Talk About (and Around) Dance: Joe Goode's 29 Effeminate Gestures

“Talk About (and Around) Dance/Entextualizing the Self: Joe Goode’s 29 Effeminate Gestures” Sima Belmar University of California, Berkeley Choreographer-dancer Joe Goode stands in a spotlight at the house right edge of a theater’s orchestra section. He is wearing a yellow and black baseball cap and dark blue coveralls, a hot pink shirt visible at the collar. His face is frozen in a mask-like smile with an exaggerated overbite, his eyes are crinkled shut, and he holds up his right hand in a thumbs-up gesture. Standing in place, Goode says, “He’s a good guy,” first in a fairly straightforward manner, and then repeating and extending the phrase in a fantastic assortment of rhythms and cadences that propel him through the audience and onto the stage. With his hands in tight fists, his arms flung out from his sides, he makes guttural noises and steps to the rhythm of his words, occasionally looking directly at the audience members whose knees he tries to avoid as he moves sideways down the row. He repeats the phrase, “He’s a good guy” approximately forty times in a wide range of vocal variations—from growling bass to shrieking falsetto—and with caricatured gestures of hyper-masculinity—arms held in a low machine-gun position or as if driving a car, fists playfully punching the air, elbows pumping in and out. Once on stage, still chanting, “He’s a good guy,” he takes hold of a chain saw, turns it on, raises it to the level of his genitals, and begins screaming over the din, “He’s! A! Good! Guy! He’s! A! Good! Guy!” He takes the saw to the wooden chair on which he found it, and cuts through its back, continuing to scream, “He’s! A! Good! Guy!” Resting the saw on the remains of the chair without turning it off, he abruptly tosses his hat, backs away from the chair with a defiant gaze while rolling down his coveralls and tying the arms around his waist. He removes his sneakers and stands with an open chest, like a gymnast preparing for a vault. Standing on the diagonal, he turns his face to the audience and shouts, “29 effeminate gestures!,” his hands spread wide, arms slightly curved at the elbow. My description of 29 is based on a recording of the piece when Goode performed it at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 1997. Courtesy of the Joe Goode archives, Joe Goode Annex, San Francisco. With the chainsaw continuing to emit its high-pitched whine atop the mutilated chair, Goode begins the series of 29 gestures. He dusts off under his nipples, rises onto the balls of his feet and lifts his arm in a high wave with gaping mouth, he presents a limp wrist, blows a kiss, cups his hand over his mouth with a look of surprise, performs a swishy walk, pulls an imaginary piece of fuzz from his breast and sprinkles it to the floor, flicks his wrist as if to say, “go away,” bites his palm, wiggles his fingers in a “toodle-loo,” pats his butt cheeks, points to himself as if to say, “who me?,” dries his nails, wipes his forehead, draws a heart from his nipples to his groin, touches his chin, lunges in parallel attitude, like a spitting fountain nymph, with his hand shading his eyes. So begins Joe Goode’s 29 Effeminate Gestures (1987). Over the course of the 12-minute solo, Goode repeats the gestural sequence four more times—while speaking, while making sound effects or “vocal gestures,” to recorded music, and, finally, to a variation of the song “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof, which he sings a capella. Structured as a series of recontextualizations, 29 revisits an originary moment of Goode’s encounter with his gestural habitus. This paper imagines this moment as a lived experience of entextualization, a process I characterize as the subject coming into awareness of its self-difference. Put another way, I would like to posit entextualization as a form of “attentive awareness,” I was introduced to B.K.S. Iyengar’s notion of “attentive awareness” by Michael Lucey at my Somatics, Scholarship, Somatic Scholarship symposium at UC Berkeley in February 2015. Lucey discussed a sort of bodily knowledge that exists “in a space that is not intellectual and yet is not exactly bodily but a space of awareness or attention.” I am trying to think about entextualization as just this sort of space albeit with a mind that may not be “full, focused, and relaxed at the same time.” a thick and stretchy process-space that makes a stretch out of, and stretches out, in the case of 29, movement production. I examine the source of 29’s central movement phrase as the flux of subjectivity coming towards but never reaching identity-as-text. Waking Up(take) According to Goode, 29 was born out of a confrontation with a heretofore unconscious yet self-marking gestural regime. Goode had set out to make a dance composed entirely of gesture. He began by observing his own gestural vocabulary in a mirror. But this “neutral” improvisational task quickly turned into a piece of flypaper, snagging an unexpected and unwanted label and making it stick. Goode explains, “I discovered upon looking in the mirror that the gestures were effeminate. I was appalled for a while…and then I was appalled that I was appalled.” Goode cited in Selby Schwartz, “The Silent E: 29 Effeminate Gestures, 24 Years Later,” In Dance, April 1, 