During the first five minutes of the performance, I suspect I might have to leave. Lit by floodlights, we sit on the floor of the black box theater where we have been guided by ushers to install ourselves. We take off our jackets. Beharie, on a red metal sculpture that reminds me of a giant ski crossed with an operating table, begins sipping water, spitting into a little bottle, sipping his expelled saliva, and rubbing it over his skin. They stick their hands impressively far into their mouth. They gag. Members of the audience look away. I’m worried—I’ve seen someone make themself vomit onstage,[1] and Beharie doesn’t have a bucket. Later I realize—this was the beginning.
Slowly, Beharie descends from the sculpture—plinth? Autopsy tray ? He spreads saliva on the floor, meticulously. On his legs.
Beharie installs pads, previously around his ankles, on his knees, and begins to move slowly around the room on all fours. They wear grey braids, black sneakers, and nothing else. Music, which I initially believe to be someone’s ringtone, swells from a speaker hanging in a corner of the room. Other speakers are hung in clusters from the ceiling. Sometimes, when I can’t look anymore, I examine their wiring, which hangs in graceful swoops, vaguely evocative of a baroque proscenium. I also look at the shoes of other spectators, at their faces, how they place their hands. I especially watch Elie Autins, seated across the room from us, and a group of white people on a low platform in the middle of the room. One of them has hot pink nails and pale pink platform sneakers. We are seated on the floor and on platforms of various heights; Beharie moves around and among us. Some spectators fold themselves up, feet tucked away. The floor is lava. Maybe they feel safer that way.
The performance, like most of the works I saw at Les Urbaines, is immaculately paced and technically masterful. The sound design, spatialized through the dispersion of speakers and the integration of unamplified sound the performer generates, is scenography. These are sound people, but not necessarily techno people: at times, the salle is perfectly silent, just as it may be near-deafeningly loud at others. Likewise, Beharie’s movement varies from wildly frenetic to excruciatingly slow.
For me, from early in the performance, it is clear to me that this is in some way about violence, limits, and trust, although these are not words used in official communications about the work. In one of the first frenetic sequences, Beharie grabs the leg of a spectator. Not just a caress or a flutter, a grab. The spectator doesn’t flinch. The salle tightens noticeably, though—it could be any of us. Beharie skitters around the salle; I wonder when they will run into me. I wonder, again, if I will need to leave.
I never do, though, because something crazy happens, something I believe I’ve seen many performers try and fail to accomplish: I start to think seriously about whether Beharie can trust me, and whether I can trust him. I decide that we can trust each other. I am suddenly, excruciatingly, aware of my own performance as a spectator. I am comforted by the fact that this feels wholly intentional: we are not separated by a fourth wall, there is no membrane. We are at the same height, we are lit by the same lights. This awareness is the show. Although I haven’t looked at Beharie’s CV, I’m pretty sure he’s a trained dancer, and that this work has gone through months, if not years of preparation, so even when he spins so fast and so long that I cannot imagine how he can possibly see straight, I trust him to stop before barreling into the public. And I’m right—they do stop.
Nudity in art is, to make a Big Claim, always about power. In a schema of domination of the subject, this power operates over: in the glare of representation, to be nude is to be vulnerable. Of course, this power never operates in the same way over black bodies, brown bodies, white bodies, skinny bodies, fat bodies, hairy bodies, crippled bodies. Nudity in art has baggage. Thus, operations to exert power over spectator-consumer-looker through nudity, to reflect the glare and peel open the vulnerability of looking, as opposed to the vulnerability of being, can produce a dazzle that stymies domination-based identification and desire. All bets, or at least the bets regarding the function of the fourth wall, are off. The spectator can be called upon to work, and this is destabilizing, if not frankly terrifying; ‘work’ in the spectacle can entail degradation and humiliation. The one-way safety of consuming is not guaranteed.
Bathed in this dazzle, the looker has choices to make. As such, I decide that there’s nothing truly (traumatically) violent that can happen to me personally in this space, and so I am able to appreciate, along with the consciousness of my spectatorial vulnerability, Beharie’s technical prowess as a dancer, and the significance of what he’s producing here, now, in this room.
