dance and Process sessions took place at the same location and influenced a shift in format from dancing to writing, drawing, and video. Marion Cuyjet, my great aunt, was a pioneer of dance education for students of color in the 1950s. Her portrait sits on my desk. Next month, Objects.

Request a copy of the full image, included in the Dance and Process publication, with this link.

Initiated in 1995, Dance and Process is The Kitchen’s longest running series. Dance and Process stages an interrogation of methods of choreographic and dance practice, whereby artists challenge default structures in their own work and the field at large. 

The Spring 2020 cohort included Leslie Cuyjet, Kennis Hawkins, Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, and Alex Rodabaugh and was curated and facilitated by Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen. The group began initial meetings at The Kitchen in February and early March and was scheduled to be in residence at Queenslab in April leading up to public showings in May. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the residency and performance period couldn’t occur in shared physical space. This cohort has worked together virtually in the months since March and will continue their dialogue for Dance and Process 2021.

Images: 1) Courtesy of Leslie Cuyjet, Kennis Hawkins, Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, and Alex Rodabaugh. 2) Alex Rodabaugh, Human Capital Stock, 2021. GIF. 3) All images in gallery: Kennis Hawkins, foxtrot, 2020. © Kennis Hawkins. 4) Leslie Cuyjet, With Marion, 2020. Detail 1 of 5.


Dance and Process is made possible with commissioning support from Marta Heflin Foundation; annual grants from Howard Gilman Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, and The Harkness Foundation for Dance; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.