“I’m not a voguer”

When Trajal Harrell heard that the critics’ jury of “tanz” magazine had voted him “Dancer of the Year 2018,” he thought it was a joke at first. He had never thought of himself as a great dancer.

“My cousins always said I was a bad dancer. Also when I came up in New York I was very different from most of the dancers. So it was very surprising that I was chosen as Dancer of the Year and not Choreographer of the Year.”

But today he thinks that perhaps his being voted Dancer of the Year was due to his development as a dancer. In 2015, he began to delve more deeply into the work of Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010), creating a solo entitled “The Return of La Argentina,” which refers to Kazuo Ohno’s 1977 signature piece “Admiring La Argentina.” This work was inspired by the Spanish/Argentinean dancer Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina. The piece was directed by Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986), whose work the American choreographer has been exploring since 2013.

“Working on ‘The Return of La Argentina’ changed my way of dancing. There was a big shift in me, in terms of how I thought about dancing. I never had a role model, never had somebody I would look up to as a dancer and say: I want to dance like them – I mean philosophically.” Harrell had seen Kazuo Ohno dance twice when the latter was still alive, and it had never really affected him. But when he came across “Admiring La Argentina” in an archive in Japan, something clicked. “Admiring La Argentina – that was it. I went ‘wow,’ this is the kind of dancer I want to be. Because Butoh is not a prescription of movements, I could understand it as a way of inhabiting the mind of dancing that gave me freedom as a dancer. Maybe this change was seen on the stage.”

And so he became Dancer of the Year 2018 and in response to his nomination by the “tanz” critics’ jury for the award, he created the solo “Dancer of the Year.” The piece captures much of what makes up the art of Trajal Harrell, albeit in allusion or simply in the form of loosely associated ingredients. It is a dance born and developed from the imagination, an imagination that has been and continues to be inspired by various dance forms: American postmodern dance, voguing, Butoh, folk dances, and pop culture. The Dancer of the Year enters the stage as an old man and leaves it as an even older man. Harrell wears a mask – bent, broken, a dead or dying man, who then manages his own show on the laptop and with it his artistic life: from Butoh and back to Butoh, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In between are the dances that have moved him and inscribed themselves on his body. They change whenever the choreographer selects a new piece of music on his laptop. From meditative oriental-style dance reminiscent of Sufi or Loïe Fuller’s serpentine movements, to disco groove, from stillness and arm dances to minimal postmodern forms, and finally to the runway walks that made him famous, but from which the dancer keeps breaking out. And for each dance, a new dress. Harrell carries them onto the stage in a huge bag and puts them on. But doesn’t wear them. Dresses are the most important props in Harrell’s art. They are changed in his shows a thousand times faster than we could ever order them online. And yet they do not end up in the Atacama Desert like the mountains of fast fashion we produce every day, but in collections in his studio in Athens, in his house in Charlottesville, in the prop room of the Schauspielhaus Zürich, where they wait to be reused on a new runway in another work. “The clothes are part of a postcolonial feminist trajectory in my work. I always paid more attention to the costumes than I did to the sets. This goes back to this idea of the operation of fashion into movement. The runway is the main form that I use in my work – that’s the signature of my work. And of course, the runway is a place where people display clothing on bodies. So we display clothing on dance. This is something that becomes a huge part of my process. At the beginning, when I’m with myself thinking about movements for a new piece I often have the clothing to help my imagination. And then as I go into the studio with the dancers the clothing is there. So from the very beginning we usually start working with the costumes.”

„Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church“

These are the questions that drive Trajal Harrell. He is a special kind of historian who researches the history of dance and finds events that never happened. He calls this “historical imagination.” He imagines encounters between protagonists from different movement schools and asks how dance historiography would have changed if the artists had actually met. In his cycle “Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church,” he asks what would have come of a connection between postmodern dance professionals and the African-American gay and transgender voguing scene. The former went down as beacons in dance history, while the latter shone only among their peers until they were brought into the spotlight by two artistic productions in 1990: the documentary “Paris Is Burning” by Jennie Livingston and Madonna’s hit “Vogue.” “Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church” refers to the title of the film and is the series that made Harrell world famous. In “Deathbed,” he inquires about an encounter between the mother of Black Dance, Katherine Dunham, and the father of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata. Since Harrell came across traces of the latter’s work in an archive in Japan in 2013, Butoh poses have been breaking down the beautiful appearances of his catwalks, which were never really beautiful to begin with, as they were immediately recognizable as appearances. But what effect would a meeting between Katherine Dunham and Tatsumi Hijikata have had on their respective dances? None, one had to conclude after the performance at the Kunsthalle Zürich. For many years, Trajal Harrell has been combining the catwalk steps of the beautiful and flashy from the worlds of fashion and pop with the poses of pain and terror found in the post-war Japanese dance. There is little of this in “Deathbed,” which instead features poses from Greek antiquity and steps from the Caribbean, whose local dances Katherine Dunham researched. Only at the end does one of the dancers begin to contort his limbs and face, to sink into himself, and finally be carried away under mountains of fabric. Is Katherine Dunham being carried to her grave? The icon of Black Dance is largely absent from this work, present only as a gap, a void. An open question, left unanswered by all the deceased of this world. “Deathbed” is a work about mourning, remembering, and letting go – like almost all of the pieces that Harrell has created with his Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble.

“Dancer of the Year Shop” – a dancer’s value in his objects

Remembering, letting go – in “Deathbed” the performers sit in front of small tables covered with things they want to get rid of, such as perfume, cables, sponges, old dolls. In “Dancer of the Year Shop #4” from the same series, first performed in spring of 2022, Harrell offered objects from his personal collection for sale at the Kunsthalle Zürich: photos, a love letter, a laptop with personal documents, shoes, the last remaining picture of his grandmother – priced between 300 and 250,000 Swiss francs.

He sold very few of them. Apparently they were too expensive for the audience who attended the exhibition. Remembering, letting go. Among the mementos was a quilt, one of only a few in the family’s possession. It dates back to the time of his slave ancestors and has been passed down from generation to generation and mended time and again.

His search for a dance of his own led him to a more recent part of the history of African-American culture and subculture: ballroom culture and voguing. Ballroom culture emerged in the 1960s when African-American and Latino homosexuals and transsexuals gathered in New York’s Harlem neighborhood for ballroom competitions. Although drag balls existed in major U.S. cities as early as the late 19th century, people of color could not win any prizes at these early balls, dominated as they were by whites. So they got together in houses and vied with one another in their voguing battles in Harlem. The houses, which bore the names of famous fashion houses, were intended to give them the recognition and protection that their families of origin often denied them at the time. It was from this scene that the dance style of voguing developed in the 1980s.

For many years, he attended the ballrooms regularly – not as a participant, but as an observer. The distance was always very important to him.

Long title, short piece – voguing meets minimalism

His choreographic career began in 1999 at the Judson Church with a short piece that is almost over by the time you finish reading the title: “It is Thus From a Strange New Perspective That We Look Back on The Modernist Origins and Watch It Splintering into Endless Replication.“ The title comes from Rosalind E. Krauss’ essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.” At the time, Harrell was using resources from the Judson Dance Theater tradition, working with everyday, minimalist, vogue-inflected movements.

Harrell came to New York in 1998 to continue his dance studies. Born in Douglas, Georgia, he originally wanted to become an actor but began devoting himself entirely to dance, studying in Rhode Island, at San Francisco City College, and eventually at various schools in New York. That’s when a friend who worked for Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) took him to one of the organization’s balls.

At the time, he was in residence at New York’s Movement Research, which entitled him to give two performances at the Judson Church.

Thus was born the short piece with the long title and the surprising reaction of the audience. Trajal Harrell began to study the ballrooms more closely. The walks down the runways, imaginary and imagined real, this world of fashion, glitter and glamor, the combination of the everyday walk and the desired walk, offered him endless possibilities for movement research. The fact that the voguing movement, like the postmodern dance movement, emerged in the 1960s sparked his historical imagination: what would have happened if voguing maniacs had made their way downtown to Greenwich Village to join the Judson Church crowd?

Le Derniere spectacle

The reference is to an iconic piece of French conceptual dance from the 1990s. In “Le dernier spectacle” by Jérôme Bel, the four performers take turns claiming to be Andre Agassi, Susanne Linke, Hamlet, and Jérôme Bel. Similarly, the beginning of “Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow,” which was created at Schauspielhaus Zürich in 2021, is reminiscent of both “(M)imosa” and “Le dernier spectacle.” Here, the runway goes the entire length of the shipbuilding hall as the audience on both sides prepares for the upcoming fashion show – for theater, so to speak, from Anna Wintour’s perspective. Then Trajal Harrell rises from the midst and claims to be Anna Wintour. He/she says he/she has been asked by Trajal Harrell to open the show, which she would like to do but for the fact that Harrell wants her to dance. If you are alive, you can dance. She is going to go change now. She/he leaves and actor Thomas Wodianka appears. He claims to have been asked by Anna Wintour and Trajal Harrell to open the show, which she would like to do, and so on, and so on.

