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riting · 6 years

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Body Bags by Jmy James Kidd

devika v. wickremesinghe on Body Bags

My belly bottomed out when TJ hit the bass, and the floor of PAM sunk 200 feet below-down beneath the building, the concrete, the dirt, and I peered off the edge of the bench to get a look at the deep crevice below. I braced myself for vertigo and almost fell off my perch, but the deep sluice filled with a fluid that somehow refracted the bodies of the two yellow creatures, so that while I was looking into the depths I could see their slippery skins in clear detail and they seemed somehow larger and closer.

I was curious to see how they lived and moved. They crawled, backstroke, ate up space with butts and bones. The deep fluid sloshed back and forth, PAM lilting like a ship, and as the waves got bigger the bass resounded. Not at the will of the tides, nor directing the flow, but expertly riding the curves, Perin and JMY’s incessant traversing propelled forward by hunger and desire, mouth and buttholes reaching, had a rhythm that my cells recognized. Their thin transparent fabric hugged and sagged and my subdermis nodded. My cytoplasm was seduced and cells serenaded-only to be suddenly surprised by the evolution of a flicker of an emergent limb. Some sense in me remembered growing my limbs. In this way this tide pool was an exposition but also a reflection.

I was not perceiving JMY and Perin dancing “like” anything. Metaphors and anthropomorphic descriptions are tempting me (Yes, salamanders yes snakeskins, cidacas, anenomes, sure, but… ) but a description of an animal has a delayed separation to it, and the experience I am talking about had no separation. On hands and knees, backs and bellies, JMY and Perin generously carved out rivulets of timespace to show an expositionmeditation on layers that dance dynamically Inside Of Us. Masterfully wild movements rose out of the depths. Perin’s arms flung out like tentacles, shattering the glass of the windows and knocking out the traffic light on Figueroa. JMY’s legs grew three times the size, whipped around three times and kicked off the roof. That giant chicken statue ran for cover. It was then when the floor started to bounce and breathe like a giant fleshy trampoline, and I realized they had been dancing on PAM’s pelvic floor, resilient and rebounding.

Tag from Jmy:

Oh devika! My time life in Los Angeles is laced with devika dancing, teaching, living, being, friending, eating. She came to this place and went feral. This is our life. dev is my community.

devika v. wickremesinghe is a los angeles expressive.

Brian Getnick on Body Bags

COMPLAINT: All dancers practice but do all dancers have a practice?

Most dance that I see in Los Angeles on largish proscenium stages are dances of achievement: medleys of dance representations which reference a dance history that ends prior to the conceit that dance can be any intentional movement. In Los Angeles, this conceit has long been taken up by performance artists in gallery spaces, artists for whom the rehearsal process is anathema to the representations of the so called real, and whose work is more often than not, evacuated of the displays of strength, flexibility, and precision that are the privileged qualities of the ubiquitous dance of achievements. At Pieter Space, founded in 2009 by dance artist Jmy James Kidd the ethos of training the body to be physically skilled and the possibilities of receiving all movement into ones dance making, are invited to merge. What happens then, when a dancer, with years of training, takes “any intentional movement” as an invitation to see all impulses towards moving, all the reverberations in the body that movement causes, and all the staggers, falls, misses, (often discarded inelegant movements) as their crucible? This fine-tuned looking and trying takes more than practice, it requires “a practice”.

BODY BAGS AT PAM

Outside PAM's largest window, palm fronds could be seen sailing down in the wind. Inside the room, the movements of the two dancers were overlarge, outsized, extra, decadent; a massive dance in a bedroom. The audience sat between these two storms. Dressed in gauzy ochre jumpsuits and shot through with an alternately storming and oceanic base composition by Tara Jane O’Neil, Body Bags, created by Jmy James Kidd and performed by Kidd and Perin McNelis, was a dancer’s practice on display. Body Bags is broken up into five or six large passages of movements that Jmy or Perin initiate and then layer in staggered time. I will analyze two of them and recount where I began to see a practice emerge.

After an initial crawl in from the bathroom (Perin) and the hallway (Jmy) the first passage explores space by bullying the thin envelope of air between dancer and witness. It called for delicate unfurling hands, giant steps countered by arched backs that harkens to the melodrama of Isadora Duncan. In the dance of achievement this would be enough, the dance signifier would remain a citation, but for Kidd and McNelis, the formal and associative qualities of Duncan (arms outstretched and leading / high minded elegance) are overcommitted to: They relish in the absurd beauty of the Duncan-dance-artefact to the degree that it decays in front of us. In other words they commit themselves to repeating and re-interpreting in real time an earlier dance signifier until the tiny stumbles, the near misses, and broken patterns switch from being the precarious details of a imperfectly achieved representation to the thing itself. This is where “the practice” first starts to show itself: a perceptual switch from recognizing and thereby judging the achievement of a form into being present to concretely executed material. The hick-ups and near misses are the chosen texture. Smoothness and symmetry are, for the time being, out the door.

