Out and About

Gay City News
By: BRIAN MCCORMICK
11/26/2008

Kyle Abraham makes dance exploring his experience as a gay black man in hip-hop culture. Layard Thompson, who received a 2008 Bessie award for his adaptations of Deborah Hay’s solos, among other things, is a member of the gender-fuck clown group The Pixie Harlots. Worlds apart, these two artists together are being brought together on a split bill by Dance Theater Workshop, with commissions for new works.

Abraham will present a new work for seven dancers, “The Dripping Kind,” and will also perform “Brick,” a solo inspired by the charged cutout figures of American visual artist Kara Walker and the geisha imagery of 17th century Japanese artist Hishikawa Moronobu.

“I’m interested in looking for connections between hip-hop culture and classical and contemporary Japanese culture,” Abraham told Gay City News. “I look at Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, how they are influenced-with their album covers, like Kanye’s “Graduation” album designed by Takashi Murakami, for instance.”

“Kara Walker’s imagery is very in your face,” Abraham said, “very provocative, with black children being raped by their masters, or children being beheaded, or eaten by a crocodile. In some way, the Japanese imagery is even more so, especially for that time period. But it tells more about sensuality and sexuality in suggestive ways, things like dominant & submissive.”

Abraham also said that his solo took on a whole different meaning and immediacy recently. “I’m trying to deal with issues related to my emotions on November 4 when Obama won and Proposition 8 also won. This is not just about race anymore. It’s not about binaries anymore - black-white, male-female, gay-straight. There’s a whole other layer.”

“The Dripping Kind,” an ensemble for seven dancers set to a dissonant score, is derived from an installation work originally presented through Springboard Danse Montréal at Usine C.

“I wanted to create a piece based around the idea of falling down,” said Abraham. “I started there. The first version had 22 dancers and was an 18-minute performance installation in the lobby of the theater. Once I knew I had the commission, I began looking for resources. Alexandra Wells at Juilliard, who had commissioned the installation, later helped me get a space grant at Stella Adler, and with ten dancers there I made a 45-minute version - a kind of mixed taped of music and movement, very much inspired by Merce. I’m working on paring it down for the split bill.”

Layard Thompson, beloved nature queer and disciple of Deborah Hay, will present his latest elaboration, “Cup…puC……K……Ohhhh, Beauty, full, vessel:” a solo that explores the nature of materialism and consumption inherent in living. In this gender-bent and naked romp, co-designed with fellow Pixie Harlot Machine Dazzle, Thompson melds dancing with vocalizations, and tests the potential of the moment.

Thompson is commuting these days from Liberty, Tennessee, where he is developing a rural studio for installation environments and a residential arts community on 360 acres.

“It’s a challenge to manage land as well as other aspects of work and life,” Thompson told Gay City News. “But it’s the first step towards a dream. I chose this community of queers living in the woods who want to worship nature for a reason!”

He’s been going back and forth for six years.

Thompson has performed with many choreographers, but it was his relationship with Deborah Hay that changed his attitude toward being a dance artist.

“Being a dancer is, in some ways, subsuming your creativity into someone else’s vision,” he said. “With Deborah Hay’s work, there is more of a middle ground, there’s a shared authorship, and the working relationship is non-hierarchical.”

“It’s been a revelation for me in other ways,” Thompson added. “This is the first time I made a libretto to get outside of myself. The solo process is isolating, so add physical isolation to that… and it can become hard to be objective. Of course, there are people I can call on, even in Tennessee.”

“I’m so greatly influenced by Deborah Hay,” Thompson continued. “For Hay, performance is a question of how as opposed to what. I’m a spontaneity junkie and like to push the envelope of my self. I’m taking on her pragmatics in process, using her strategies to produce a multiplicity of meanings - how audiences could perceive, observe, judge a certain action or set of actions, and the subjectivity of those meanings as the context changes. Some things test the waters of other’s judgment and interpretations; sometimes observer’s judgments become the dance. It all comes down to the context of the relationship.

“There’s the idealized theoretical version of the work, and the real mind-aggravating/stimulating version. Thankfully, in Tennessee, me and my mind have lots of time and space.”

Thankfully, Tennessee can’t yet have him all to itself.