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Comfort / Gayelle / Fierce (images three, four & five)
Image 3: Comfort (:00-3:10)
Flowers & Arrows (If disco were a lady)
Moving pictures of three muses
Mother/Siren/Warrior
On a dancefloor
Or embedded in 70's-80's vinyl
Ethereal
Zeus’ daughters
Laughing on their own island
Away
Away
Away
Lazy sun loving
Goddesses
Disco ladies of their own imagined
St. Tropez
Venus/Oshun/Aphrodite/Oya/Athena/Isis
as Labelle
as Alicia Myers
as Stephanie Mills
and Loleatta Holloway
Proprietors of their own oasis
Exporters of luxurious reveries
A dream-place
To produce comfort
Where lightness and weight coexist
Where dreaming
Is both soft and direct
Smooth and accented
Flowers & arrows
Dripping, dropping and fierce
Disco is not a dirty word!
I have no problem admitting to the fact that I am a child of disco. This, in the face of Chicago's legendary 1979 demolition of disco event during a White Sox game. But that just points out that disco had/has a different function for various segments of Chicago's communities. Cuz for many black, LGBQT (and other) marginalized folk of a certain generation, disco has continued to be a powerful musical genre. For many of us still, the genre is a defining cornerstone of Chicago house's character. In building GT, I wanted there to be a special place for disco (it's also featured at the end of GT with Made in USA's "Melodies"). So, really "Comfort" is an homage. I chose Sergio Mendes' "The Real Thing" because it's a Chicago disco/house classic. Note too it was written by Stevie Wonder, and many of Stevie's early works (e.g., "As" and "All I Do" (with a soul clap break!) are staples of classic Chicago house.
The Mendes tune was also a challenge to work with. How to both draw upon and push against it's gooey instrumentation, it's lounge quality, it's drippy vocals? My approach was to describe and deconstruct some of the structural qualities and floating images I heard and envisioned in the track. I created a list: Smooth, Even, Direct but Spiralling, Internalized, Controlled, Free, Dignified, Tango, Reverie, Luxury, Lazy Sun, Muses, Disco Ladies. Extracting from this list, I asked the three performers (Yuka, Linsday, Gina) to create short phrases based on "smooth, even, direct but spiralling." We tweaked, pulled apart and re-ordered these core phrases to build the section.
The other descriptive terms became conceptual guides to build tableau images. For example, the beginning image of this section is a snapshot. It is a picture of serene, cool and calm muses/goddesses/sisters resting. They begin in reverie, dream-state and the section unfolds with their waking up, growing from sleep into a comfortable state where there is no strain, just fluidity and maybe even a bit of detachment (a kind of armor of sophistication/refinement) that is physically articulated through sustained and even execution of the movement. Accents are minimized in favor of connected phrasework. But then, the energy of the section shifts and the dancers become warriors moving with aggression, direct attack and staccato force. They become an expression of what I see as the range of disco herself (and I do picture disco as a woman): from Venus/Oshun to Athena/Oya.
Indeed, this spectrum of disco's Womanist character brings out a kind of embedded idea that fuels this section and undergirds the entire Househedz project, though it's not readily apparent in the performance (something I need to continue on working out and bringing to the surface). One of the things that I have always loved about the disco/house connection is it's reliance on the strength of diva's voices; it is the wails, moans, honest vulnerability and "I will survive" mentality of women's voices that catalyze the genre. It is those voices which urge you on and sustain you when you're dancing in a set. Yet, in most documentation about house, these female voices are never honored or acknowledged. As I continue to build this work, I want to intervene in this act of silencing by bringing womens' voices and experiences as vocalists, DJs, promoters, dancers, etc. to the fore.
Image 4: Gayelle (3:11-5:30)
This duet is both a giving into and a battle/competition between potential lovers. The title for this section is a Trinidadian term. The gayelle is where one shows one’s skills before his/her community. Traditionally, it was the stick fighting space – where two competitors literally battled with sticks in front of a crowd trying to bust each other’s head and draw blood. In claiming gayelle as the duet’s title, I am performing house's own pastiche in allowing myself to integrate influences. So Trinidadian knowledge becomes part of my own knowledge base. In a larger sense, the duet’s title/content illustrates how house is always incorporating genres outside itself that share a similar feeling, sound, intention, etc. Trinidad's gayelle parallels the continuum of competition/community found in house's own cultural rubric. The Trini context and the US/Chicago context are diasporically related systems. The gayelle circle and the Chicago dance floor/club are spaces to use the body to blur the lines between the sensual, the sexual, the sacred and to catalyze/cement the making of community and relationships. The competition here – as a gayelle – is a challenge that aims to make bodies stronger rather than destroying them (which is often I think what people feel is happening to them in our day-to-day experiences, problems, trials, issues).
