The Brooklyn Rail

Neva Guido steps into a small circle drawn in chalk on the floor. They cock a hip, bring their hand to their chin, and glance upward. “Well, I wouldn’t say it reminds me of that, no.” We’re dropped into the middle of a conversation, into an answer to an unknown question.

It does remind me of this other thing though. It’s paper, like a paper puck. And on it, there’s a picture of her. Her head is thrown back, she’s laughing, mouth open. In a kind of ecstatic state. She has earrings on, and her earrings are that same paper puck with a picture of her on it. So, this image of her contains an image of her, and that image of her contains another image of her. So, it seems fair to assume that she goes on, maybe… forever.

I start in what feels like the temporal middle of Generator, Guido’s (mostly) solo work presented at Pageant in early April, with their jarringly poetic description of a Laughing Cow wheel of cheese, because this dance feels something like looking into the mouth of a cow to find another cow, seductive, to find another cow, smiling. It’s a little trippy and also bewildering and undeniably entertaining. It feels like being charmed by a shiny surface and wondering if its glow can feed you even while it gets bought and sold and profited from in the bright aisle of a grocery store. Generator made me ask, what do we do with a passion for and deep suspicion of glossy imagery, shining spectacle? What is left when you generate stardom?

But let’s back up. Neva is my friend. We both circulate in a community of NYC-based dancers loosely assembled through frequent attendance at improvisation and performance workshops at places like Movement Research and the Field Center in Vermont. This community can’t stop talking about why and how we make performances. And especially for dancers like Neva and I—who are white and class-privileged—we can’t stop asking, as they once aptly and critically put it, “What dance can/might/must we make from our position of opportunity within the empire?”¹

With this context in mind, I am not surprised to find that Generator opens with a sequence that declares: this performance is about performance. Guido enters in white pants, white kneepads, white windbreaker (hood up), white headphones, and dark sunglasses. They dance, step touching as if enjoying a song while puttering around the house, even miming cooking and cleaning. We don’t hear what they hear. This is a private, preparatory, domestic moment that only bursts out of itself when Guido occasionally sings a single word: “MUSIC.” “MUSIC.” Later: “DANCE.” “DANCE.” “DANCE.” Even as these fragments of songs signal paths to the spotlight (music! dance!), none quite reveal to me what track is playing in the privacy of the headphones. Not until Guido sings “NO-OO-THING” in an unmistakable Sinead O’Connor tone.

Once I start to recognize what’s happening inside, Guido seems to have left the domestic zone and started affectionately tending to the performance space, to Pageant.² Between “nothings,” they climb and kiss the walls, gently. They approach a ladder like it’s a timid lover, or a timid animal, eventually climbing it too. The two of them, Guido and the ladder, end up rolling and tumbling on top of each other. This romance with the space turns to romance with the self. Headphones come off; opera music comes on. Guido pulls back a curtain to look out the window of Pageant, gazing as if the flashing lights of the bodega across the street were a grand cathedral. They brush their teeth vigorously as if carving a masterpiece, simultaneously pushing a table slowly downstage and holding a fan to their face, wind in their hair. They mount the table, toothpaste foam dripping down their chest, head tilted up toward an unassuming fluorescent light above, to belt the final notes of the aria with what can only be described as a perceived sense of glory. These are acts of devotion to the act of performance—its spaces, props, frames, finales.

But the finale of the aria is not the end. Generator keeps going. Guido slow dances with a ghost, precisely re-enacts a Tonya Harding figure skating routine, performs baseball slides and male stripper slides. They become an American club-goer on a Euro-trip, an impatient director trying to get their dancers to jump like dolphins, and, simply, a dog (their bark is unsettlingly realistic). Guido generates and becomes and makes and makes laugh with energizer-bunny-like stamina and earnest, absurd, effortful conviction. There is real pleasure in the enactment of these fictions. For them and for us.

So, what is left? Once you’ve used music and dance to be a satisfying lover to a ladder and an audience?³ Satisfyingly sweaty, dirtied, and leaking, Guido generates a false wound to make it stop. They smear ketchup on their nose and declare sheepishly: “I can’t perform. Sorry. I have a bloody nose.”

Emptied, yet full of gratitude, they proceed to lie down, prone, at the feet of various audience members, thanking them for coming to the show. It seems Guido knows many of them personally, saying their names. From my estimation, most are also performers themselves, underlining the sense that this dance is a contribution to a discussion among performers asking why we feel compelled to do what we do. They thank a progenitor last—on night one, their mother, on night two, a mentor, Juliana May—wishing her a happy birthday and leading the audience to sing the birthday song. Lovingly dispersing the spotlight of attention across watchers, mentors, mothers, they seem finally able to relinquish their ambition, to stride off stage.

But this exit is also not the end. Generator keeps going. In an unexpected coda, two new performers enter to enact what seems to be a kind of meta-narrative of the solo: one playing the watcher/mentor/mother figure with a commanding air (on night one, Mik Phillips, on night two, Johanna Meyer), the other as sparkling bright-eyed performer (literally sparkling, Devi Rayne is in all sequins and metallic). Guido reappears to join Rayne in a brief turning, swinging, pivoting unison choreography. But when the steps break down, Rayne jumps as if to reach that same fluorescent light that Guido sang into not long ago. Guido catches her, throwing her over a shoulder, and carries her out. A failed attempt to touch the glory. The watcher places and climbs the ladder to flick off that fateful light, finalizing an end.

This is one dance—and Guido’s drive makes it clear there will be many more—that can/might/must be made from a position of opportunity within the empire. It is a performance that provokes its audience of performers to self-consciously confront the pleasure in performativity, a pleasure that feeds both artists and an extractive culture of commodity—enchanting, entrapping. A dance that evokes the simultaneous melancholia and ecstasy of spectacle. A dance that shows us that the absurd power of illumination (that central fluorescent light, that relentless economy of attention) is only as glorious as we make it.⁴