IN PRACTICE: Dancing Around Race with Gerald Casel by SIMA BELMAR
GC: I wanted more tension. And every time I asked for it, it felt forced. There was all this tension in the rehearsal room but also all this avoidance, which is what maybe happened on stage. Also, trying to harness the ideas and themes in the writing and put them into a compositional form was really hard. I would generate material, they would generate material, and after Splin- ters in Our Ankles [the first of the trilogy that includes Cover Your Mouth and Not About Race Dance ] choreography felt like a colonizing force because I’m always teach- ing them and they’re learning from me; I kept making movement for them to follow. So for a long time I didn’t dance I just gave the dancers instructions. I wanted some- thing different, a little bit more of me danc- ing, writing together, developing scores or improvisational ideas. But because of the nature of what we’re talking about, it didn’t feel organic or flowing as I’d imagined it would be. SB: We talked about dance legacies inscribed in the body at the public gather- ing. What dance legacies are inscribed in yours? GC: I started as a hip hop/jazz baby in Oak- land/San Jose. I had such a classical com- positional training at Juilliard, with Doris Rudko who assisted Louis Horst. When I left Juilliard I didn’t want any of that, I wanted to practice “release” techniques. I met Ralph Lemon and did his Folk Dances for my senior jury, which was really a departure. But I felt at home in that material. That’s when I met Michael Clark and Stephen Petronio. I would say I borrowed a lot of tools from Stephen borrowing from Trisha [Brown]. That lineage is very clear. I’ve written about it, processed it a lot. Some days I want to shake it out and have nothing to do with it, and some days it just feels like it’s so deep I can’t undo it. And that’s fine. Juilliard was richly diverse, at least my class. Not the teachers—they were mostly white (except for Indrani – who was my Bharatanatyam teacher, and Carolyn Adams, who taught Paul Taylor’s technique). Over time, I started to be a little more aware of who was the population that follows the post-Judson, Stephen, Trisha lineage. And I realized that I was picking up someone else’s history—even though it was in my body it didn’t reflect me. So when I moved back to the Bay Area, I felt, this is where I felt things shift.. But I still notice that the choreographic tools that I’m seeing on stage in the Bay Area still look the same. I can’t do that—I have to figure out what am I resisting, what am I highlighting, and what I feel encumbered by. I look around at positions of power in dance organizations, studios, companies, artistic directors, boards of directors, and they are mostly white people in the Bay Area. If I’m looking at my own history, not just my dance history but my ancestry [Casel came to the US from the Philippines in 1978], it doesn’t have anything to do with the reality that I’m seeing so why am I assimilating into a culture that I don’t want to reflect back, to define me? SB: So an immanent critique of dance train- ing and a confrontation with racial politics in the US drive your creative process these days. What sort of relationship between the two do you see in the Bay Area?
To be fair, there were efforts to turn the conversation towards specific dance-related issues. There was a question about decolo- nizing dance training, to which David Her- rera, one of the members of the Dancing Around Race artist cohort, said, “It’s about getting rid of stuff in our bodies passed down by teachers and mentors.” Hope Mohr asked about how we determine criteria for good art, which launched a discussion about mastery and virtuosity. Yayoi Kam- bara, another member of the cohort, said we need to ask ourselves how we value what is good, beautiful, or true. Jess Curtis takes a performance studies approach, asking what a dance does, “Who does it change?” And Jacqueline Shea-Murphy pointed out that terms like mastery, virtuosity, innovation are inscribed in a system, and that the modes of doing things, like gathering energy, “can’t be sensed until you’ve been with them a long time…a different kind of sensing means the terms may not be the terms.” I didn’t ask my questions at the gather- ing, but I did ask them when I got together with Gerald Casel a week after. We talked about the conversation and about the work he showed at ODC Theater in June, the premiere of Cover Your Mouth When You Smile , and a preview of Not About Race Dance . I wanted to know why he had said at the gathering that Not About Race Dance failed to reveal whiteness through structures as he had hoped it would. I wanted to know how he mobilized Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry practically in the creation of the dance. Gerald was unflinchingly hon- est, forthright, humble, thoughtful—another magical conversation with another magical Bay Area dance artist. Sima Belmar: Dancing Around Race did a great job talking about race and art/cul- ture more broadly, but the dance expertise in the room wasn’t tapped. Aruna talked about visual arts, and institutionally, there are some similarities. But even with post-