2011. Goode’s awakening to his gestural habitus—the closest stuff we can’t see, the closet stuff everyone else sees—marks a distinctly human crisis between inner and outer subjectivity. I would like to note how the double nature of Goode’s affective response (first appalled that his gesture appeared effeminate to him and then appalled that this appearance should appall him as if witnessing a moment of internalized homophobia) redoubles in the face of his double identity as an out-and-proud gay man and a professional dancer. These two coherent identity-texts fracture here in a moment of self/sensory misrecognition, a crisis of double identity in response to a double command: the dancer is supposed to notice his movements and be able to control their presentation, and the effeminate man had very well be able to do the same or face potentially violent consequences. Goode’s gestures are the practiced movement in their coherence, performed out of awareness, that move into awareness and out of coherence. Facing himself in the mirror, Goode experiences the “social misfire, discomfort, or incommensurability” that comes with/as an awareness of a social code at “in the very moment it is transgressed” (Tristram Wolff, ACLA 2016 paper proposal). As a dancer, who has labored his whole life to develop technical control of his body, Goode was doubly shocked to discover that he moved unconsciously, that his body spoke in ways he did not intend. So, 29 became a play with that discovery, the quality of the movement mirroring the quality of the moment in front of the mirror. The affective-kinesthetic quality of Goode’s gestures as he claims to have experienced them in front of the mirror, and as he performs them on stage, is “too much.” Goode transmutes his response to his transgression of normatively gendered gesturing—the horror!—into a choreography of exaggeration. This begins with gestures of hypermasculinity and shifts to gestures of effeminacy. And as Goode’s movements begin to lean away from the gestural and toward a form of expression more recognizable as dance, dance becomes a sign for excess. The penultimate variation on the gestural sequence is the work’s moment of “dancey dance” (industry term). As he stands oscillating dreamily back and forth with his eyes closed, he and the audience begin to hear the sound of drums. Goode rotates out of the twist and begins to move upstage, walks a small circle around himself, then a larger one, slowly removes his shirt, and, continuing to turn, ties the shirt around his head, forming what looks like a sort of keffiyeh or turban. The gestures return but they develop and stretch into recognizably technical dance vocabulary—walking steps become deep lunges and grand battements (high kicks), there are over-the-shoulder rolls and big, low turns in arabesque. Goode also performs movements of his pelvis, hip circles that conjure belly dance. His chest is ecstatically open, and he is smiling, indulging in arcing suspensions. As the music begins to fade out, Goode faces us upstage; his gaze and arms lower, he unties the shirt from his head and lets it fall. Up to this point, 29 structurally posits dancey dancing as an extension, a fulfillment, and an exaggeration of the gestures, following as it does from other exaggerations effected by talking while gesturing and making sounds while gesturing. In this way, dancing becomes the “too much” of gesture and seems to present a further articulation of effeminacy. Take the case of the final gesture in the sequence: Goode’s right hand reaches up from behind his head until his fingers drape over his forehead. His left arm wraps across his body, while he sinks into his right hip, bending his left leg at the knee and slightly raising his left heel. In this position, he oscillates slowly, sliding his fingers upward as if pulling a string out of the top of his head. Despite its deeper abstraction, this gesture carries a clear affect of excess, more precisely, of pleasure in excess. And, this pleasure-in-excess (and pleasurable excess) is the gestural text-result of the transformative entextualization process of Goode’s horrified encounter with his unfelt gestural regime. When Goode turns off the saw and faces downstage to begin the series of gestures a second time, turning his extraordinarily mobile and elastic face in the audience’s direction as he waves that coy “toodle-loo,” he begins to speak as he gestures: If you talk too much… If you laugh too much... If you feel too much… If you react too much… If you think too much… If you gesticulate too much… If you are excited by too much… If you enjoy the aesthetic of too much… As he attaches the self-proclaimed effeminate gestures to a list of tendencies that have unnamed consequences, gay male identity and queer masculinity become partially coded in and coated with gestures and verbal utterances that are “too much.” Goode, the blue collar working man, entextualizes towards the effeminate man who takes too much pleasure in the too much, drawling instead of speaking, lifting his chest ecstatically toward the sky instead of standing “straight,” drawing his elbows in towards his body instead of out. The dancing, talking, and gesturing seem to seamlessly fold into one another, blurring the boundaries between them; the overarticulation of vowels crosses talk