The Brooklyn Rail

It begins with an embrace, one so tender and intimate to witness I recall thinking, “I didn’t know I needed to be held like this.” The performance is in the round with the audience lining the edges of the room. In the center, two performers cling together, their heads nuzzling the nape of each other’s necks, while they sensually caress the other’s contours. They are flanked by three performers slowly undulating and swiveling their feet, while another crawls on the floor. Animated only by the sound of their breath, the embrace grows more desperate, hands grasping and pulling close, hips thrusting and swaying, elevating a sense of urgency in the room. In a stomp and a flash, the stage and all six performers are illuminated with bright light and a group declaration: “we, animal.”

Performed by Laurel Atwell, Sally Butin, Maddie Hopfield, Deja Rion, Fiona Smith, and Ray Tsung-Jui Tsou, anyyywayyy whatever is an hour-long live work directed and choreographed by the artist Barnett Cohen. The movement artists function as a collective entity, at times embodying a dance troupe or cheerleading squad, pals at a sleepover during pillow talk, or even adversaries on a battleground. They are brought together by looks styled by JenniLee with pieces from New York-based fashion designer Melitta Baumeister, in floppy wide-leg sweatpants, soft ruffles in jersey knit, and untucked mesh bodysuits in varied combinations of orange, peach, bright red, light purple, electric green, Klein blue, tan, black, and gray.

Unaccompanied by audio, an epic poem provides the score for the piece. Cohen’s writing is a work of effortless citational practice, assembling references from literature and queer theory, and mashing them up with those from the everyday, both on and offline (the zine that provides the score contains thirty-four footnotes). In their recitation, the performers take full advantage of the range of spoken voice: from yelling to monotone speech, high and accelerated pitches, guttural projection, comically slowed down speed, 2x speed, and sing-song cadences. Overlapping claps, stomps, and group proclamations comprise the rhythm, as the audience follows loose narratives that get picked up and dropped, a never-ending flow of word associations and regurgitated rhetoric. I cannot help but think of digital scrolling:

This is how we answered when they asked: how will you demonstrate passion in your job this coming year

Gonna be in town next week bb & would luv to see you

& truth be told…i hate that phrase.

With all the humor and play they embed in the piece, Cohen does not shy away from the most pressing issues of this moment, with lines such as “unrelenting death at cinematic scale” and “we cannot cosign your brutality. We cannot cosign your genocide.”

anyyywayyy whatever is all about perception and affect, and their respective shifts. These shifts in comprehension—in questioning what we see—extends to the atmosphere of the work itself. The lighting design by Sarai Frazier is a color wheel calibrated to queer nightlife, whose mix transforms our perception down to what color the performers are wearing. The phenomenon is reminiscent of the 2015 viral moment “the dress” in which the internet passionately debated if an image of a dress was white and gold or blue and black.¹ Similarly, under Frazier’s illuminations, a bright red top changes to a black one, grey bottoms turn peach, and neon desaturates.

A cacophony of gestures reiterate and mirror across synchronized movements as the performers shuffle, slide, chassé, fall and recover, arm whack, and lewdly thrust and pump the air. Repetition is a central component to the work; harnessing this device on the rhetorical level, the performers attempt to hail the audience. A single “hey!” yelled by a performer once, calls to the others. “Hey” again, but louder this time, calls to the abyss. A “hey” asserted thunderously with a dead stare at onlookers breaks the fourth wall. I’m reminded of Anthony Howell’s writing on “Mimicry and Repetition” when he asserts that “everything we learn comes from outside ourselves…we repeat until it becomes familiar. We may also repeat something until we get it right.”² The performers endeavor not only to get it right, but also to usher those present to join them.

Toward the end of the piece, repetition breaks under duration when one of the performers cannot keep up, collapsing in fatigue. The others continue without helping her, becoming bystanders to her suffering. This enactment, too, is a mimicry of everyday life, how the resolve to keep up with the masses misses the moments of sincere desperation in those around us, and so we fail to intervene.

In this respect, anyyywayyy whatever meets this contemporary moment (and our attention span) on its own terms, but warps reality ever so slightly that we feel Cohen lets us in on a little secret: how to not forget our own humanity amidst the doom scrolling and political posturing.