The public is very, very white. Some people nod their heads to the music when it turns a little more rock. This feels weird. I’m not sure if I want white people to enjoy this. The people nodding seem too comfortable. This isn’t a concert, and I kind of want Beharie to compromise their comfort. I can’t really tell if he notices, or responds to it. Although some members of the public seem to have found a balance between trepidation and trust, others remain quite tense, and several leave during the performance. Some of Beharie’s interactions with the public do seem to cross real limits. Their genitals fly quite close to the face of one of the people on the platform near us, and the spectator closes their eyes and rubs their face. Later, Beharie throws the same person’s sweater and hat into the air, and the person looks genuinely distressed. I wonder, as I often do in performances that entail some enactment (or re-enactment) of violence, what the point is. Who really needs to experience this, and how is it possible to craft an experience that genuinely makes them think about white spectatorship and the consumption of black queerness?
Like many works at Les Urbaines, the performance ends abruptly.
When people ask me what I saw at Les Urbaines, this is the performance I talk about. I’ve thought about lots of other aspects since. What does it mean to impose a discourse about white spectatorship on this performance? What does it mean to impose discourse at all? (Am I imposing discourse?) Were my reflections on white spectatorship somehow white spectatorship folding in on itself, refusing or afraid to truly abandon the protective glare of whiteness? Because the work doesn’t include text, I’m missing my usual point d’accroche. However, I’ve also seen other art since, and been struck again by the dilemma of the discursive in performance—the dangers of saying (enough, too much, not enough), the impossibility of uniform interpretation, and, somehow, the preciousness thereof. Maybe it’s okay.
Particularly laudable for me in Batty Bwoy is the fact that, for once, I feel like sitting with discomfort genuinely worked. Obviously, it hits differently in ways that fall more or less on identity lines. But whether or not the reality of hitting differently is or isn’t the point itself isn’t the point, or at least will never be clarified.
As mentioned, I don’t think that it makes sense for me, as a white spectator, to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Batty Bwoy. However, there were several things I much appreciated:
- I was not overwhelmed with the feeling I often have in art spaces, which is ‘wow art sucks. Why are we here’
- Beharie is a genuinely talented performer with impressive physical endurance and precision
- The work takes risks that make all the contemporary dance and theater work I’ve seen recently feel timid. Some of these risks might be problematic for some people, but for me personally they provoked reflection.
- Although I sometimes wished it would end quickly, I was not bored
Les Urbaines, running in Lausanne (CH) since 1996, self-describes as an emerging art festival. My proposed alternative descriptions are:
- What Anne Imhof is trying to do
- Taking seriously the aesthetics of la fête
- Sad Gay People
The text on the performance published in the paper program of Les Urbaines is:
À travers une réappropriation du terme jamaïcain « Batty Bwoy » (littéralement fessier-garçon), utilisé en argot pour désigner des hommes gays ou efféminés, Harald Beharie en détourne et retourne les mythes pour y invoquer sensibilités démoniaques et cruautés charmantes, déployant la vulnérabilité des possibles dans un jeu de naïveté consciente. S’y démasque alors l’horreur de « Batty Bwoy », inhérente à l’expérience de corps noirs et queers.
Dans une danse scrutant l’absurdité d’une monstruosité queer, Batty Bwoy articule la porosité des corps et des langues, leurs bouches avalant et régurgitant les fictions projetées sur leurs peaux.
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Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican terms “Batty Bwoy” (literally, butt-boy), slang for gay or effeminate men, Harald Beharie twists and turns the myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror of “Batty Bwoy,” inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked.
Scrutinizing the absurdity of queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates through dance the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the fictions projected onto their skins.
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From Beharie’s website:
CHOREOGRAPHY/PERFORMER
Harald Beharie
SCENOGRAPHY/SCULPTURE
Karoline Bakken Lund and Veronica Bruce
MUSIC
Ring van Möbius
SOUND DESIGNER
Jassem Hindi
OUTSIDE EYE
Ines Belli and Hooman Sharifi
CO-PRODUCERS
Dansens Hus and RAS
SUPPORTED BY
Norwegian Art council, Fond for lyd og bilde,FFUK, Sandnes Kommune and Tou Scene.
PHOTO
Julie Hrncirova
Thanks to Tobias Leira and Ingeborg Staxrud Olerud.
The project was nominated for the norwegian Critics Association Prize 2022.
Beharie attended the Alvin Ailey School of Dance and has a bachelor’s degree in contemporary dance from the KHIO in Oslo.
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Further information:
https://haraldbeharie.com/ ; soon http://www.urbaines.ch/archives/fr
[1] S’entraîner les dents, Marco Berrettini + Yan Li + performers, collective dance performance in echo to a painting show, at Le Commun, Genève, 16.09.22; part of Dance First Think Later, by Le Commun, Pavillion ADC + Cinémas du Grütli.