How to Start A Daniel Linehan Fan Club
Andrea Liu
It is a decided minority of modern dancers who have anything inside–a depth, an intelligence, a charisma, a sense of freedom–that seems larger than the mere sum of their physical acts and movements; some inner quality–whether it be moral, ideological, political, imaginative or emotional–so rich or intriguing that the movement seems to be a vehicle to express this quality, as opposed to an end in and of itself. Often, a myopic narcissism, moral thinness or lack of dynamism of character, underlies modern dance performance. Luckily, however, the incestuous downtown NY dance world has been blessed–maybe redeemed and resuscitated–with two performers from Seattle, Daniel Linehan and Michael Helland, who have this quality.
Squeeze Machine, a contemporary dance collaboration between Daniel Linehan and Miriam Wolf at Triskelion Arts Theater in Williamsburg, NY this January, was an uneven performance whose bright spots were the performers Linehan and Helland. Linehan’s piece began with four performers in primary-colored Speedo outfits grunting, or yelling, with a locker room athletic warm up-like gusto. The movements, particularly on Helland’s part, had a refreshing lack of daintiness–that is to say, a generous roughness or deliberately unrefined assuredness. A fairly simple sequence was repeated each time the jock yelling session began. It soon became apparent that it didn’t matter with Helland what movements he was doing, but that there was something about him as a performer that was interesting to watch, regardless of the movement.
Linehan was on stage but separated, prostrate and remote, physically and mood-wise, from much of the group for most of his piece, lying dead-like in a corner, away from the communal team-like dancing. Antithetical to the usual "watch-me-as-I-use my-back-up-dancers-as-bridesmaids-like-complements-to-the-main attraction: myself" embedded vanity of dance, Linehan’s self-imposed extrication and muteness within his own piece seemed like an ironic commentary on a sense of alienation, whether in life or in the making of the piece. Linehan’s absence or separateness had more authorial weight than any movement of the dancers. Having laid face down on stage for some time while the other dancers were twirling about, finally a loud almost machine-like wheezing or gurgling noise emanated from Linehan, who then began slithering snake-like upstage, up the steps of the risers of the audience, all the time his face unviewable to the audience. After slithering back down to the stage, one of the dancers briskly slapped on a hefty strip of masking tape on his mouth and the noise ceased. This episode succeeded in transforming Linehan with a non-human creature-like involuntary quality, as he scarcely seemed like a human, but an oblivious, endearing but menacing wheezing rodent.
Finally, towards the end of the piece the prostrate Linehan arises and begins a harried hopping dance with arms outstretched perpendicularly, moving his arms both vertically and horizontally, progressing diagonally downstage. The movement, though well-woven, still seemed like a backdrop to the utterance of text: a lengthy and dense four minute stream-of-consciousness sputtering of random words. These words are uttered with urgency and a seemingly "possessed" involuntariness, as if they had to be expelled or exorcised from the internalized pressure of containment. Eschewing any semantic order, sentence structure or discernible association in meaning, the words were heterogeneous and unpredictable, ranging from "homophobia" to "Jennifer Lopez." The intensity and rigor of this episode was so unexpected relative to what came before, one almost felt a relief when it was done. It was an exquisitely crafted postmodern moment, as it seemed the Linehan character was an unwitting sponge that had absorbed diverse, multifarious, but ultimately incoherent shards and fragments of popular culture, mass media, history and contemporary life. It was if these sediments had been deposited inside of him, stewed in him, and imprinted upon him, over-stimulated or prostrated him. He was now spewing back and regurgitating what had been variously programmed or dumped in the random sewer of the contemporary psyche, the receptacle for the "anything goes" postmodern incoherence of modern culture. The coup de grace was that it was not a person-character-dancer who had been overwhelmed by these words, but that he embodied some larger, yet more specific, psycho-social dynamic of cultural absorption or system overload. It was as if he were involuntarily subjected to a cultural pummeling so relentless, vast and amorphous it had invaded and taken over the sovereignty of his psyche, or his agency over his person. This sequence showed tremendous promise and the performance would have been better served to be a two hour development of this one episode.
Outside of Linehan and Helland (a real-life couple), the rest of the performers could be characterized as "dead weight." Particularly ludicrous was the only other male dancer aside from Linehan and Helland who inflicted incessant mechanical twirls on the audience, always in the same direction. This dancer was well-schooled in this one trick, clearly still of the "I Need to Show Off My Mechanical Ability to Prove I Am a Legitimate Dancer" concept of dance. Next to the more seasoned authoritative presence of Helland/Linehan, he seemed so ridiculously disconnected from the mindset and philosophy towards dance of Linehan that one started to wonder if he was not meant as a parody of one-dimensional dance.
As a performer, Helland imparts the feeling that the mere execution of dance barely contains or encapsulates everything that is inside of him: almost a suggestion of wildness? An intriguing performer to watch, there could be 10 dancers doing exhibitionistic twirly-twirls, meanwhile Helland could be picking lint off a sweater and it would be infinitely more fascinating to watch Helland. Whether he was sniffing around another dancer on the border between teasing and menacing, engaged in faintly S&M- evocative chasing or play rough-housing with a female dancer, or tenderly climbing atop a motionless Linehan with great care for his fragility, there was a total lack of contrivedness to anything that came out of him, and a hint of a particular type of irreverence. This translated into a type of stage charisma. One had the urge to shave off the other dancers, as if they were denaturing a chemistry or vision Linehan/Helland already had, toning down what would have been an extremity or a sense of "attitude" with a moral mediocrity.
Looking like he could pass for 12 years old, Linehan has a sort of impossible ethereal-cherubic-seraph Boy Wonder aura. But not a "moronic youthfulness" (to borrow Marber’s phrase), Linehan imparts the rare trait of having an innocence but not a naiveté; a cynical innocence, a cynicism illuminated by an aware but still lush innocence. What sets Helland/Linehan apart as performers, particularly in Linehan’s case, is the sense that the dance is merely the means to say something larger than dance, unlike many dancers, for whom the execution of dance is the ends, rendering it non-compelling as art. There is also a sense that he is not defining ahead of time who and what he is supposed to be and then picking and censoring his experience to match the label of who he believes himself to be, but that he is vulnerable to whatever experience comes his way, and that informs how he becomes himself. This is a trait that I don’t even think one in thirty top NY dance artists can legitimately claim to have, which is what makes him precious. It is almost unsettling to be around an innocence that acute, a reminder of all the things you could have been if you had remained stronger. Let’s hope that in five years he does not refashion himself into yet another cosmopolitan ego-cult DTW-manufactured more-avant-than-thou pseudo-radical-style-but-empty-substance New York artist.
