The Brooklyn Rail

On September 4 and 5, at Pageant in Brooklyn, Matty Davis will premiere The Essence & The Choice, a performance for which he has a new collaborator: his thirteen-year-old stepson, Wolfgang. It’s rare to see someone so young be given equal presence onstage, especially in such a physical work. The Essence & The Choice explores fatherhood through embodiments of violence, trust, and learning, and considers the impacts of our presence in (and absence from) one another’s lives. The work features dramaturgy by two-time Pulitzer finalist Chloé Cooper Jones.

Davis and I are radically different in terms of our backgrounds, identity, and life experience. Despite our differences, when I watch his performances, I am forced to lean in and experience the universal ideas that mark his work. From one project to the next, he asks complex questions about life and the human body, a basic form we all share. For example, his last project, a co-commission by High Line Art and Frieze called Die No Die (The High Line) (2024), cast five performers in a mile-long exploration of succession, or how we bear the responsibility of carrying each other and life itself forward through time—between the moment we come into this world and the moment we die. I have also been interested in Davis’s stripped-down approach to his performances. He does away with all excess and decoration, centering the body itself, relationships, and what’s at stake.

Last fall, as curator, I invited Davis to develop The Essence & The Choice at Barnard College’s Movement Lab. Following a recent work-in-progress showing of The Essence & The Choice, I was excited to catch up with him. We met at Matty’s studio in Brooklyn, NY. 

NiNi Dongnier (Rail): The Essence & The Choice begins with a kind of game that made me think of Matthew Barney’s choreographic video installation Secondary (2023), as well as Paul Pfeiffer’s manipulations of sports footage. Like those artists, you seem to be using the vernacular of sports, gamesmanship, and spectacle to ask deeper questions. Can we begin our conversation by talking about the notion of a game?

Matty Davis: The performance begins with a unique version of a catch-and-throw game that kids, including myself, played in middle school all across the United States, under various names like “wallball” or “Suicide” or “Red A.” The Essence & The Choice is an exploration of fatherhood, and games have long been a primal space in which fathers and sons establish relationships and bond.

Wolfgang dubbed our version of this game “Nermis” by removing an “a” and an “s” from the phrase “near miss”—players in the game are eliminated by being struck with a ball thrown by another player. Nermis is an injection of raw play and the spectacle of competition into the overall choreographic framework. I’m excited about how the vernacular of a game and competition might attract certain people to see this work, even participate in it—the game is open to people from the audience to join. What’s ultimately important about Nermis is how it shapes the audience’s perception of the performers at the outset of the work. The game has two outcomes: I am defeated or not, and this shapes the texture of my relationship to Wolfgang in what follows. 

Rail: Have you used games in your work before?

Davis: Games haven’t made an appearance in my work before, but my work often has a certain level of physical intensity and athleticism, which I use to try to reach certain ideas and psychological and emotional states. But I’m also curious about how athleticism and a certain level of intensity relate to how our culture understands and appreciates physicality more broadly. Sports are obviously huge in this country—a kind of organizing principle for many people. You have to meet people where they are in order to move them, and I think Nermis offers a specific kind of entry point for certain audiences. I dream, for example, that someone my age who played wallball twenty-five years ago might venture to see the performance, that they might join and play this game that lurks in their body’s memory.

Rail: In the game, you situate Wolfgang’s body at the base of the wall against which the ball is being thrown. He feels under threat. Can you talk about this decision?

Davis: I was interested in the expression of “putting something on the line,” which refers to what we choose to risk, or what’s at stake. There is a sense that Wolfgang’s body is the line and is on the line. His body becomes both literal and metaphorical, something or someone to fight for and protect. But there is also the sense that what is on the line could be lost or hurt. 

Rail: The performance very effectively uses objects and tools in this way. In addition to the ball, throughout the work you also make use of basic objects found in any gallery or theater space, like a mop and a ladder. Then there’s the sword that is used in fencing. 

Davis: Yeah, Wolfgang’s fencing foil. 

Rail: Throughout the work, I feel like Wolf is in a more powerful position, while your role is more fragile and delicate. I recall a specific moment when you are crawling on the ground, on your hands and knees, with Wolfgang standing on your back, holding the sword.

Davis: He starts standing on my back, and as I crawl, slowly lowers himself onto his stomach on my back, his sword leading the way.

Rail: This moment is very precise and reminds me of medieval knights having one final fight. You appear so vulnerable. I’m curious about the decision to use this tool, because much of your work involves one body facing another body directly—hugging, touching, squeezing, smashing, or running. What was the decision behind using the fencing foil? 

Davis: Part of the choreographic framework of The Essence & The Choice involves harnessing a practice that is part of Wolfgang’s life. For the past year, he has been learning fencing. If he did something else, then we would have used that “something else” as material. Considering the ways in which bodies are struck in Nermis and the way the game is re-shaped by using/putting Wolfgang’s body as/on the line, I wanted to similarly tweak fencing as it’s commonly seen and understood to create a new, unfamiliar psychological and physical dynamic. As you may know, you don’t stab people in the back in fencing, nor should your weapon be making contact with people who aren’t wearing proper protection. I’m often interested in exploring permission and consent surrounding what we as people can do together, to and for each other, in the context of challenging actions and sensations. If I offer my body to you—to carry me in some fashion, for example—I have to trust that you can do it, and you have to trust that I can manage whatever demands are my responsibility. For Wolfgang, I wanted him to fence my back, which he was afraid and hesitant to do. He had to find the willingness and commitment to step over that line in himself to meet me in this new experience. While the foil emerged from Wolf’s fencing practice, its presence in the work started to evoke other worlds. The way it’s stored in the top of the ladder seems to allude to King Arthur’s Excalibur, the sword in the stone.

