"THEM" and us

I saw them once. I don’t know when or who they were because they were too far away. -- Dennis Cooper in THEM

PS 122's revival of THEM--a dance/text/music piece created during the early era of AIDS--feels not only fresh but necessary today. With a title that suggests observation and finger-pointing from a distance, this work brings to mind that saying about where your other four fingers are pointing. While its text, quietly recited live by writer Dennis Cooper, reflects memory the way a river's surface plays at capturing the moon, its physical and imaginal energy could not be more in-your-face, more disturbing in real time, in distracted, fearful, denial-bound America.

The hour-long piece premiered at PS 122 in 1986 with a performance team including its primary creators--Cooper, Chris Cochrane (music) and Ishmael Houston-Jones (direction and choreographic score for improvisation). For the reconstructed work, developed in residency at The New Museum, the trio are joined by very talented lighting designer Joe Levasseur and a new team of young dancers--Joey Cannizzaro, Felix Cruz, Niall Noel, Jeremy Pheiffer, Jacob Slominski, Arturo Vidich and Enrico D. Wey. All shoulder great responsibility here with a challenge that demands and takes everything an artist has to give. They give it.

Cruising, anonymous sex, rough sex, gay bashing, anxiety, illness, mortality--the specificity of these things, and of those tumbling, grappling, "tangled guys" invoked by Cooper, are there for anyone to see. The uncommon beauty of THEM is also its terror. Awkward, expansive, often explosive individual and interactive movement throws light onto an aspect of American maleness--whether sourced in biology or in society--that rules. Desire rules: Watch how every aggressive part of a dancer's body gets its way, its voice, humbling the heavy, listless head which merely follows, helplessly and blissfully, in momentum. 

Dramatic lighting carves the various scenarios out of the midnight darkness of a space bound on two sides by packed-solid audience seating. While the hip PS 122 crowd--generally "downtown" artists all--might not be unnerved by most of what occurs in THEM, there are at least two scenes that would fail to rattle only the dead. The first occurs when the tense undercurrent simmering in the air suddenly bursts into violence. The second links back to the work's opening image--Vidich led forward and blindfolded by Houston-Jones--and involves the entanglement, and surely the identification, of the young dancer with the bloody carcass of a goat.

This one scene--not brief enough, I'm sure, for most observers--acts like an implosion, as if everything preceding it has collapsed into horror. Here we have the ancient rite, the casting out or slaughtering of the scapegoat, the one bearing our sins and woes. As long as the goat stays well away (or is dead), we are purified. We can breathe easily, live safely, all troubles gone. We still practice this rite today. We just do it in ways that keep our hands clean and smelling sweet.

THEM concludes tonight with 8pm and 10pm performances. I'd be surprised if tickets were still available, but give it a shot here. It's worth it.

THEM

Performance Space 122

150 First Avenue (at Ninth Street), Manhattan