In March I attended Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/, a performance choreographed and directed by Miguel Gutierrez.  Miguel is from the Bay Area but lives in New York.  The performance was humorous and addressed issues Miguel was dealing with in his life.  This included aging as a dancer, movement and language as communication, and the performer/audience relationship.  Miguel self identifies as a queer performance maker.  As a choreographer and individual who identifies as queer myself, this sparked my attention.  I attended his Queer Choreographies workshop “Whatever the Fuck that Means” to try and understand what it actually means and see if I could apply it to myself.  Unfortunately, there was not significant time allotted for a discussion and in the time that was allowed there was no answer.

Queer choreography and performance continued to resonate with me.  I believe it is an important new device in crafting choreography and performance and that there are strong currents of subjectivity and performativity that make up its core.  It was imperative for me to identify and understand what it is and why it is important. In order to define queer performance and choreography I found it necessary to break it down.

At its Google-core, the word queer as an adjective means strange or odd. As a verb it means to spoil or to ruin.  It can also mean same-sex desire and, compared to lesbian or gay, is uniquely ungendered.  Not surprisingly, the word queer has an immense history of meaning and association.  The word queer was at one point used as a slur, as an “emblem and vehicle of normalization” (Butler 223).  For those who are a part of the homophobic community, the word queer was used to create a line between normal and abnormal. People used it as a way to shame those who weren’t “normal” (Butler 226). Aside from the controversial history of the word, queer has seen reclamation in recent years.  Youth have reclaimed the word for themselves.  According to Judith Butler’s article titled “Critically Queer,” she believes that the word can never fully be owned by those who use it but can “only [be] redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes” (228).  Using and reclaiming the word in this way allows it to hold onto the history that created it and simultaneously move forward into the future.

Presently, queer is used and interpreted in various ways.  Queer appeals to the younger generation as it breaks down the more “institutionalized and reformist politics sometimes signified by ‘lesbian and gay’” (Butler 228).  It is also seen as a largely white and male-centric term (Butler 228).  This has lead to activism for larger representation.  More generally, according to Susan Cook, in her article “Fluid Desires and Lesbian Kinesthetics, or She Got Game,” queer has the power to transform (101).  It pushes the individual to rethink received definitions (Cook 101). In use, queer can be as specific or general as the scholar or artist wishes it to be.  For Miguel Gutierrez, queer means a difference—a difference in desire or approach to form (Miguel).  Miguel uses it to “push against capitalist notions of success, patriarchy, and traditional forms of knowledge and leadership” (Miguel).  His concept of queer swings between micro and macro.  In her article, “Post-lesbian? Gendering Queer Performance Research,” author Sarah Mullan states that queer “is a mode of political thinking that assumes that identity can bridge the gap between the personal and the political” (100).  This matrix is common in queer performance and choreography.

Queer choreography is a difficult term to identify. At the base line, queer choreography is taking the word queer and using it as a verb. Many artists and scholars talk around the subject instead of directly defining it.  For Bryant Alexander, Madison Moore and Riley Snorton, authors of “Queer Performance and Performativity”, queer performance is “constructed in the broadest sense of embodied/engaged activity with the intent to celebrate or illuminate the practices, politics, and polemics” of LGBTQ lives (193).  They believe that it interrupts “repetitive regimes” (Alexander et al. 193). For Miguel Gutierrez, queer choreography examines the contract between performer and audience member, sometimes breaking it or seeing if the audience will break it (Miguel).  He believes that the stage helps show the complexities of the human and shows the body as an archive.  

Miguel uses queer performance to challenge and engage in subjectivity.  He believes queer choreography looks at the dancer as a human instead of a performer on stage.  To Miguel, the “human” does not take on the role of “performer” for the audience.  This is directly linked to subjectivity.  According to Nick Mansfield in his book titled “Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway,” subjectivity refers:

To an abstract or general principle that defies our separation into distinct selves and that encourages us to imagine that…our interior lives inevitably seem to involve other people, either as objects of need, desire and interest or as necessary sharers of common experience (3).

