Dancer’s queer theory

Greenberg explores ‘transgressive’ steps

metro new york
By gus solomons jr.
Published: June 12, 2008

In a recent rehearsal onstage at Dance Theater Workshop, four women, singly, wander onto the dancing space, which in performance they’ll share with three harpists, including composer Zeena Parkins.

The women move in their own orbits, lunging low, flapping arms like languorous seagulls, swinging a leg like a gate in the breeze, hopping up and down, but never coming close to each other.

That’s how Guggenheim Fellow and Bessie Award-winning choreographer Neil Greenberg’s self-describing “Really Queer Dance with Harps” begins. The 50-minute premiere, which shares the bill with his 2006 “Quartet with Three Gay Men,” grew out of his exploration of what he terms “transgressive” movement.

Greenberg’s dances are purely kinetic, but as fellow dance maker Miguel Gutierrez observed of Greenberg’s performing, “it has always been about the queer male body dancing.” Greenberg accepts the observation and acknowledges this project had to do with “movement qualities that are usually censored by men – certain kinds of flamboyance or extravagance.”

So, “queer” is meant both literally and colloquially.

“‘Quartet’ was the first dance I had made that was for dancers of only one gender,” the choreographer notes. In “Really Queer Dance,” the genders alternate passages, rarely onstage together and never physically touching. “I realized there was something about having men and women performing the same movement that creates a kind of variation, even in unison.” To avoid that diversity here, he highlights the segregation of the sexes onstage.

“It became about having more multiplicity of focus,” Greenberg notes of the intriguingly ambient texture of the piece. “I really think this piece is quite a bit of an experiment for me.”