Rail: I was reminded of that. 

Davis: These associations are often subtle, but allusions like this to history and other aspects of culture are really important to me. Some are part of a framework that intends to harness familiar aspects of this boy’s life, to give him confidence with which to step into the unknown. There are other, more abstract allusions that have inspired and shaped aspects of the choreography, such as Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which games out the biblical tale of Abraham sacrificing his only son as a testament to, or failure of, his faith.

Rail: It’s interesting how this work directly grows out of your life trajectory—you met Wolf, became his guardian and stepparent, and because of that, it seems, you incorporated him into a performance. It feels like the questions in your work come from your life. However, your work gives me the feeling that you are engaging in something that transcends the particularities of your life and the differences between your life and mine.

Davis: The Essence & The Choice did emerge from pressing questions in my own life, but what I’m trying to do of course is to distill and shape those personal questions into ideas and forms that can communicate with many different kinds of people anywhere. The artist Nile Harris has joked with me that I like to go around cities and towns with my “discrete little ideas,” which I think is actually a serious comment about the fact I that I am trying to make work that feels meaningful and relevant in any town or city in the world, not just in a particular scene, like downtown dance in New York, for example. If you truly believe that art can alter our lives and the world we live in, then I think you have to aim at questions that have a degree of universality—in the case of this work, questions like, “What is the difference between being a parent, which is a noun or state of being, and parenting, which is a series of actions? What is gained and what is lost in the absence of a father? What do we pass onto our children, and what control do and don’t we have in that?”

The overarching subject of The Essence & The Choice is fatherhood, a parent-child relationship. If you’re alive then you have a primal knowledge of this reality. There are infinite particular arrangements and experiences regarding a parent-child relationship, but there are also deep-rooted commonalities. I’d love to see more male artists exploring this subject matter, especially since we’re living in such a weird time for men. Work made from a father’s perspective is oddly scarce in art history.

Rail: Can you say a little bit more about that?

Davis: Men? It seems that every day the New York Times publishes a new piece about what’s wrong with boys and men. They’re anxious, they’re lonely, they’re emotionally ill-equipped. There’s this shit with the “manosphere.” And we have these oxygen-consuming figures like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk advocating for more babies and commitments to the nuclear family, traditional gender roles, etc. Vance is largely talking to heterosexual white men, and promulgating a traditional, archaic vision of power and masculinity. I’m a heterosexual white man, but The Essence & The Choice is invested in pushing back on those orthodox structures and exploring masculinity and parent-child relationships in a different, more complex way. It might be societally useful for more men to explore their parenting and social roles in art. 

Rail: I have two questions stemming from this. First, do you feel like you have roots that you reference? For me, I have roots that are shaped by a strong connection to nomadic spirit, specifically Inner Mongolian. Additionally, in my twenties, I moved to New York, which sparked my curiosity about postmodern dance and broader visual art practices. I’m not looking for purity, but rather accepting myself as an evolving synthesis of different influences. What’s deep in your bones?

Davis: This is a good, tough question. If I search my bones, so to speak, I guess I would say that my roots are play and death. I grew up as a kid among kids in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. We played everything, every sport, through the seasons, in the night, on concrete, dirt, grass. We skated, played paintball, trespassed, climbed trees, threw snowballs at cars, and fled for our little lives. In the late nineties and early 2000s, none of us had phones, so everything you did was about being engaged in the moment with each other, which is a state that live performance forces us all into. Whether I could recognize it at the time or not, there was a lot of trust and connection and discovery happening, something primordial that is eternally at work among humans about being with other people and trying to make magic.

Rail: What about death?

Davis: My dad was killed in a plane crash when I was five. The plane he was on nose-dived and cratered into the earth miles from our house. Ever since, I’ve felt and thought a lot about bodies falling, terrified, bracing, resigned, holding each other, all the various actions and feelings that might have occurred in the face of the end of their lives. In The Essence & The Choice there is a very particular choreographic structure called “The Death Pull Spiral Permutation.” I intended it as a confrontation with the body of my own father and certain dynamics experienced by his body at the end of his life—dynamics that occupied my imagination as a child. In the performance, this choreographic structure is an attempt to embody and share my own father’s death with Wolfgang. 

Rail: To achieve the intensity you described in the choreographic structure, I’m curious about your daily practice. As an artist, I have multiple practices—choreography, painting, and moving image. For dance, I need a daily, body-based practice. What you’re doing is highly physical, so how do you keep yourself prepared?

Davis: I exercise, yeah, broadly-defined. I’m invested in longevity, which is sometimes at odds with the immediate demands of a given performance work. I know that sometimes I’m asking things from my body that are not necessarily good for it, though I have very rarely been injured. My whole MO with exercise focuses on range of motion, joint health, efficient uses of strength. I don’t go to a gym, but I run high intensity intervals on a loop of horse trails and stairs in Prospect Park that I call the “Doom Loop.” I climb up and down the 25-foot rope in the tree in the backyard of a house my wife and I just bought in the Hudson Valley. I’m doing a lot of renovation work on this house, mostly alone. I tune my body into the demands of that work, all of the lifting and stuff, and approach it as a kind of training. Sometimes I’m on the subway platform doing little hip abduction exercises. 

Rail: I saw you doing those movements while holding a cup of tea before the performance showing at Barnard.

Davis: I’m always trying to keep my body open and available, as I never quite know what questions or forces my work may need to face—that same uncertainty definitely characterizes our bodies in life.