Dance
Extreme Behavior? Or Simply Queer?

Whether we’re post-gay, post-AIDS, post-Will & Grace, or blindly drifting in the marketing-driven scam of metrosexuality (which, by definition, is a male heterosexual mannerism), queer male identity is certainly due for an overhaul. Luckily, there appears to be a trend in queer performance to boldly, and with intelligence, break out of, or at least seriously bend, the tropes of camp and drag in an effort to present queerness in all its rich, contemporary complexity. In early April, on a shared bill at the new New Museum curiously titled Extreme Behavior, performing artists Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver offered wildly different projects, each evoking various dimensions of queer identity–whether intentionally or not–and with results that exhibit a common reluctance to be placed.
Jack Ferver’s I AM TRYING TO HEAR MYSELF wanders through the sexual subconscious as he and Paul Lane struggle with intense and arrested desires. Using monologues, music, and genuine dance, Ferver stirs up a heady mix of sexual passivity and cultural friction.
While some of his dramatic scenarios are well worn—the attractive but abusively cold object of desire, the often close proximity of sex and violence—there are moments when Ferver and his rebellious attitude surprise. In the opening routine, Ferver struts around in a circle, fakes wearing high-heels and cigarette smoking while throwing all kinds of shade, and in the finale, Renee Benson stands up from the audience and sings, with Ferver eventually joining her in gospel chorus, “I am disappeared! I am disappointed!”
Costumes ranging from a black, slick rain coat to your standard ’80s porn chic short-shorts and striped tube socks, evoke contradictory images of masculinity, sometimes gender bending, other times, quintessentially boyish. That is where Ferver and Neal Medlyn may actually find some common ground.
Medlyn’s particular brand of queerness challenges virtually every line you can draw, and his performance style seems largely to rely on amateuresque exuberance, like a kid who’s found his sister’s sequined dance costume and just has to put it on.
But Medlyn’s boyish charms begin to wear thin mid-way through his send-up of Beyoncé’s self-righteous and flagrantly decadent birthday concert DVD, “The Beyoncé Experience—Live!”. While the outrageousness of a tall, skinny white man acting out the booty-shaking antics of the ultimate R&B diva is at first amusing in its absurdity, the tactic becomes rote; a mere replication of the concert without any complex dialog between Medlyn and his media source.
It was certainly fun to watch. Medlyn’s energy is contagious and inexhaustible. Will Rawls (who adapted the choreography) and Eric Montes as back-up dancers were perpetually fierce. And while I admire Medlyn’s geek-forward queer personality, there runs a risk of observers regarding his queerness as having a primarily juvenile (and silly) origin. That can reinforce a kind of condescension that has long haunted gay men: that of the emotionally stunted adult, i.e. Weird guy X would start liking girls and stop running around in pink dresses if he’d only just grow up.
But these and other queer performances I’ve seen in the past year seem to exhibit a similar and emphatic resistance to category. They want to be boyish, or effeminate, or butch, or confused, or just boring, without receiving social censure for it, and without being expected to adhere to only one way of being.
Even to use the term “queer” is to risk applying a label that these artists may not identify with, and the effort to liken them probably contradicts the will of their work not to be pinned down, hoping, instead, for a broader appeal. Then again, billing the performance as Extreme Behavior seems—paradoxically—to keep these men in their place.
Contributor
Ryan TracyRyan Tracy is a writer, performer and composer, and is the Editor of CounterCritic.com.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Nele Wynants’s When Fact Is Fiction: Documentary Art in the Post-Truth Era
By Tiernan MorganOCT 2020 | Art Books
The anthologys thirteen contributors, among them artists, photographers, broadcasters, and filmmakers, analyze projects that exemplify the discursive and rhetorical value of blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. But, despite its title, the contemporary context of online culture, populism, and fake news are almost entirely absent from its pages.

Grace Notes: Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein’s New Work for Goldberg Variations
By Rachel StoneFEB 2020 | Dance
The ushers at the New York City premiere of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and pianist Simone Dinnersteins New Work for Goldberg Variations at The Joyce Theater warn me that the program is 75 minutes75 minutes!with no intermission. Its possible they have to tell me this, but either way, the length of Bachs Goldberg Variations (which, apocrypha alleges, he composed in 1741 as an anti-Scheherazade to help an insomniac count finally sleep) intimidates.
Partial Reveals & Inclusive Revelations in the Post-Truth Simulacracy: The Poetics
By Chris CampanioniJUL-AUG 2020 | Books
The Poetics is interested in exactly this conjunction, and Ives questions both the narrative of history and the history of narrative as a form in elaborate, strident observations that are illuminating and speculative.

Gabo Camnitzer and Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco: Aesthetic Behavior; Developmental Sequences
By Joseph LubitzMAR 2019 | ArtSeen
Descending a flight of stairs into the sunken gallery, the syrupy sounds of a '60s exotica album echo off a tiled floor. A large hardbound reference book is propped up on a bookstand. It is opened to a page with a black and white photograph of a darkened room containing what looks like the shell of an observatory, brightly illuminated from the inside.