In the next section, Jmy broke from the enormous steps and ponderous elegance and began a slow decline, her legs pumping at the knees, her arms outstretched, her gaze fixed on a lucky witness. She lowered down until she was finally squatting on her calves, her arms still in a "T". It takes about 2 minutes and she holds it there, her body quivering with focus and teetering on collapse. Yet she stays. Jmy once said to me something to the effect of "Failure is boring" and yeah, failure is a boring thing to put on a pedestal when succeeding means showing off a fine tuned exploration of energy, elevation, sexuality, a hearty feminine energy and connection between performers. Perin for her part while seeming to follow and look to Jmy for cues also is a free operator, you see her make choices that are distinctly hers: where Jmy’s expression is interior and placid, Perin stares wide eyed and ferocious, where Jmy transitions from shape to shape in bows and curves, Perin’s transitions are quickly angular. You see that this practice highlights difference. Their contrasting inclinations are their distinct modes of thinking, they’re of two minds about how to move and yet remain adjacent in a game of chasing shadows.

This basic structure of one dancer falling into a task, then the other picking it up again before moving on has the effect of a distorted echo, it gives you time to see the "how" of the task and it clues us in that the work that came behind it a thing of value. The process of looking into what happens in the leg joints during a transition up or down shows the witness that these large phrases are also stages for much finer, small motor dances: the quivering lending a dramatic tension to hydraulic lift while the delicacy of the fingers, floating in space, perform a sly weightlessness. The practice on display here is that every part of getting into the conditions of the phrase have both a boastful engineering and an element of fantasy.

Between the 6 big passages are six or so sequences where Jmy and Perin flatten themselves to the floor. Sometimes they wriggle on their backs up and down the corridor like eels, or kick their legs up in a slow motion jog but mostly what these events on the floor feel like is a brief respite into an image. Most of this dance does not allow images to be apprehended and stabilized because the proximity of their bodies blurred our vision and the staggered, refracted score keep us constantly shifting gaze from one dancer to another, enthralled in the procedure.

CONCLUSION: A dance practice is an ongoing research into the possibility that movement produces its own, sometimes prelinguistic meanings. The intensity of discovery, association and affect are greatest in the studio and the public showing is a glance down a well into the depths of an ongoing exploration. When dancers, and other artists who use movement in their work witness dance, they hunt for information to absorb into their creative process. Since artists of all stripes comprise the majority of the public that witness dance in spaces like Pieter, and PAM the performed practice is as materially important in reading a live work as the costume, language, sound and extraneous media. The “how” is therefore also the “what”.

END

Tag from Jmy:

Brian Getnick is PAM. PAM is residencies. Residencies are people. Brian makes puppet sculpture beings that are meant to be touched, grabbed, cuddled, tossed because they want to be alive.

Brian Getnick is an artist, curator and writer about contemporary performance in Los Angeles. He is the director of PAM Residencies, a showcase and residency program for performers making long form work (30+ minutes). He is the founder and co-director with Tanya Rubbak of Native Strategies, a journal documenting performance art in LA since 2011.

Anastasia Baratta on Body Bags

Contemplation of containers, ephemeral nature of such a capsule meant to hold something temporarily. Reminder that most things must be held, suspended within something else.

Beyond that, is there....there?

I think about these bags…the holder of things precious or not, kept safe or instead, cast away.

I used to put people in rich leather body bags. I would zip them up and reinforce it with ties, ropes and belts. They were captive and at my mercy. A package of flesh within flesh, waiting for connection.

Now, I contemplate the bags we live in such as the skin bag, the muscle bag or the ultimate fascia bag, that encompasses the corporeal and possibly the essence of us. The body bag we carry is maybe just a vessel to contain the spirit on this temporal plane. A package of flesh within flesh waiting for connection.

These highly organized bags that contain us and at times distort us. When I move my body bags, it can feel cumbersome or exuberant. My gut bag, my bone bag, my mind bag…is that your bag?

Sometimes, its all I can do to get my bag out of bed and other times the bag carries me in swirls and twirls and laughter. It’s just a bag to be eventually discarded…and when I die, I want to be put in a mushroom shroud bag into the soil bag and then maybe, free of containers.

Tag from Jmy:

My friend and pilates teacher Anastasia Baratta says she was a dancer in a past life. "Pilates" is just a container for the work she does. for me she senses the beyond of bodies. Her work is a huge influence in the organization of my Now body (bag). I make dances and live with and within this body which I inhabit. "Body Bags" is a regurgitation of the things I put in it, like other people and their questions and ideas. I am a subjective creature.

Anastasia Baratta is a self defined body geek, movement coach and witch. Her background is in Education and has multiple certifications in various modalities of movement and healing. She lives in LA and philosophizes about bodies, life, death and healing more than most.

Body Bags by Jmy James Kidd happened at PAM Residencies on April 12 & 13, 2018.

Body Bags was performed by Jmy James Kidd, Perin Hailey McNelis, and Tara Jane O’Neil.

Jmy James Kidd (b. San Francisco, CA) designs dances and clothing and makes watercolors. Her dance history includes ballet and RUG Cunningham technique. Over the last decade she has developed a healthful studio practice with a spiritual body in Los Angeles, where she founded the nonprofit dance studio Pieter as a response to her repressive dance training.

Perin Hailey McNelis is a dancer and restoration horticulturist based in Patagonia, AZ. She holds a BFA in dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and her work has been presented by the Fourth Arts Block’s FAB Festival (NYC), Machine Project, Home LA and Pieter.

Tara Jane O’Neil is a musician. Since 1992 she has released 9 solo albums and collaborated with musicians, dancers, filmmakers and artists. She performs in rock clubs, festivals, DIY spaces, museums, and wilderness areas. Her visual art hangs on walls and sits in stacks or bookshelves. She makes salve.

Film stills from footage shot by Angel Alvarado.

#Performance Riting #PAM Residencies

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