Artists Reach Out: Jules Skloot

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Jules Skloot

Jules Skloot
(photo: Jules Skloot)

Jules Skloot is a dancer, choreographer, and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently, Jules has performed and collaborated with Tatyana Tenenbaum, Hadar Ahuvia, devynn emory, Circus Amok, and The Ballez. Jules’ work has been presented at Dixon Place, BAX, BKsD, The University Settlement, and through AUNTS. Jules teaches dance classes to people of all ages, health classes to 4th graders, and is committed to joy and collective liberation in all these endeavors.

Jules Skloot
(photos: above, Jim Coleman; below, Megan Stahl)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic? 

I do. I am working on a solo performance investigating the phenomenon of projective identification and my embodied experiences of it. Projective identification is the psychological process by which we project onto other people our own subconscious needs and feelings, and also subconsciously internalize and take on the projections of others.

I was supposed to perform part of this solo this past week at DåncēHølø, which is a dance series at a music venue in Ridgewood, organized and curated by the wonderful Rebeca Medina. I was supposed to perform in devynn emory’s piece at Danspace Project this month, too. Hopefully both are just postponed and will get to be performed in some way in a future time.

My own project has costume elements, I’ve been working with cloaking and disguising my body, so in quarantine I’ve been working on some sewing and hot glueing and also creating a few collages that touch and elaborate on the dreamspaces of the work. But otherwise I am in a deep pause.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

For me as a kid, art was the portal to the world that I felt okay living in. I felt freedom in art, from social constraints, rules, and expectations that felt oppressive and scary to me, like norms around gender and “beauty” and behavior. My parents, who had a lot of fear and expectations for me and my survival based on their inherited Ashkenazi ancestral terror, gave me miraculous and joyful leeway around artistic expression and creative shenanigans. I was a very physically curious and precocious kid, and they were able to put me in dance classes from a young age, and this just became a staple in my life. I had some traumatic surgeries as a very young person, and experienced some physical abuse, and I think dance was a way to re-inhabit and heal my connection to my body after vacating it. I almost lost my connection to it around puberty time, but I think I needed what dance gave me too much to ever permanently walk away from it; a space to be alive, embodied, with all of me, a space to regulate myself, and be really human and also in touch with something infinite.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I am practicing self love and self-gentleness. This means having to really see and admit the harshness and denial with which I learned to treat myself. I grew up in the midwest, and most self-love talk and affirmations sound so pretentious and hollow to me and, while I have no problem believing, saying, or applying them to someone else, I just can’t say them to myself, or believe them when I do. So I have been trying to translate the message into some midwestern voice that I can listen to and not wriggle away from. The best I’ve been able to come up with so far is when I am scared or really struggling saying softly to myself “oh, honey.” So I’ve been walking around gently touching my chest and saying that.

I am practicing not letting my anxiety confirm my worst fears and suspicions. 

I am practicing tasting, letting taste be a full-body physical sensation and if it connects to a memory, taking the time to remember.

I am practicing noticing what is working, or going well.

I am noticing how my life has been shaped by trauma, fear, and my family’s assimilation into whiteness and white supremacy culture. I am practicing coming out of denial.

I am taking a lot of walks and taking a lot of pictures on my walks. I am remembering how much I love visual composition, looking around at, framing, and arranging sights and colors and textures and relationships that please and delight me. I am feeling and allowing myself to be delighted by signs of spring.

I am dreaming and envisioning ways out of oppressive structures. Ways to not ever go back to the inhumane “norms” of daily life. I am looking for the ways people are figuring out to push towards liberation in the cracking and crumbling of our society. Doing what I can to add wind to the sails of those ideas, people, organizations, campaigns.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

The themes of the practice are what I care most about.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

The world is changing and so much is being uncovered in mainstream collective consciousness about terrible things that have been happening for a long time, the ways in which those problems are connected, and we humans are interconnected. These practices are functioning to keep me awake to the moment, and alive to the feelings and information coursing through me. They are helping me to grieve this pandemic and what it is revealing about the injustice of the world we have now. They are helping me to stay grounded so I can be in integrity with myself, a good partner to my partner, and good caretaker to my dog, a good neighbor to my neighbors. So that I can take action towards my visions when the opportunities crack open. I hope that these practices of being present and envisioning and working towards liberation will function to bring me into the world I want to live in.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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On the APAP trail: Half Straddle and Ballez