ON SEPTEMBER 20 OF THIS YEAR, approxi- mately fifty Bay Area dance folks gathered for a Long Table discussion at Human- ist Hall in Oakland as part of Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project 2018 Community Engagement Residency, Dancing Around Race . The conversation was the first of three public gatherings organized by the residen- cy’s Lead Artist, Gerald Casel, and featured Aruna D’Souza, art historian and author of Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in Three Acts . D’Souza is a brilliant thinker who spoke eloquently about racial inequity in the visual art world, and the Long Table format afforded participants the space and language to discuss the question of racial equity in Bay Area dance. But in a room full of choreogra- phers, dancers, dance administrators, dance presenters, and dance writers, we somehow managed to dance around the subject—not of race, but of dance. Maybe it was because the invited inter- locutor came from the visual art world and not the dance world. I’ve long thought that 20th century Western concert dance dis- course struck a devil’s bargain by position- ing itself first within discourses of visual art (e.g. the Clement Greenberg club), and then within the conceptual frameworks of literary theory (beginning with Susan Foster’s Read- ing Dancing ), to legitimize and make itself legible to a broader public. Although many writers work to find language to describe “the different ways dance does what it does” (as dance scholar Jacqueline Shea-Murphy, author of The People Have Never Stopped Dancing , put it at the gathering), when it comes to talking about what dance artists do that constitutes expert knowledge, I’ve often found a strange reticence. For example, when Judith Butler was invited to speak about gender and perfor- mativity at the July 18, 2013 Dance Dis- course Project, I asked a question about what dance as a practice may offer as a way to explore or understand the very concept of gender performativity, given that both take embodied behavior as their matter. I remem- ber the moderator, Julie Phelps, dismissing my question as somehow reifying of dance as a movement practice wholly unlike the everyday embodied practices that Butler had been discussing. Didn’t I know that it was woefully unhip to talk about dance as an art form with unique characteristics? How awfully modernist of me! Had I not read my French theory? But that was not my point. I don’t regard Capital D-dance as a monolith. My ques- tion had to do with what people who devote their lives to dancing, making dances, sup- porting dance, and even viewing dance have to teach the rest of the world. The guid- ing questions for the Dancing Around Rac e conversation were: What obstacles get in the way of racial equity in the Bay Area dance community? What does it look/feel like to have racial equity in dance? What does the future look like? How do we get there?—all great questions. But I wanted to ask, How might dance practices, in their medium-spec- ificity and cultural context, help us address practical questions of how to cultivate racial equity? And what are dance’s blind spots to racial equity? It seems to me that any analysis of how the Bay Area dance com- munity (or dance communities, as choreog- rapher Byb Chanel Bibene rightly pointed out) can improve racial equity requires a deep acknowledgement and investigation of the methodologies and discourses that are grounded in their disciplinary expertise.
Gerald Casel: I noticed that there were very few dancers there, like maybe a handful, maybe five. There were choreographer-danc- ers, but just dancers? The people who take class? I didn’t see very many. To me that was an indication of something. Maybe we need to reach out more to that specific person and make sure that we’re talking to them and they’re totally part of this conversation. I agree that we really didn’t go into the weeds. I feel like there was a hesitation on the part of folks. Since I started working on Not About Race Dance , I’ve felt this huge reti- cence, people holding back, even my closest dance allies and colleagues in the studio. GC: When I started that piece there were four white women and me. And there was certainly kinetic hesitation present in the room; there was white fragility. I asked the dancers to write about instances in which they felt racialized. They either withdrew from the process and were totally silent, or it snuck out in small increments. Or they talked about it in other people’s experience, as an observer of racialization. “I’m asking everyone to write a statement of equity.” —GERALD CASEL SB: What did the experience of reticence look like?
GERALD CASEL DANCE / photos by Robbie Sweeny
One of the missions of the project is to mark white- ness, to make it visible. Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance (1994) was highly celebrated. It was an all white cast. And that was the same year as Bill T. Jones’ Still/Here , which was massacred by [critic] Arlene Croce. It was mostly black and POC, different shapes and sizes. There felt to be a
modern dance inhabiting the white spaces of the museum more and more these days, the visual art, museum model of reflection feels lacking. When we go to an art exhibit we’re not watching the artist’s labor in real time. The body of the artist is simply not on display in the same way the dancing body is. The artist alone in her atelier is simply not the usual structure of rehearsal. The way the artist feels making sculpture or painting is simply not the stuff of art history. (Though it should be.) Dance is a discipline, an inter- disciplinary discipline to be sure, but a dis- cipline nonetheless. And its workers know things that other kinds of cultural workers do not know. Why are we so loathe to share our expertise?
total discrepancy. I was there [dancing with Stephen Petronio] in 1994 and actually saw both premieres. I wasn’t really conscious of the racial politics and so part of Not About Race Dance is trying to acknowledge the racial politics of that time and to see how it’s become a persistent legacy. SB: But at the public gathering you said were unhappy with how Not About Race Dance turned out. Why do you feel that way?
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in dance NOV 2018
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