I wanted to translate this gayelle idea to a house community. The duet contains valences of love, attachment to/investment in a community, and a kind of meeting of kindred spirits (i.e. dancing with someone who understands what house is without having to articulate it; it i enough to embody it). But then at the same time there is a sense of isolation, of each body as an impenetrable island/mask, of a competition to be better than. There is also this other kind of dark variable. Some of house I think has to do with a kind of symbolic violence that is sanctioned on the dance floor. That one can bring one’s own issues/troubles to the floor and bring that into your interaction with this other body/presence. And it’s not as if you want to hurt the other person but there’s a projection or maybe a personal exorcism that happens in that dancing relation. It is a kind of catharsis alongside/with/onto another body where both parties are going through something, and it’s safe to let it go here because of the framing “house” social logic that lets it be okay. ALL of this is sewed up together with sexuality/sensuality – love, sensual touch, support, violence, aggression. It all comes together in the expression of this relation – a duet, two bodies dancing.
Now because of house’s flexible gender politics, I could have cast this duet as female-female or male-male – that’s fine, maybe something to play with in further versions. But, I am fascinated by the way sexuality, competition and gender-bending come into play for men and women in house. Codes get turned on their heads. Women can become aggressive, forceful, dominant. Men can become soft, light, submissive. And, then these roles can be switched again to embody more conventional performances of gender. It is fluid, experimental. All of this is mitigated through sexuality, the club atmosphere and this ethos of community AND competition. This destabilization – and the very personal experience of defining my own sexuality and sensuality within this cultural frame – has always fascinated me about the house scene in Chicago.
Fierce (5:35-end)
This final trio is yet another tribute to disco divas and black feminisms. However, Fierce adds another dimension or layer by playing with the over the top embellishment of drag performance. An an ethnographer and choreographer, I am inclined to draw upon the cultural references within my field of perception/vision. Seeing similarities between the gender play I have experienced as part of the Chicago house scene and the current vogue femme/ballroom scene, I wanted to enlist this cultural frame as a way to embody/elaborate on a technique of fierceness, which I define as a simultaneous masking and vulnerability, the ability to be both raw and impenetrable, a skill set that enables one to survive the stresses of the daily world and to maintain vitality/passion through performance (i.e., performance as mask and performance as affirmation of life). Performance enables these women to both veil and deveil.
They are a cycle or a progression of womens’ experiences with love. There are moments of strength, composure and impenetrability in concert with vulnerability, pain, a feeling of being discarded/abandoned. There is extreme equilibrium in concert with forceful attack. Each solo - stately and regal in quality - relies on centripetal force evidenced in phrases built on sustained balances and turns that require inner core strength. In terms of stage persona, they wear poker faces. And it is their collective range of body vocabulary that emphasizes or belies this mask of poise. In each sequence they go from sculpted to thrashing, from carving ethereal lines with their limbs to deploying arms and legs as arrow-like appendages. They embody torch singer, disco diva, and drag performer/vogue femme queen, laying emotions bare through their bodies. And while their faces are still/masked, there is attitude in their head action. I'm riffing on gestures I know as part of an African American (and wider black diasporic) female experience: neck rollin,' hands akimbo on hips, flipping hands - all are subtle weapons of disregard, gestures I would include in the technique of fierceness. Overall, the Fierce trio is a variation on, or maybe a response to, the Comfort trio. The larger section begins with the three muses of Comfort and ends with the three muses of Fierce – from soft to fire, from love to warrior. And yet, there is an overlapping circularity linking them. Each contains elements of its own alterity. So, my disco muses contain some of the Athena/Aphrodite/Oya/Oshun fire of my torch divas and my torch divas contain some of the Mother Demeter/Yemoja love that bathes the disco muse. They are flexible archetypes.
This figuration of "Woman" continues its malleability into the next image-section Queen wherein I am playing within the realm of a vogue femme vocabulary and reconfiguring the notion of community and competition once again. So, similar to Comfort/Fierce, Gayelle and Queen are also kaleidoscopic refractions on the notions of gender performance, community, competition, masking, demasking, love and fierceness. On a meta-level, the overlap between these four images - their variations on a similar set of themes - is my attempt to translate a DJ's subtle shifts in a set's playlist. They share foundational elements (e.g., house, community, fierceness, gender-coded play) that get reconfigured in each section. They are sewn together by cueing towards the throughline of these foundational elements (i.e., each image-section contains elements of and/or comments upon the previous section). Choreographic themes and motifs surface and resurface, playing at lower volume in some sections and louder (or as more overt) in others. But all are connected by that foundational beat, similar to the DJ technique of beat matching.
