The Brooklyn Rail

Jonathan González and their collaborator of ten years, Marguerite Hemmings, dance in a room painted red—red as wine so delicious you take a deep gulp even though you only meant to take a sip. This is Full Tilt, a demonstration of total and relentless devotion in the form of a contemporary dance performance. The five-hour durational work took place at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, as part of the 2026 graduate thesis exhibitions. Full Tilt is part of an exhibition of González’s work of the same name, curated by Devon Ma. It constitutes a new chapter in their ongoing choreographic project Swerve Fatigue (2024– ).

In ​​iterative forms, Swerve Fatigue brings together multiple performers who respond to each other and their rehearsal environments. The cumulative effect of seeing so many bodies in motion gives Swerve Fatigue the appearance of a flash mob. As they move, the performers carry memories of physical collaboration and engage with the historical transmissions—the ghosts—that haunt the locales where their dancing takes place. In choreography that is reminiscent of debutante balls, they spin palm-to-palm in pairs. They conjure the club dancefloor in swivels and gyrations. In an interview in Full Tilt’s exhibition publication, González tells conversation partner Will Rawls, “I want to not be a self; I want to be a we.” Swerve Fatigue, and by extension Full Tilt, thus interrogate what it might look like to submit the self to the collective—to move in constant relation with others, memory, and space.

One iteration of Swerve Fatigue took place in a spacious house on Fire Island as part of the 2025 BOFFO Performance Festival, co-curated by myself and Sydney Fishman. Night fell over the Fire Island Pines, and festivalgoers danced to Alexis de la Rosa’s mix as it pulsated within cedar walls (he was González’s co-conspirator, cosplaying as a DJ on the festival lineup). González stepped into the crowd wearing an eighties rockstar wig. They were a provocateur, strutting around a swimming pool, climbing trees, and shaking their faux-hair in people’s faces. Joined by an ensemble that included fellow festival artists Nile Harris, Jas Lin, and Symara Sarai, González took over the dancefloor, swerving to the seductive sounds of Sonique’s “It Feels So Good.” The crowd couldn’t hold back their elation: cheers erupted as González whined their hips in front of the DJ booth, their body a sensual shadow in the thick haze that covered the dancefloor.

If Swerve Fatigue – BOFFO was rapture, then Full Tilt is quiet devotion. It starts at 10:30 a.m., half an hour before the CCS Bard galleries open to the public. A heap of yellow clothes sits in the center of the all-red gallery. González tells me the yellow references an image of the sun setting behind the Hollywood Hills by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, made for his partner Ross Laycock as he died of AIDS-related causes. Across the entire performance, Hemmings and González return to this pile as a prop or performance partner as they add and subtract layers of their golden uniforms from their bodies. A pair of chorded microphones are also collaborators. The artists amplify sonic textures—scrapes of Hemming’s hoodie zipper, squeaks from González’s sneakers, and rustles of clothing against skin—and use the chords to draw perimeters and desire lines in the burgundy carpet.

A droning soundscape (a score González composed from past sonic works) fills the gallery. Sitting in this environment is akin to being in a club. In the dim room, the sound is all-encompassing, as solid as a clay sculpture. But unlike in the club, and unlike on Fire Island, the gratification of physical touch is deferred. González and Hemming interact with spectators in the form of “tracing.” They use their hands and sometimes their entire bodies to evidence the outlines of the architectural space and the audience members, at first from a distance and then, as the performance persists, close enough that I smell their sweat as they push their bodies against mine, tracing the wall an inch above my head. “What we trace we then aim to become,” González told Rawls. My invisible electric field intermingles with the performers.

González and Hemmings press themselves against the earth, then assemble themselves in a tangle of limbs. “I want you to feel it!” they encourage each other. When Hemmings climbs atop González and they roll around on the floor in an act reminiscent of child’s play, their bodies don’t appear to impact the ground. They are made of air or water: more than human. In moments of physical strain, they utter to one another, “Are you okay?” “Yeah, I’m okay,” is the consistent response. Moments of extended stillness buffer accelerated and intense actions like splits and handstands. The performers melt into one another so often it is easy to believe they are one being. By manifesting a choreography of interdependence between temporal and physical relations, Full Tilt is what it looks like to acknowledge our entanglements: it is methodical, rooted in relation, and it does not build to one singular moment of ecstasy, but toward intimate and iterative gestures of connection.

González makes an impromptu proposal to their collaborator. “There was a choice to … leave the space nude at the end. That emerged for me in the moment and I asked Marguerite how she felt about that. She was affirmative, and we left every item, walking out of the gallery full of substance but bare of attire,” González explained after the performance. There is no bombastic moment of release at the conclusion of Full Tilt, not even a round of applause. González and Hemmings exit the gallery. The audience thins. A small child remains. The child presses themselves against the floor, rolls to the wall, and traces their feet up its surface until they are upside down, as González had been hours before; a new iteration of Full Tilt.