According to Mansfield and his definition of subjectivity, the human is not a “separate or isolated entity” (3).  Humans are influenced and made up by those around them.  The “performer” or “human” is influenced by the audience he or she has in front of them.  As a queer choreographer, Miguel plays with these characteristics of subjectivity.

Other perspectives of queer performance and choreography look at the issue of sexuality.  According to Sarah Mullan, one does not need to identify as queer to be a queer choreographer. Although queer performance does foreground sexuality, many think that the queer identity is embodied within the performance (Mullan 100).  In general, queer performance uses the dance floor as a device “to increase tolerance of embodied practices” (Cook 99).

Queer performance and choreography links most directly to Judith Butler’s performativity. Performativity is the repetition of specific acts associated with certain identities, especially gender. Butler focuses on the notion of performing gender.  She argues that performativity is socially constructed through “the power of discourse” (Butler 225).  It is exactly how we speak that generates the norm.  She states:

There is no subject who is "free" to stand outside these norms or to negotiate them at a distance; on the contrary, the subject is retroactively produced by these norms in their repetition, precisely as their effect. What we might call "agency" or "freedom" or "possibility" is always a specific political prerogative that is produced by the gaps opened up in regulatory norms, in the interpellating work of such norms, [and] in the process of their self-repetition (231)

It is through questioning that the expectations and repetitive regimes are unveiled.  This is what queer performance does. It uses the stage and choreography as a means to communicate and break down the norms that govern the self.  Queer performance is a place where performativity is addressed.  Although Judith Butler was mainly interested in gender, queer performance has a large spectrum of subjects.  It is personalized for each choreographer; it takes socially constructed norms and critiques them.

In my own piece “This is yours” I employed queer choreography as a way to engage in public intimacy, gender ambiguity and the fluidity of sexuality.  My piece consisted of two heterosexual females and a mattress.  I worked in a very personal manner and considered each performer as an individual.  I struggled with the fact that both dancers considered themselves heterosexual and wondered if the piece could still be genuine.

Throughout the process I gathered material on performativity and subjectivity in relation to queer choreography.  I identified for myself what political and personal norms I was taking on and where I could challenge and enhance them. I attempted to create ungendered choreography.  I directed my dancers according to who they personally are and asked for them to bring themselves as well as their “character” to the stage.  I also challenged the audience to consider the two dancers as humans rather than females.  I did this through choreographic and costume choice.  The result, according to my goals and perspective, was successful.  Of course, I had wishes about the performance but they were logistically out of my control.  For example, I would have liked to work with men and I would have preferred if each dancer had considered themselves homosexual or somewhere on the spectrum.

The qualities of performativity and subjectivity in queer choreography helped me to address intimacy on stage in a public setting, to manipulate and bend gender and to explore the fluidity of sexuality. Queer choreography allowed me to mobilize these three core interests. Queer performance and choreography creates a space on stage to confront the issues that subjectivity and performativity embody.  As a choreographic device and performance technique it changes what is expected in a performance and challenges the audience.  Queer performance and choreography works in the present to expand the range of perspectives a choreographer can work from.

Works Cited

Alexander, Bryant K., Madison Moore, and C. R. Snorton. "Queer Performance and Performativities." A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2013): 193-94. Project MUSE [Johns Hopkins UP]. Web. 17 May 2015.

Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer." Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. 223-42. Print.

Cook, Susan C. "Fluid Desires and Lesbian Kinesthetics, or She Got Game." Dance Research Journal 34.2 (2002): 99-101. JSTOR. Web. 17 May 2015.

Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: New York UP, 2000. Print.

Miguel Gutierrez Presents "Queer Choreographies or Whatever the Fuck That Means" Perf. Miguel Gutierrez. Knowing Dance More, 2013. YouTube.

Mullan, Sarah. "Post-lesbian? Gendering Queer Performance Research."Theatre Research International 40.01 (2015): 100-03. Cambridge. Web. 17 May 2015.

Sullivan, Nikki. "Performance, Performativity, Parody, and Politics." A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. New York: New York UP, 2003. N. pag. Print.