Flowers & Arrows (If disco were a lady)
Moving pictures of three muses
Mother/Siren/Warrior
On a dancefloor
Or embedded in 70's-80's vinyl
Ethereal
Zeus’ daughters
Laughing on their own island
Away
Away
Away
Lazy sun loving
Goddesses
Disco ladies of their own imagined
St. Tropez
Venus/Oshun/Aphrodite/Oya/Athena/Isis
as Labelle
as Alicia Myers
as Stephanie Mills
and Loleatta Holloway
Proprietors of their own oasis
Exporters of luxurious reveries
A dream-place
To produce comfort
Where lightness and weight coexist
Where dreaming
Is both soft and direct
Smooth and accented
Flowers & arrows
Dripping, dropping and fierce
Disco is not a dirty word!
I have no problem admitting to the fact that I am a child of disco. This, in the face of Chicago's legendary 1979 demolition of disco event during a White Sox game. But that just points out that disco had/has a different function for various segments of Chicago's communities. Cuz for many black, LGBQT (and other) marginalized folk of a certain generation, disco has continued to be a powerful musical genre. For many of us still, the genre is a defining cornerstone of Chicago house's character. In building GT, I wanted there to be a special place for disco (it's also featured at the end of GT with Made in USA's "Melodies"). So, really "Comfort" is an homage. I chose Sergio Mendes' "The Real Thing" because it's a Chicago disco/house classic. Note too it was written by Stevie Wonder, and many of Stevie's early works (e.g., "As" and "All I Do" (with a soul clap break!) are staples of classic Chicago house.
The Mendes tune was also a challenge to work with. How to both draw upon and push against it's gooey instrumentation, it's lounge quality, it's drippy vocals? My approach was to describe and deconstruct some of the structural qualities and floating images I heard and envisioned in the track. I created a list: Smooth, Even, Direct but Spiralling, Internalized, Controlled, Free, Dignified, Tango, Reverie, Luxury, Lazy Sun, Muses, Disco Ladies. Extracting from this list, I asked the three performers (Yuka, Linsday, Gina) to create short phrases based on "smooth, even, direct but spiralling." We tweaked, pulled apart and re-ordered these core phrases to build the section.
The other descriptive terms became conceptual guides to build tableau images. For example, the beginning image of this section is a snapshot. It is a picture of serene, cool and calm muses/goddesses/sisters resting. They begin in reverie, dream-state and the section unfolds with their waking up, growing from sleep into a comfortable state where there is no strain, just fluidity and maybe even a bit of detachment (a kind of armor of sophistication/refinement) that is physically articulated through sustained and even execution of the movement. Accents are minimized in favor of connected phrasework. But then, the energy of the section shifts and the dancers become warriors moving with aggression, direct attack and staccato force. They become an expression of what I see as the range of disco herself (and I do picture disco as a woman): from Venus/Oshun to Athena/Oya.
Indeed, this spectrum of disco's Womanist character brings out a kind of embedded idea that fuels this section and undergirds the entire Househedz project, though it's not readily apparent in the performance (something I need to continue on working out and bringing to the surface). One of the things that I have always loved about the disco/house connection is it's reliance on the strength of diva's voices; it is the wails, moans, honest vulnerability and "I will survive" mentality of women's voices that catalyze the genre. It is those voices which urge you on and sustain you when you're dancing in a set. Yet, in most documentation about house, these female voices are never honored or acknowledged. As I continue to build this work, I want to intervene in this act of silencing by bringing womens' voices and experiences as vocalists, DJs, promoters, dancers, etc. to the fore.
Image 4: Gayelle (3:11-5:30)
This duet is both a giving into and a battle/competition between potential lovers. The title for this section is a Trinidadian term. The gayelle is where one shows one’s skills before his/her community. Traditionally, it was the stick fighting space – where two competitors literally battled with sticks in front of a crowd trying to bust each other’s head and draw blood. In claiming gayelle as the duet’s title, I am performing house's own pastiche in allowing myself to integrate influences. So Trinidadian knowledge becomes part of my own knowledge base. In a larger sense, the duet’s title/content illustrates how house is always incorporating genres outside itself that share a similar feeling, sound, intention, etc. Trinidad's gayelle parallels the continuum of competition/community found in house's own cultural rubric. The Trini context and the US/Chicago context are diasporically related systems. The gayelle circle and the Chicago dance floor/club are spaces to use the body to blur the lines between the sensual, the sexual, the sacred and to catalyze/cement the making of community and relationships. The competition here – as a gayelle – is a challenge that aims to make bodies stronger rather than destroying them (which is often I think what people feel is happening to them in our day-to-day experiences, problems, trials, issues).
