The Brooklyn Rail

On November 3 at BAM’s Harvey Theater, Trajal Harrell stands at the edge of the stage, watching us. The house lights are up; the people chatter, stacked up the slope of the orchestra and into the balconies. In black pants and a white button down, a pale silk dress draped from his neck, Harrell is still but for a turn of the head as he scans the room. There’s a strange expression on his face, sliding between annoyance or anguish, disbelief or disgust. Is he trembling?

At some point, Harrell begins swinging an arm, and a hush falls over the crowd. A piano sounds from the speakers, then in pipes Joni Mitchell’s unmistakable clear high voice. Swaying in place, Harrell raises open palms to the sky, head bowed. He brings them down tremulously, looking upward; he flaps a hand softly, shooing or fanning. Still that mercurial emotion. Are these gestures of religious praise, or are they voguing, slowed down and softened? Is this the Black church, or an uptown ball? Darkness begins to fall, light narrowing toward the spare stage. Harrell continues his dance in place, finishing out Mitchell’s “My Old Man,” then ties an orange ribbon around the dress at his waist and sits down on the nearest black piano bench. The audience applauds.

So begins The Köln Concert, choreographed by Harrell and performed by him and his Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble. So called for the music that will score the latter half of the work, the piece takes the name of the 1975 record by jazz musician Keith Jarrett—what is in fact the best-selling solo piano record of all time. Harrell, whose career took off with the 2009–2017 series Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church, has long been in the practice of named reference. An early title quoted a phrase by theorist Rosalind Krauss; Twenty Looks occupies Jennie Livingston’s documentary and the dance-historic Judson Memorial Church; his works Antigone Jr. and Antigone Sr. nearly take the great play’s name before shading into other meanings via the suffix. In this case, though, the work is “The Köln Concert.” What does it mean for this show to be that concert? Can a record be staged like a classic play? Harrell’s minimalist set consists of seven piano benches, arranged in two rows, which seem to ask: where—or who—is the piano here? Who plays it? And who gets played?

After Harrell’s solo, as the houselights finish what has been their slow descent, the rest of his ensemble trickles in, decked out in unlikely assortments of clothing that shimmer between motley-make-do and high fashion. Many, like Harrell, are wearing but not wearing items, sheer dresses draped over a T-shirt and athletic shorts, or strangely fastened swaths of fabric. As each takes a seat, they join a movement in process: swaying from side to side, waving arms bent at the elbow, a soft rhythmic stomp. For the length of Mitchell’s melancholy “River,” the piano benches become pews. It’s hard for the minimalist dance to compete with her narrative lyrics and crystalline voice. Instead, the dancers become, perhaps, the congregation; or, sitting as they are on piano benches, they join as musicians, playing the instruments of their bodies in a supporting role. In a later moment, when the benches have been bent to an orchestra’s semi-circle, and dressed in musician black, the dancers take turns as soloists, their body the voice riding Jarrett’s piano. I’m thinking of the way drag artists lip-synch an existing song, lending body to a bodiless voice, letting themselves be traversed by the feeling, and rerouting its meaning as they do so.

After the church-like section, when only one dancer is left (Thibault Lac, a frequent collaborator of Harrell’s), he rises to his toes and begins to strut down center stage. Each step on non-existent heels reverberates into his opulent leopard-print coat, making it flounce slowly with fabulous weight. Each step transforms the stage into a runway.

The heels-without-heels, which has long been a signature part of Harrell’s work, gives a clue to the piece as a whole. In the spirit of the voguing balls that form one of his key references, it is a movement that lets a person conjure all the glamour of the runway with nothing but their body, which is (perhaps) all that they have. Nothing but the muscular will to stay aloft, nothing but the grace and style to look good doing it. And yet if the typical affect of this kind of queer Black and brown conjuring is one of fierce assertion, Harrell’s work is more fragile. Scored by Joni Mitchell’s pathos, it’s the precarity that shines through. I’m watching the dancers’ toes grip the ground, toes working overtime where the thousand-dollar heels should be.

For the long last section the work settles into a structure of successive solos: each dancer rises from their bench onto those non-existent heels, dramatizing the process of finding their balance, stumbling and catching themselves in a Paxton-esque not-so-small dance, until the dance finds Jarrett’s music. Each dancer does this differently, though it’s clear the language is shared. Lac’s joints turn inward; his movements crescendo to a violent fit, then grow smooth and blissful, yielding inward, a smile playing across his face; New Kyd serves an unwavering regard, which the choreographed trips can hardly ripple; Maria Ferreira Silva finds a tentative graceful line, nervously dropping and catching it again; Songhay Toldon clutches his ’fro over his face, refusing to be fully seen. Like Jarrett’s involuntary vocalizations, the groans and grunts that interrupt the piano with an indecorous corporeality—the body’s effort and ecstasy—the dance runs over itself; the dancers seem not quite in control of what they show. Like the black dresses, which can seem like elegant robes in one moment, and then mere rags in another, there is a deep ambiguity in Harrell’s choreography. As the dancers stumble, present themselves, feel the music, retreat into themselves, they create a double-vision around their vulnerability…. Are they beautiful? Are they pathetic?

In addition to his other influences, Harrell works with Japanese Butoh, citing an interest in the way the post-WWII dance puts the movements of the dispossessed on stage—the weak, the sick, the mad, the dying. Such an approach stands in opposition to western dance’s usual emphasis on dazzling control, strength, and apparent lightness; or even to postmodern dance’s matter-of-fact “ordinariness,” its professed indifference to those qualities. But Harrell’s choreography is interesting because it does not simply reject familiar ideals of beauty; rather than only a “dance of darkness” (as Butoh was originally called), the choreography—and thus the dancers—seem to attempt glamour, grace, and self-possession, and also to (purposefully) fall short. Is there anything more vulnerable than a failed performance? What is asked of us as the audience when the performers constantly clamber into grace and fall from it again? When we feel they hope to project something they cannot maintain? How do we react to these slips, these moments when the performer reveals what they (or we) ostensibly wish not to?

Tavia Nyong’o, the scholar of performance, writes about Harrell’s previous work as “afro-fabulation.” Nyong’o looks at Harrell’s way of “interinanimat[ing] the present with the past”; reads his navigation of the “burden to appear” placed on marginalized bodies; and highlights his ability to be in and out of the work, critic or audience as much as performer.¹ Harrell’s performance here contains elements of a speculative mode that resonates with the fabulation Nyong’o analyzes—not “I am this,” but “what if I said I were this?” Yet like the dress draped around his neck, which marks its own impossibility, but twirls and swishes nonetheless, or like the title of the work itself, the distanced inhabitation remains a kind of inhabitation—Harrell manages to wear a garment without wearing it. And so there is also real vulnerability here: not just “what if I said I were this?,” but something like “might it be true?”

Given the powerfully ambiguous rapport with the audience, the main element that gave me pause was the rapport between performers. They were strangely siloed in their dances: those not dancing sat on their benches like sculptures, staring fixedly ahead, or taking a bowed head. If two danced at once, they remained two solos. What would it have meant for these precarious figures to encounter each other? To witness each other? This is not something we get to find out.

When Harrell stands up for his own soloist moment, the hearth-fire of the movement becomes clear. Harrell’s body moves with an ease—even in the movement’s uneasiness—that speaks of a long inhabitation. Strangely, his tottering and stumbling are expert; there’s an integrity from toes to fingertips. The others are like fledgling birds, awkward and delicate, an awkwardness that Harrell’s framing makes into art. In Harrell—standing in and out of himself, instrument and musician—the awkwardness is already an art.

1. Tavia Nyong'o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. NYU Press, 2018.