with vocal gesture, the spread of the gestural space across the entire body crosses gesture with dance. Because of this blurring, the second, effeminate subjectivity does not overcome the first, hyper-masculine one but rather, in a sublating move, incorporates him. The dance then theorizes entextualization as an extended coming to awareness of the always too muchness of what is mine/not mine, me/not me. 29’s multimodality and multidisciplinarity helps stage the process through which we become a series of coherent texts whose multiplicity fractures our sense of self. In other words, 29 is a performance of mining, of digging into a stretch of movement production for new choreographic vocabulary and of taking ownership of what is not “mine” (of embracing that which horrifies and blows apart the self in its sensory understanding). After the horror begins to recede, Goode meets himself where he is. I like to think of entextualization as a process of mining in this double sense: reclaiming habits as not merely social constructions but as mine and finding within them, or finding themselves to be, choreographic nuggets for artistic exploration. Improvisation, Inscription, Entextualization Bauman and Briggs define entextualization as “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting” (73). I would classify the interactional setting of concert dance discourse/performance as the studio/rehearsal space of improvisation. Improvisation is the process that offers movement to choreography and the viscous space-time where dancers discover choreographies as body-self-other relations. Improvising in front of the mirror, Goode set himself the task to explore his gestural vocabulary as a source to mine choreographically. What rendered this improvisational (read: pre-textual) discourse extractable appears to be Goode’s own affective reaction to it. Goode’s horror story describes the improvisational moment in which a process of entextualization began, replete with “retrospective position” of the “I” (Butler, Senses of the Subject, 2). The gestures of 29 move out from their improvisational flow in front of the mirror and towards their becoming text, as a text-to-be. Sally Ann Ness employs the term “danced gestures” Sally Ann Ness, “The Inscription of Gesture: Inward Migrations in Dance,” 2. to refer to the reproducible and recognizable movements of a dancer that inscribe the body inwardly. Ness’ “in- of ‘inscription’ is not the in- of ‘inside’ but the in- of ‘into.’ It is a place-seeking, not a place-being, ‘in’” (1). It seems to me that the en- of entextualization entails a movement out of a discourse interactional setting that also seeks a place to/as which it never arrives. But the en- is also creative, generative of something—a previously non-existent text—that it also provides with something. Entering (and exiting, all at once—that transitional space, that sticky flypaper space before it attracts a particular fly), engendering (giving birth to the text as a type, a genre of text), and endowing (and enregistering with communicative, expressive, and affective qualities). Whereas a series of recontextualizations and decontextualizations provide the structure of the work, taken as a whole, 29 foregrounds entextualization as a process with directional intent that doesn’t know where it’s going to land. And this almost rhizomatic lifting off and alighting registers the qualitative experience of identity formation. In this way, 29 performs the making of a dance and the making of a dancer as mutually constitutive, intertwined processes. Entextualization dredges up what inscription has deeply sunk. It is the waking up to habit that initiates a practice of loosening habit’s grip. The gestures repeat with difference creating new grooves from old ones, old and new grooves sharing space, changing the ways me move and the ways we think about what movement means. Goode’s gestures make and unmake what they describe through the interaction with speech, sound, song, and dance. 29 is a work with a mobile center and, as such, it both thematically and structurally performs identity-in-flux, a self’s non-coincidence with itself, a subjectivity politics. Subjectivity in lieu of identity marks “a complicated field of subjective articulation that is provisional and shifting” (Farmer, Spectacular Passions, 7). 29 operates in just such a provisional and shifting field. The viewer must move nimbly between the communicative modalities as they illuminate and obfuscate each other’s meanings by turns. The “good guy” of 29 is now hyper-masculine, now effeminate, now talking, now gesturing, now dancing. He does not cohere, but rather, like the multiple expressive modalities he mobilizes and occupies, he overlaps with himself, a mobile palimpsest, thicker, richer, ever-changing, always already entextualizing. 29 posits identity formation itself as a process of entextualization, the making of a self out of the flow of experience. 