|
Miguel Gutierrez storms on the raw stage of Dance Theater Workshop to U2’s New Year’s Day—a sign of the rebirth to follow—to set up for his show. The clothes come on and off as he references his past works through video, including a dance around a Christmas tree. He pushes iron before a mirror and in jogging pants addresses the audience with an impish little-boy look on his face. “Hello, please repeat after me. I am Miguel Gutierrez.” We have become his mirror and he has become ours. But he plays with our perceptions, and his own, by mimicking his youthful struggle to intellectualize movement in a videotaped talkback. |
 |
Miguel Gutierrez: Transcending Uncertainty – Lisa Paul Streitfeld
Miguel Gutierrez storms on the raw stage of Dance Theater Workshop to U2’s New Year’s Day—a sign of the rebirth to follow—to set up for his show. The clothes come on and off as he references his past works through video, including a dance around a Christmas tree. He pushes iron before a mirror and in jogging pants addresses the audience with an impish little-boy look on his face. “Hello, please repeat after me. I am Miguel Gutierrez.” We have become his mirror and he has become ours. But he plays with our perceptions, and his own, by mimicking his youthful struggle to intellectualize movement in a videotaped talkback. The evening will reveal how he has succeeded, by forging his own idiosyncratic path, to bridge thought with experience.
Miguel Gutierrez & The Powerful People’s Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies (with Julie Alexander, Anna Azrieli, Michelle Boule and Abby Crain) premiered at DTW in December 2005 to critical acclaim and returned for the “Just Artists Series” in June 2006. The nudity was real but also a metaphor for the stripped down emotionality the dance artist achieved by a fractured presentation that successfully integrated dance with performance art. In his struggle to embrace uncertainty, Gutierrez paid homage to well-known performance artists: Matthew Barney’s turning video on an audience; Carolee Schneemann’s creating visuals from saliva kisses; and Marina Abramovic’s taking the body to its limits.
Characteristically, Gutierrez gets right to the heart of the matter; the effect of time passing on the body was made real by full lighting illuminating the personal shadow. Struggling for the live moves to compete with a video monitor of a younger Miguel dancing among—but disconnected to—a group of women in dainty dresses, he abruptly walks off the stage. When he returns, he is ready to embrace the shadow. He puts on a t-shirt with a sinister figure and laments what he could have been while running the camera over photographs of his younger self. Time is bearing down as he cries, “I could have been somebody!” The doubts every artist goes through are made into a rhythm of a psyche overwhelmed with regret with the use of a looping device.
He sets the mirror down center stage and becomes Narcissus slurping his way with saliva kisses into a serpentine wave. He pulls down his underwear and places his anus above a candle, paying homage to Marina Abramovic, complete with audience interaction. He gets up and references Karen Finley as he walks into the audience, “I’m going to the store to get some chocolate.”
These antics have a purpose: to drop the perfection-seeking ego plaguing the dancer in order to arrive at a sincere human interchange with the audience. His self-flagellation is painful, a remarkably physical demonstration of the inner tension between the opposites. He passes through a rebirthing process, surrendering to the primitive serpentine power and thereby achieving his long-stated goal of inviting audiences into the process of energy transmutation. Gutierrez’s stripped down honesty enables him to turn his lens around—quite literally.
With Difficult Bodies, a trio of female dancers, one of them visibly pregnant, roll across the stage to a rhythm like the hum of the earth. The harsh lighting illuminates every imperfect detail of their bodies as they slither out of their sequined cocktail dresses. Reappearing in t-shirts, they belt out Survivor with Destiny’s Child, act as chorus for a poem Miguel recites and join him in the chant: “I am perfect and you will love me and everyone in this room is in this fucking dance.” Words are no longer weapons of separation but instruments of connection that make the dancers’ shifting identity interchangeable with the audience. As Gutierrez partners with one of the women, his vulnerability gains him the visible support that results in authentic interconnection with the feminine—and time itself.
For a gay dance artist whose identity was forged in the aggressive moves of ACT UP in San Francisco, this is a huge leap into the abyss. But we are conspirators in this dramatic process of surrender, disintegration and rebirth. The goal is a full-body awareness of the holistic Self, thereby bringing into physical form the mental strivings of the younger Miguel. Think of the possibilities of dance expanding to fulfill this vision!
