Jerron – Sweat Play – from Relative
Descriptions
-
Jerron
The stage is set like a giant club dance floor; pools of light flicker in disparate places and people sit, stand, and groove all around in chairs and the floor, encroaching on the stage. A tall, thin DJ spins in the stage left upper corner, he is generously lit. On the other side of the stage is a rectangular bracket of light and Jerron, a dark-skinned black man wearing a metallic two-piece suit slowly undulates and revolves around himself, nearing the corridors of people watching him downstage. His movement grows more sensuous as the music slows and he completely gyrates with full hip circles. He thrusts his hips forward to an awaiting audience as they clap in time to the downbeat and his swaying hips. He fully leans back so that he’s looking at opposing walls/people. His rigid left arm spasms up. He turns from them in another hip circle and repeats swaying his hips. Finally his articulate hand touches his sweaty body and flicks droplets at consenting folks yelling, YES.
Jerrron, in this clip, I think of the body as a dancer, a performer, amongst other bodies who are watching but also dancing participants. A club, a stage, a sinuous mover, sexy, hot. The fourth wall of the theater is dissolved as theater becomes club, becomes social event. Jerron, a dancer, a conductor of shared electricity; a group celebration of sensuous sexuality, led by a charismatic mover.
Jerron,
Because sweat is in the title, you immediately make me mindful that a body is mostly liquid, that it is porous and leaky. You make me think about sweat as a response to exertion, to heat–both external and internal–and also a spontaneous signal of nervousness or fear. And hear, the sweat is all those things–the dancer’s exertion, heat, and stage fright–all condensing into something sacred and sexy he distributes to the audience that clamors for it.
For all this is a solo work, which usually means one particular body, I am struck by the necessity and connectivity of the body. It realizes in the evacuation of the central solo space where you dance so much with the audience at the margins or perhaps periphery is a better word. This body is about the relationship to the audience and what the audience does. Play the lighting connects Jerron and the DJ, the presence of the audience on stage suggests a very different look at where the boundaries of performance lie. I find myself asking not what is the body but really whose body am I looking at here and why? Does the costuming matter to me is a good question? I feel as if it ought to because of the weight it carries around blackness queen of sexuality and disco. And yet, the more I look at you dancing – the more I find that the costume matters less than the presence of the fleshly body itself. And that is at least in this video very much Hidden. It is more of a suggestion than an actuality – and yet I know that it is in actuality because of the way the audience reacts (and because I was there). Costume draws attention to a solo single body and yet to work is so much about the collective.
I have known Jerron as a colleague for about five years, and we have participated in a few disability culture and disability knowledge making events, one of which was a conference where each of us was a speaker representing disability culture and studies. I’ve seen Jerron perform his own work several times, including some version of this piece. I have talked with him a lot about what I understand as the distinctive movement vocabulary his particular form of embodiment affords him. For one thing, there are a few or perhaps no other disabled dancers whose asymmetry within symmetry upper body form is similar to his. His own dance vocabulary and embodied presentation at once violate and conform to the aesthetic principle of symmetry upon which the traditional Western notion of beauty– with the exception of the Baroque aesthetic– tediously enforces in all art forms, but particularly in dance. All human bodies manifest variation within a formal standard, but the range of that variation is fairly narrow. One characteristic of the human variations we think of as disability is an expansion of the range of human form that presses up against all of the pronouncements about what it is that makes a human body human. The violation of bilateral symmetry that seems so fundamental to human embodiment is a particularly fertile ground for aesthetic development. This is what I saw in the movement vocabulary that Jerron’s body affords. I am particularly moved by witnessing the aesthetic possibilities in a body understood as deformed because human deformation is culturally understood as not just an aesthetic violation, but a disqualification from the category of the human, in short deformity is monstrosity in the dominant tradition. To witness embodiment consigned to deformity as an instrument of aesthetic integrity if not outright beauty is important cultural work and speaks to me as a person with the kind of disability my body bespeaks. Monster theory, which is a very productive and robustly developed theoretical area, could be brought into disability dance theory to illuminate the forms of movement vocabulary that is disability dance. However, monster is an exceptionally evocative word and concept to be hurled at someone and I would not gladly either accepted or bestow it. It has been pointed out to me, as well, the danger of people with disabilities– like me in this case– over identifying with disabled dancers and thus appropriating them or even exploiting them in some way through the expectations of solidarity coming from that identification. One of the topics we may wish to discuss in our time together is what might be called the disabled gaze and the nondisabled gaze in relation to disability dance. In other words, we may wish to consider the differences between meaning making in dance when the audience members identify as disabled people or nondisabled people. I have written about this somewhat in a book I wrote a long time ago on staring, feminist film theory has developed gaze theory, and literary criticism has developed reader response in order to think through the relationship between an aesthetic product and its audience.
YES. I saw a level of comfort from the performer and audience that I dont often experience in typical performances. The entire space was engaged and every body was activated. Was it the muse, the music, the audience, the stage set- up, the live DJ, or all of it? Was there a surprise element to the performance? How did it start/end ? I really love the music and was reminded of a time when dark, loud clubs were a refuge for me to be fully in my body And Be seen.