29 makes and remakes coherent texts that plunge the viewer into that process and away from the units themselves, away from coherence and towards difference. In other words, 29 repetitively entextualizes a Goode self. “Conclusion” At the end of 29, Goode radically shifts from his comic approach to land on a strongly melancholic and disturbing note. We left him at the end of the dance sequence, standing with his shirt at his feet, his head bowed down in silence. He begins the final iteration of the gestural sequence by moving towards the audience from upstage left, having been pulled there from downstage right where the work began. The by now familiar gestures take on a painful cast, each one seeming to knock a bit of wind out of him, his sternum slightly collapsing as his fingers curl toward his heart. A hand covering his mouth is no longer a coy, “Oops!” but rather a silencing. His head is thrown back, and the reverberations through his body slow down. His eyes are closed tight, and his pointing index finger is now accusatory. His mouth and heart are emphasized as sites of loss and trauma. As he moves forward in halting steps, he begins to sing a section of “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof. In a mournful wail, he alters the lyrics from, “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?” to, “Is this the little boy I buried?” He sings in a deep, guttural moan, the words hard to discern but the melody clear. His face is a tragedy mask, a reversal of his opening face, that wide plastic smile. About half way downstage, Goode takes hold of a power drill that has lowered from the ceiling, and continues to limp forward. He extends his arms directly in front of him, holding the drill in both hands and pointing it at the audience. Then he turns the drill on himself, pointing it towards his chest, and continues his wailing singing. Crumpled on his knees now, he shifts the aggressive, suicidal gesture to an affectionate one, cradling the drill against his cheek, and rocking himself to blackout. Tristram offers beautiful language in his paper to describe the function of the “you” in 29. Goode’s use of the indexical pronoun morphs into the power drill that then acts as a prosthetic index finger, a second-person pronoun that interpellates the viewer and Goode depending on which way it’s facing. I think it also serves as “an open acknowledgment of the narrator’s subjective experience of self-difference.” 29’s origin story positions Goode as an autoethnographer of his own idiosyncratic gesture. Hollywood film makes its first explicit appearance here, at the very end of the work, and in a most unlikely fashion. The heteronormative scripts of the mid-twentieth century Hollywood film musical form a central intertext in Goode’s work. Throughout his oeuvre, Goode’s largely white, middle class, concert dance-loving audiences watch again those musical romantic comedies with their happy endings, overblown characterizations, and all that singing and dancing, but through the eyes of a man both heir to and marginalized by this quintessential American art form. By reading mainstream Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s, those “heteronormative artifacts queerly against the grain” (David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 426), Goode brings his gay male subjectivity to the traditionally abstract universalist realm of the modern, concert dance stage. The concert dance stage into which Goode imports aspects of his gender and sexuality via the American musical is also a space where talk has been largely forbidden. Goode’s drive to perform identity has always been matched by an equally strong imperative to speak on stage. In collusion with his gay spectatorship of the American musical, therefore, Goode stages his dancer-choreographer spectatorship of its generic structures. Because of the ways in which Goode’s gay identity is intertwined with his identity as a dancer who likes to talk, these two modes of spectatorship go hand in hand. 29 is both signature and seminal in Goode’s oeuvre because it is as much about bringing talk to dance—turning dance into dance theater and a dance company into a performance group—as it is about deconstructive restagings of gay male identity. Put differently, what 29 shows is that there is no staging one without the other due in large part to the already entangled and unstable relationship between the two. And, although Goode’s work historically has been received in the context of American concert dance practice, I argue that it is his engagement with the Hollywood musical—the musical’s role as the work’s central “speech genre”( M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)—that helps us hear how talk, dance, and gesture perform disintegrating identity in 29. In his later work, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, John Wayne, and a host of other recognizable ‘excessively’ gendered stars, characters, and genres make their appearance. But 29 cites Fiddler, drawing childhood, tradition, and violent change into its discourse. The work, thereby, represents and physically engages the “psychic and material complexity of childhood,” Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 243. something found in the works of several queer-identified, experimental artists. Fiddler is, of course, very much about gender, and the wedding scene in which “Sunrise, Sunset” appears offers images of a decline in patriarchal authority and the rise of feminist voices. Not only does Tzeitel choose her mate, Hodel dances with Perchik. Men and women are forbidden from dancing together in orthodox Jewish culture, but when the Rabbi is asked whether this is a sin, he replies, “Well it is not a sin exactly…” and before he can finish his thought, Tevye exclaims, “You see? It’s not a sin!”, and the men and women dance together. But as tradition after tradition is joyfully overthrown during the wedding scene, a group of Cossacks on horseback arrive. They proceed to destroy everything in sight until the constable, who is painted as mildly sympathetic to the Jews throughout the film, shows up to stop them. The Cossacks leave the wedding, but continue through the village, pillaging and setting fire to homes and businesses. The insertion of a pogrom scene might have been the producers’ effort to include difficult historical facts in their otherwise idealized version of Jewish culture in Czarist Russia, “the cutest shtetl we never had” (Irving Howe). Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent, (New York City: New York University Press, 2002), 224. But following as it does on the heels of a small gender revolution within the community, one has to wonder if it reflects a certain amount anxiety about how far such revolution can penetrate. The limit case in Fiddler is the marriage of Tevye’s third daughter, Chava, to a gentile. But even then, Tevye mutters his blessings over the couple as they say good-bye for the last time. It appears, then, that, although the violence that ensues after the wedding is a representation of a version of historical fact, and not about the men and women dancing together, there is an implication of a deeper command(ment) at risk. As the constable says, “Orders are orders. You understand?” Orders are orders. And yet, Tevye bends, and the order shifts. By performing a “queered” version of “Sunrise, Sunset,” Goode exploits the wedding scene’s depiction of changing gender norms as a collision of joy and violence, re-sounding the sounds of war from the earlier iteration of the gesture sequence. Goode’s San Francisco of 1987 was a space of freedom for his gay male and talking dancer desires, a space where a boy can grow up to be an effeminate man who takes pleasure in dancing. But it was also the place where so many gay men, many, many dancers among them, got sick and died. The joyful romp with which 29 begins and the mournful note on which it ends captures these mixed feelings and realities. Whereas Fiddler ends with a promise of a future—in Chicago, America! In New York, America!—the future of the wailing boy in 29 is cut off at the knees. This little boy is buried. “Laden with happiness and tears,” 29 goes as the song goes. The saw and the drill are also tools that build and tools that destroy. 29 charts the course of a subjectivity that builds up and breaks down over and over again until it ends with a man rewound to a boy. Part of what makes the end of 29 so powerful is how it rolls off the back of hilarious caricature into something sorrowful and frightening. Audiences laugh all the way through until the dance sequence, when the mood starts to shift until it takes a 180-degree turn at the end of the piece. 29 ends with the child who grew up to be an effeminate man who also likes and knows how to use power tools, the dancer who also likes to talk. 29 includes the “sound/shout” (Moten, In the Break, 205) of the dance that points us back and invites us into Goode’s stretch of horrifying entextualization. “Once a perceivable and reproducible text has emerged through entextualization, it becomes available for the potentially infinite processes of decontextualization and recontextualization.” Anna Deumert, Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication, page # somewhere in chapter 5, 2014). In other words, repetition of a particular movement facilitates uptake; the movement begins to stand out as a unit or text. 29’s repetition-with-difference structure performatively reenacts this process. The gestural phrase in 29 stands out—it is recognizable in all of its variations—and its meanings shift radically with each new multimodal and intertexual interaction. Goode’s vocal gesture his signature drawl, his long, drawn vowels, and dreamy cadence; his rhythmic, percussive sound patterns composed of everyday “human” noises like grunts, sighs, whistles, shrieks, huhs, uh-huhs, uh-uhs, and sharp intakes of breath—all pour feeling-meaning into the gestures. When Goode restarts the gestural series for a third time, after having reached under the chair to pull out a tea cup and sip from it, he accompanies each gesture with sound effects of bombs bursting in air, sirens, machine guns, groans of injury, missiles whistling, fighter jets zooming overhead. These sounds attach to the gestures, disintegrating them as soon as they are performed while simultaneously marking them as themselves destructive, disintegrative of the subject that performs them.But I would argue that the entextualizing moment in the mirror never stops. Rather, it stretches across time and space offering novel modes of uptake with each variation that represent, index, and perform Goode’s original horrified response to his previously unfelt gestural habitus. 29 is a performance of recontextualization that revisits the primary scene of entextualization, repeating not only (or not so much) the gestural phrase but a/the moment of coming to awareness of the tactile-kinesthetic texture of horror at the self’s non-coincidence with itself. ACLA 2016 1