I wanted to translate this gayelle idea to a house community. The duet contains valences of love, attachment to/investment in a community, and a kind of meeting of kindred spirits (i.e. dancing with someone who understands what house is without having to articulate it; it i enough to embody it). But then at the same time there is a sense of isolation, of each body as an impenetrable island/mask, of a competition to be better than. There is also this other kind of dark variable. Some of house I think has to do with a kind of symbolic violence that is sanctioned on the dance floor. That one can bring one’s own issues/troubles to the floor and bring that into your interaction with this other body/presence. And it’s not as if you want to hurt the other person but there’s a projection or maybe a personal exorcism that happens in that dancing relation. It is a kind of catharsis alongside/with/onto another body where both parties are going through something, and it’s safe to let it go here because of the framing “house” social logic that lets it be okay. ALL of this is sewed up together with sexuality/sensuality – love, sensual touch, support, violence, aggression. It all comes together in the expression of this relation – a duet, two bodies dancing.
Now because of house’s flexible gender politics, I could have cast this duet as female-female or male-male – that’s fine, maybe something to play with in further versions. But, I am fascinated by the way sexuality, competition and gender-bending come into play for men and women in house. Codes get turned on their heads. Women can become aggressive, forceful, dominant. Men can become soft, light, submissive. And, then these roles can be switched again to embody more conventional performances of gender. It is fluid, experimental. All of this is mitigated through sexuality, the club atmosphere and this ethos of community AND competition. This destabilization – and the very personal experience of defining my own sexuality and sensuality within this cultural frame – has always fascinated me about the house scene in Chicago.
Fierce (5:35-end)
This final trio is yet another tribute to disco divas and black feminisms. However, Fierce adds another dimension or layer by playing with the over the top embellishment of drag performance. An an ethnographer and choreographer, I am inclined to draw upon the cultural references within my field of perception/vision. Seeing similarities between the gender play I have experienced as part of the Chicago house scene and the current vogue femme/ballroom scene, I wanted to enlist this cultural frame as a way to embody/elaborate on a technique of fierceness, which I define as a simultaneous masking and vulnerability, the ability to be both raw and impenetrable, a skill set that enables one to survive the stresses of the daily world and to maintain vitality/passion through performance (i.e., performance as mask and performance as affirmation of life). Performance enables these women to both veil and deveil.
They are a cycle or a progression of womens’ experiences with love. There are moments of strength, composure and impenetrability in concert with vulnerability, pain, a feeling of being discarded/abandoned. There is extreme equilibrium in concert with forceful attack. Each solo - stately and regal in quality - relies on centripetal force evidenced in phrases built on sustained balances and turns that require inner core strength. In terms of stage persona, they wear poker faces. And it is their collective range of body vocabulary that emphasizes or belies this mask of poise. In each sequence they go from sculpted to thrashing, from carving ethereal lines with their limbs to deploying arms and legs as arrow-like appendages. They embody torch singer, disco diva, and drag performer/vogue femme queen, laying emotions bare through their bodies. And while their faces are still/masked, there is attitude in their head action. I'm riffing on gestures I know as part of an African American (and wider black diasporic) female experience: neck rollin,' hands akimbo on hips, flipping hands - all are subtle weapons of disregard, gestures I would include in the technique of fierceness. Overall, the Fierce trio is a variation on, or maybe a response to, the Comfort trio. The larger section begins with the three muses of Comfort and ends with the three muses of Fierce – from soft to fire, from love to warrior. And yet, there is an overlapping circularity linking them. Each contains elements of its own alterity. So, my disco muses contain some of the Athena/Aphrodite/Oya/Oshun fire of my torch divas and my torch divas contain some of the Mother Demeter/Yemoja love that bathes the disco muse. They are flexible archetypes.
This figuration of "Woman" continues its malleability into the next image-section Queen wherein I am playing within the realm of a vogue femme vocabulary and reconfiguring the notion of community and competition once again. So, similar to Comfort/Fierce, Gayelle and Queen are also kaleidoscopic refractions on the notions of gender performance, community, competition, masking, demasking, love and fierceness. On a meta-level, the overlap between these four images - their variations on a similar set of themes - is my attempt to translate a DJ's subtle shifts in a set's playlist. They share foundational elements (e.g., house, community, fierceness, gender-coded play) that get reconfigured in each section. They are sewn together by cueing towards the throughline of these foundational elements (i.e., each image-section contains elements of and/or comments upon the previous section). Choreographic themes and motifs surface and resurface, playing at lower volume in some sections and louder (or as more overt) in others. But all are connected by that foundational beat, similar to the DJ technique of beat matching.
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