Some members of The Ballez
(photo: Hedia Maron)

Now might not be the kindest season to hang around The Kitchen, that drab industrial box for the industry of experiment in far Chelsea. But Tina Satter's Obie-winning Half Straddle has set up shop there for the first time, and the chilly environs actually add a bit of vérité to the proceedings.

In Ancient Lives, which is kind of a movie-as-theater inspired by teen flicks from the 1980s but with a whiff of something decades, centuries and even aeons older, we find ourselves deep in the woods with a mesmerizing teacher, her three charges, a little witch and broadcast media equipment old and new. We know we're in the woods because that downstage chaise lounge, inexplicably covered, encrusted and taped by packing materials, has an owl statue perched atop, and there's an outsized badger (Chris Giarmo) playing Chris Giarmo's music live in the upper left corner of the space. And I swear there's a scent of pine--along with troubling power dynamics--drifting through the night air.

The aura of the artificial as well as the self-consciously awkward tickled me, everybody playacting in a production cobbled together as if by a magpie. My favorite bit--a time-warped set piece around the word "poppet"--shows Satter's players at their sharpest in vocal skills and timing.

Performed by Jess Barbagallo, Eliza Bent, Emily Davis, Julia Sirna-Frest, and Lucy Taylor with choreography by Elizabeth Dement, video by Ilan Bachrach, set by Andreea Mincic and lighting by Zack Tinkelman

Ancient Lives continues Wednesday-Saturday, January 14-17 with performances at 8PM. For information and tickets, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

***

Oh, how I regret that Katy Pyle's Variations on Virtuosity, A Gala Performance with The Stars of The Ballez--presented by American Realness at Abrons Arts Center--will have come and gone after only two shows on a single weekend. Why do the best things in life last so briefly while we must endure the likes of social injustice and bad performance? A better question: How soon can someone bring The Ballez (and sexy) back?

The Ballez, we're told,

celebrates the virtuosity of complexly gendered people by choosing the grandiose container of ballet for its presentation. The company celebrates a lineage of dykes and post-modern performance by telling queer/dyke histories inside the framework of classical ballet narratives.

The 45-minute program, beautifully lit by designer Carrie Wood, sampled the Ballez repertoire, including a suite from The Firebird, A Ballez; the Dying Swan excerpt from Sleeping Beauty & the Beast; and the smoking 1993 Club Suite from that last piece. With the exception of the striking Dying Swan solo--attributed to Pyle and dancer Michael Helland after the Fokine choreography for Pavlova--the other works are the handiwork of Pyle and Jules Skloot in collaboration with their ensemble.

Contemporary ballet, by and large, makes my eyes glaze over. I just can't get into it much or much of it. But this isn't contemporary ballet. With the exception of the Club Suite duets, it's classical ballet for contemporary people living in a real world, and it has got my full attention. The Ballez doesn't satirize ballet; it rewrites the rules of who can dance and how they must present themselves. It appropriates technique, stories and characters for all the right reasons. It makes us look closely, in the interactions between and among dancers, to witness utmost care and delicacy of touch as well as power in the fluidity of physical and emotional roles. Dance lives here and will never flame out.

This troupe could sell out--I'm not talking about seats--and part of me would be very happy for Pyle and her collaborators. They have developed a thrilling sophistication in their teamwork and bring something a wider American audience needs to see.

Last chance: Tonight at 9pm. Click here to see if tickets remain available.

For information on other American Realness festival events at Abrons Arts Center and beyond, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

"The Firebird, A Ballez" at Danspace Project

This lesbian princess expects this Firebird to perch on her finger! (Photo: Christy Pessagno)

I think what I love most about Katy Pyle's queer appropriation of The Firebird--in the Firebird, A Ballez, concluding tonight at Danspace Project--is that almost nobody's trying terribly hard to live up to critical standards, to tailor themselves to any outsider's approval.