The duplication is not only owed to the translation – the repetition is as much a concept as the endless walks down the runway. Again and again, the performers in “Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow” make their rounds, each time wearing a new dress that is held up in front of the body as a sign that what is supposed to create something like identity here is completely replaceable – and in a flash, since it was only held up anyway. Walking on the line, legs crossing slightly so that one foot falls exactly in front of the other. Some bounce like excited ping-pong balls, others waddle like ducks or stomp defiantly – the degree of grace is negligible. Trajal Harrell’s runways play with fashion shows and the fashion world, just as they play with the spectacle of voguing. They expose the spectacle of the fashion world by hysterically subverting it, by playing with fluid – inasmuch as they are questionable – identities, juggle with the icons of dance history and pop culture. In this respect, Harrell’s dance could be read as an American answer to French conceptual dance. But unlike conceptual dance theater, unlike American postmodernist dance, Harrell’s works do not reject the spectacle; on the contrary, they return the spectacle to the stage. Albeit in a well-digested form. Fashion shows, the fashion world, and voguing are not simply quoted, just as Butoh is not simply quoted in the best of Harrell’s works, nor Loïe Fuller. The dances of the others, of predecessors and ancestors – they are assimilated and spit out as something different, something that sometimes has more, sometimes less in common with the movements of the old and the others.

Twenty Looks or Paris …

What followed was a world away from “Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church.” While some of the pieces in the “Twenty Looks” series came across as shrill and loud and the intention was so obvious as to be annoying at times, the works created at Schauspielhaus Zürich since 2019 are solemn and imbued with a deeply melancholic worldview. The ritual of the runway has become a ritual of mourning, the procession of the beautiful and their gorgeous clothes a funeral march.

“The Köln Concert” – Jazz meets drunken Willis

“The Köln Concert” was both a new beginning and a turning point. For the first time, Harrell put a piece of music at the center of a production: “The Köln Concert” by Keith Jarrett, along with four songs by Joni Mitchell. He also created an abstract choreography with his six fellow dancers, with no text, references, or images, with only seven piano benches on stage and dressed almost exclusively in black. Seven benches for seven people, with space between them. Harrell begins, sitting down on one bench and dancing with his arms. His longtime companion Ondrej Vidlar sits on another, and they both swing their arms to Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” Only then do the other dancers join in. Technically, “The Deathbed of Katherine Dunham,” part of the “Porca Miseria” trilogy, was scheduled for spring 2020. However, we would end up waiting for it until spring 2022. Instead, Harrell and his dancers embarked on a more COVID-19-compliant journey in 2022 and explored the music that had electrified him decades ago: Keith Jarrett’s legendary 1975 “Köln Concert.” But he had had so much respect for the music that it had taken him 20 years to dance to it in public, as he states in the program.

It was the reduction to the piano benches that finally encouraged him to take on the “Köln Concert.” To the fourth Mitchell song, “Both Sides Now,” Thibault Lac bobs along the runway – always on demi pointe, as if he were wearing heels. Then the famous intro sounds and now they walk in black. Or sit. They cross their legs, look lasciviously into the audience or stare stubbornly ahead. One jumps nervously across the room, another freezes in an antique pathos pose. Some get up to dance, scampering back and forth with the smallest of steps, powerful on their feet, while their upper bodies collapse in all directions – drunken Willis at dawn. The clothes stay on longer, the many colorful smarties have given way to a smart black. Was this related to COVID, as was rumored at the time? “No, no, no, the black dresses in ‘The Köln Concert’ had nothing to do with the pandemic. I found those goddess dresses ten years ago in Stockholm at a sale. And I saved them because I knew that they would be important one day. This was about Greek dancing, and those dresses were like togas almost. I wanted something that put the piece in a kind of ancient or maybe even timeless sphere. We start in a different sphere and then slowly go back and go back in time until you enter this place where the ‘Köln Concert’ happens. We change the seating and then those bodies come out and it’s in a different sphere. Those dresses are cut in a way that they can have endless shapes and silhouettes. They refer to a different time and place. Maybe it’s ancient Greece, maybe it’s ancient Rome, or some other place the viewer imagines. Again this is the historical imagination that we imagine together. This is what I work towards.”

“Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow” – all people become aprons

The colors return in “Monkey off My Back – or the Cat’s Meow (a piece for dancers and actors),” Harrell’s largest Zurich production to date featuring some 17 performers. Here the runway does not cross the imaginary world. It is the world. On the floor: Mondrian, oriental carpets, Japanese mats, kitsch; around them, the dancers and actors bob to a musical collage featuring songs by Nina Simone, Mia Doi Todd, Laura Nyro, Joan Armatrading, compositions by Claude Debussy and Steve Reich, among others. Some of the composite costumes reference dresses from famous fashion houses, some are just aprons, and most of them become aprons because they are not even put on, but simply held in front of the body. Collage, fake clothes, fake fashion on fake art.

After all, it didn’t apply to everyone. Slavery was not abolished in the United States until 1865, and women did not have the right to vote until 1920. The dissenting voice rises at the end. “I had to, like open the bruise up, and let some of the blood come out to show them” – 19-year-old Daniel Hamm of the Harlem Six, on the loop of Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” To this document of racially-motivated police violence from 1966, the black-clad dancers stubbornly make their last rounds. And the minimalism, the repetition in their gait, pays homage to the beginnings of European minimalism in Belgium, where Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker created her seminal piece “Fase” set to Steve Reich’s composition in 1982.

“The House of Bernarda Alba” – Dior goes Gothic

Most of the pieces produced at Schauspielhaus Zürich are performed by the dance ensemble. Sometimes with a single guest actor, such as Max Krause, who has already worked with Harrell in Munich and Bochum. This is also the case for “The House of Bernarda Alba” based on the tragedy by Federico García Lorca. Bernarda’s house is a women’s prison, decreed by the mother after the death of the father. Only the eldest of the five daughters is allowed to marry; the others must remain in the house and mourn for eight years. The youngest, however, gives herself to her sister’s groom and subsequently hangs herself, believing that Bernarda has shot him.

Trajal Harrell’s historical imagination has taken him – and thus us – back to the House of Dior in the 1940s. Back then, the models did not walk the runway, but swirled around in the exclusive salons within easy reach of the audience. The salon at the playhouse was recreated for an exclusive audience too. Meanwhile, Harrell does not parade the latest craze everyone is crying out for, but rather just the cry, distorted by pain and silent. The fashion is grim. Chic leather belts become dreadlocks on women and wondrous blouses turn into headscarves. Whatever splendor has found its way onto their heads and bodies pushes them to the ground.

Here, the house as an alternative family from Harlem’s voguing scene offers no protection to Bernarda and her household. The women may have a little fun with Lula Pena’s fado at first, but then Trajal Harrell enters and dances the dance of the trembling fingers. Piano and violin from Giya Kancheli’s “Time and Again” take over the sound and Butoh takes over the dance. The performers’ bodies writhe, limbs twisted inward, faces painted white, mouths contorted and drooling. Butoh, which in general was merely hinted at in the preceding works, here becomes an internal and external force at the same time – a force that drives people, not as a sign of repressed sexuality, but as change par excellence. The fashion show at Dior is not walked by the eerily sad models surrounding Bernarda Alba, but by the “petites mains,” the unsung heroines of haute couture. They present the fabrics and laces, then Bernarda’s daughters appear and transfer the elegance to the gothic scene.

“Maggie the Cat” – history told from below

The shift in focus could not be more apt. In “Maggie the Cat,” Trajal Harrell has the servants from Tennessee Williams’ drama about a phony Southern family dance. They carry various household items across the stage – comforters, pillows, dresses – while the choreographer and Perle Palombe, as Big Mama and Big Daddy, drive the action from the side. At one point, the performers walk through a box of paint, leaving brown footprints on the white floor – a footprint of African-American history, so to speak. Does Trajal Harrell want to bring to light events and things that we usually overlook?

He wants people to believe in the impossible, Harrell told London’s ‘Evening Standard’ in 2017 on the occasion of his exhibition “Hoochie Koochie” at the Barbican Gallery. What did he mean by that? The phrase did not originally come from him, but from Cuban artist Tania Bruguera – he’s referring to the oft-quoted line, “A lot of people know it’s impossible … but the impossible is only impossible until somebody makes it possible.”