bodies/miss steak

I am moved to tell the story of last friday night. Anouk Van Dijk came to Portland, brought to us by that most excellent dance envoy White Bird. Stau is the name of the performance, german for "traffic jam", also the transition point at which water changes between neep and ebb tide. the touring version of this performance is four dancers, they have staged it with up to thirty, which boggles my mind and once again kindles my imagination of running away with some contemporary troupe. I saw Stau with one friend, raved about it to another, and ended up seeing it again with her. On the way, we passed the Acropolis, where she had passed a few pleasant hours enjoying the naked ladies with a friend, and the seed was planted to perhaps return. We carried on, to the Oaks Park old-fashioned amusement park, with a roller-skating rink and teacups and a tilt-a-whirl, all garish in the spotlights of a rainy spring night. The performance was to be held in the Dance Pavilion, built in 1902, and we were treaded to free arcade games beforehand. (pinball!).
in the large dance hall were arranged seats "in the round", but square, and a tight square at that- no more than ten seats in the front row of each side, and three rows deep. a duet began, one male one female, in which their body proximity began really close but not touching, giving great potency to the sliver of space that did remain between their bodies as they reacted to each other, as they undulated back and forth, side to side in reaction to the other's push and pull, maintaining that micro-line of distance. graceful, within the unsettling static of the audio track, and the sudden pelvic twitch that she or he was compelled to make. slowly the motion was dialled up as the tense space was maintained, stronger push and pull, more action reaction, as if the relationship between the individuals was becoming more agitated, the conversation quickening. they split and rejoined, then split and interacted with those immediately around them: US. first with fast-moving hands flying past our faces, then with direct contact on our shoulders, our knees, under the chair, face to face within inches, breaking the space definitions, rejoining to the partner with increasing animation, bodies smacking against each other, perhaps as a final desperate gesture to break into the space of the body that parallels the space of mind, and back to us, imploring, and back to the pair, writhing on the floor, slapping the thigh, working the body into a frenzy of ill success, and then a still point, a shift of lighting as he, naked for a moment, stood with his leg in a ballettic pose, or she, eyes closed, walked in place as her nose bobbed a mere inch from that of an audience member.
and then volunteers removed the chairs from under us, other dancers entered the space, and the boundary between dancer and audience dissolved even further as they moved within our crowd, establising no vantage point from which we could reliably view them. sometimes at the wall, sometimes insinuating themselves among us, the performance pressed even more fervently for us to look around at those of us collected and see ourselves as those that we were trying to watch, keep track of as they dashed and danced among us, picking people seemingly at random with whom to engage in a little contact improvisation. I saw many instances of "audience" members following to their best ability when a "dancer" initiated a motion, and I saw many instances of extreme discomfort or just cluelessness. the thread of attempt at connection ran through the whole piece: can you read my body (ie-mind)? will you engage? are you afraid, are you excited? are you a stone wall, a glass wall, gentle hand? why and how are you looking at me? the dancers, illustrating a lack of connection, tried to walk into the wall, sliding along it, falling against it, getting up, trying again, drawing others to participate.... my friend was as aflame as I had been the first time that I saw some of the walls crumbling- she was bouncing with delight. I enjoyed myself as much the second as the first time, more interested this time in watching the audience reaction.... it was beautiful, and both of us felt high afterward, and took to sliding around on the floor like two loose screws. so we knew some smarmy strip club was probably going to be a big letdown but I was curious, so on a friday night we went to a large (three-stage) club that serves five-dollar one-pound burgers. such that if the girl is about to lay down on the bar at which you are eating, assuming you are at the front row, she has to move the ketchup bottle before she stretches one lithe lucite-hoofed leg into the air, a perfunctory tap to indicate her clit, etc, gives the famous ass wiggle, or slaps that tanned profundity against the bar. my friend and I made it through one, shall we say "set", of four songs, one drink, before I decided that it was a worse let-down than I had hoped, the girls were obviously completely bored, and I had checked out my local watering hole. terrible. (this is friday, after all, and I'm sure the girls were extra-plastiky to cater to the clientelle). However! there is always Devils Point.....

There was a moment of apathy. I knew Devils Point would be good, but at this point, we had had such a lovely evening already, was another strip joint really necessary? I was about to let go of it. I'm glad I didn't, because we stumbled into the owners birthday party, featuring Miss Steak and Nikita, who spin fire, not to mention a host of all manner of superfuckinghot punked out/ spanish seniorita with pierced clits/ purple worms in pirate tights ladies most of whom were kinetic sculpture on the pole. we plunked our unfabulous asses in the front row and proceeded to have a fabulous night. But here's the thread- tell me about the connection, the tension of contact. oh sure, you're not allowed to touch as stripper. not even when they drop their face upside down in your lap, not when she uses your thighs as a balance beam and puts her leg behind your head. Not when she teases you with the flame and not when she accidentally kicks you in the face. who is controlling the gaze? who is initiating, insinuating the contact improv? the glass wall exists but never in my adventures has it dissolved as definitively in two drastically different performance instances as it did that night-- last time I was at Devils Point, it was manditory for the front row to leave when there was fire dancing. not this time- I got to lean forward. I got the whoosh right in front of my tingling face. I could have touched the subtle scarification on the her chest- could have but could not have, just as one of the dancers reacted to a man who was a stone before her in Stau- she held up her own had in front of his gaze and beat herself into this wall. WHY WON'T YOU LET ME IN!!!!!!!!! I felt the scratch of her earrings, the heat of the flame, saw the slight clench of the anus, the red after the slap, and in Stau, they surrounded me, I held the gaze, I brushed the pectoral, I touched her hair, I nuzzled him with my feet as he moved on the floor, turned, was clenched by his calves, was slid in my socked feet and held contact bwteen his ankles and my toes while feighning escape. I was in the liminal space, the sliver of tense space between us and them, you and me- kind of like blogging come to think of it.

well, so Miss Steak's routine was down. old-fasioned vaudeville, the slide of the fingers around the fedora, gestures to match "this is the life" boheme, fearless fire dancing sequences that might start in single time and then progress to dizzing double, a fun little vynl scratch inside the fire-proof underpants, and, as I mentioned, teasing me with the wire wands. My friend next to me was also well-sated with our debaucherous evening. and that, my dear readers, is most likely the last time I will write about strippers. I'll let your own imagination carry on from here.

I will say one thing more that may answer a question you may have of me, given quite a few recent posts about dancing and bodies in general. I used to think quite a lot about performance art. I trained as a dancer when I was a girl and it was a simple leap to incorporate contact improv with my dance teacher into my senior thesis in college. Then, for many unconscious reasons, I chose clay instead of the expressive medium of my own body. We make decisions with the tools at hand and I would lie if I denied a twinge of regret. For whatever reason, I was unprepared to move into the world of professional dance, despite my potential and enthusiasm. I think I know now why I made that decision then, and it is not a pleasant series of memories. It is far too late for me to become a member of a dance troupe- my still-young body creaks in the morning, and the tendons move over my bones in new ways that signal the beginning of the end of superhuman youth. But perhaps i can allow myself to daydream about expanding the interactive aspect of my installation work. I stumbled into a very successful mfa thesis show that was interactive, I'm sure that I can create the venue in the future...