The first person we meet, the Narrator (Sacha Yanow) isn't declaiming her lines in a well-trained theatrical voice. She's just talking. She could be your lesbian girlfren' from around the block with a big grin and bit of gossip on her tongue. From what I can see, she's having a quick word with an audience filled with people who are a lot like her. So, yeah, she is your lesbian girlfren' from around the block!

Pyle, herself, for all her training in ballet, isn't the princess you might expect from the traditional Firebird tale and its balletic renderings. In this "ballez," she chooses to look like a cross between an animated ragdoll and a cake left out in the rain, but she shows no hesitation in stalking her desired "tranimal" Firebird (Jules Skloot) or lifting him numerous times like a stevedore--a stevedore with blue and purple hair. Dance technique- and plot-wise, she's more will than grace.

I love the chorus of lez and trans princes* in their ballet school black tights and white t-shirts and don't want them to aim for "perfect." Their earnestness and willingness and sense of togetherness in all things move me like little else can. That's a team any princess--this one included--would be lucky to gather close.

I love the space that Pyle and Skloot, with his modest charm, make for ballet to contain imperfection and feeling by reeling it back from mechanical exactitude and just plain giving it to the people. So that when the vampirish Sorceress (Cassie Mey) finally makes her electrifying entrance, with flapper-like bob, velvet, floor-sweeping coat and barely-there costume of straps and rhinestones, we see her flashy technique as a cold, heartless, relentless, manipulative thing with no room for love.

There's also the fancy of Hedia Maron's video, projected on the church's altar wall. It conjures a sense of place--a formidable castle rising on craggy heights; a classic garden with statuary and orange trees; a raging pyre--that we might find illustrating a volume of kid's fairytales. This naivete turns my heart over and turns me childlike. The excellent Queer Urban Orchestra, conducted by Nolan Dresden, brings the Stravinsky in a thrilling performance from St. Marks's balcony.

This evening-length version of The Firebird, A Ballez--long in the dreaming and making--has arrived. Tonight's performance (8pm) is sold out, but it's definitely worth a try. The wait list starts at 7:15pm.

[*Princes: Effie Bowen, Zari Esaian, Ariel "Speedwagon" Federow, Leah Hafezi, Sam Greenleaf Miller, Francis Rabkin, Mary Read, Lindsay Reuter, Lollo Romanski, Silky Shoemaker, Sacha Yanow and Nyx Zierhut]

Danspace Project
Second Avenue at 10th Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Pyle and Skloot premiere "Covers" at The Bushwick Starr

Covers--presented by dancer-choreographers Katy Pyle and Jules Skloot at that funky little Bushwick Starr performance space--is totally worth your time this weekend.

Performing beneath quilts, Katy Pyle and Jules Skloot shape-shift through an amorphous landscape of literal and metaphorical covers, inhabiting and discarding roles through cover songs, dance styles, and contemporary performance tropes.

Text by Francis Weiss Rabkin.  Music contributions from Erica Livingston, Margot Bassett, and Katie Workum. 

That does not mention Carrie Wood's enchanting lighting design (evoking candlelight, a campfire, daybreak) and how an interweaving of guileless entertainment and emotional transparency--plus some beloved pop music--makes this hour-long duet poignant and irresistible.

See it tonight, Saturday night or Sunday at 8pm. Get tickets here.

The Bushwick Starr
207 Starr Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

And if you haven't yet heard Pyle's beautiful recording for Listen., here's the link to my blog post for it (click).

Body and Soul/Listen.: Katy Pyle [AUDIO]

Katy Pyle

Click here to subscribe to Body and Soul podcast in iTunes and listen to dancer-choreographer Katy Pyle talk about the the saving grace--and the power--of imagination and performance.

Katy's bio

Katy Pyle and Jules Skloot present COVERS -- September 6-9 at The Bushwick Starr. Get details here.

To subscribe to Body and Soul podcast, click here.

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(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody (http://infinitebody.blogspot.com)