Trajal Harrell – the dirty dancer voguing his way into history | Stage
The voguing balls of Harlem, the hoochie koochie dances of rural America, the elaborate, prancing gait of runway models â€" these aren’t influences that routinely feature in contemporary dance. Yet for the American choreographer Trajal Harrell they’ve proved extraordinarily fertile. Over the last two decades he’s produced a body of work that’s as rigorously scholarly in its historical background as it is transgressively original in style. Occupying a performance spectrum between gallery and theatre, his pieces might feature a man posing semi-naked in a pair of Hermès scarves, a woman encased in a small black cube meticulously removing her swimsuit, or a man in a gaudy oriental skirt, gravely shaking his booty.
Harrell’s work is currently enjoying an extended season at the Barbican and when the choreographer â€" graceful, compact and ferociously articulate â€" talks me through his work he explains that exploring the history of dance subcultures has long been his obsession.
“I’m interested in going into the gaps and fissures,†he says, “in looking at the movement that doesn’t feature in the history books.†As a former student of cultural theory at Yale, Harrell’s interest is partly that of an academic. Yet as a choreographer he has no interest in staging “authentic†reconstructions of these hidden or outlaw dance forms. “I don’t try to represent them as historical moments. They’re constructions of the imagination, which means I can play with them, tear them apart and project on to them.â€
The wild and wonderful liberties that Harrell takes with his sources can be seen in a work such as I’m in the Mood for Frankie. Created in 2016, it’s staged on a runway, and its three male performers (including Harrell) morph delicately between a Nautch girl’s temple dance, a catwalk strut, a disco riff, a voguing ball. Other influences, according to Harrell are Japanese butoh, the black American dance pioneer Katherine Dunham, the designer Rei Kawakubo and the singer Sade. As he describes the work, it “spills out like a park of Muses, settled and unsettled between history and imaginationâ€.
The project of remixing and re-imagining contemporary dance history started when Harrell arrived in New York in 1998, as aserious-minded but still novice choreographer. He was deeply influenced by the postmodern practices of Judson Dance Theatre, a group of choreographers in the 60s, whose use of blunt pedestrian moves and witty, minimalist structures had blasted open conventional ideas about beauty and meaning in dance.
Harrell had expected New York to be busy with a new generation of choreographers, all building on Judson’s ideas. Instead, the city’s dance scene appeared to him disappointingly bland. “Everything I saw looked very balletic to me, very late Cunningham. The history seemed all messed up.â€
It was only when a friend took Harrell to his first voguing ball that he found the intellectual and creative inspiration he’d been searching for. Voguing began in Harlem in the early 60s, with young gay black people developing a ritualised and competitive dance idiom adapted from the poses of fashion magazines. By the late 90s, it had evolved into a complex, flamboyant language, divided into a highly codified range of categories, which tested the dancer’s ability to embody different styles, social classes and gender types.
“Voguing was playing with everything that I’d been reading about theoretically, questions of identity and authenticity, pedestrian movement and dance.†It struck Harrell, vividly, that voguing and Judson, these two revolutionary movements, had both originated at the same time. And it was this realisation that led him to wonder what might have happened if a black voguer from Harlem had come downtown to join the white intellectuals of Judson.
He choreographed the answer in a tight little dance, which compressed the extravagant poses of voguing into a structure of austere minimalist walks. In his mind, he’d choreographed a private “fuck-you dance†a one-off rebuke to the intellectual lassitude that he saw around him. But this piece actually set Harrell’s entire future course as a choreographer.
When he gave it a first experimental showing in public, the audience proved to be bewilderingly ecstatic. “The whole place began screaming and clapping,†he recalls. “I’ll never hear applause like it again.†He realised that he’d stumbled on a rich creative seam, and over the next decade he worked it extensively, creating a series of pieces, which he collectively titled 20 Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church.
As Harrell deepened his understanding of voguing, he linked it to fashion, a world of similarly inbred, codified movement, theatrical artifice and oblique gender politics. And, while he continued to filter it through the form of postmodern minimalism, he imagined ever more extraordinary mergers, the last of which was, wonderfully, between voguing and Sophocles.
Around 2010, Harrell had become aware of new research into the theatre of the Ancient Greeks that suggested the choreography of its actors had been far less restrictive than previously believed. “There was all this stuff coming out, about crazy Bacchanalian movement and sexual rites.†To him it sounded like an wild and early form of voguing, and in 2012 he made Antigone Snr, a highly abstracted version of the Sophocles play in which the heroine became the “house mother†of a community of voguers and the dance action took place on a runway.
One reason why Harrell has felt free to make such leaps of the choreographic imagination may be that he came to dance so late. For a long time he imagined himself working in theatre: at school he’d been famous for the drama projects that had regularly taken first prize in the state’s annual History Day competition. After leaving Yale he enrolled in a drama course at Brown University, Rhode Island. And it is only in retrospect that he can see that he’s always had an underlying attraction to dance.
He recalls that when he was eight and taking gymnastic classes in his home town of Douglas, Georgia, he used to wait behind and watch the girls’ ballet class. “I knew I couldn’t join in â€" ballet was something boys didn’t do. But I loved the form of what they were doing, those costumes and those perfect little movements.â€
He also realises now that his prize-winning drama projects at high school had been heavily choreographed: “I had my actors walking around chairs a lot.†And by the time he was at Brown the work he was making had so little text and such a strong focus on movement that a friend pointed out that maybe he should be thinking of himself as a choreographer.
Curious to get a professional’s opinion, Harrell showed one of his works to a dance teacher: “It was a solo. There were no words, just me clomping around in one shoe.†He was deeply disappointed by the robustly unsweetened response that it certainly was not dance â€" although it might be considered performance art. Yet perversely that rebuff had a decisive effect, and the next day Harrell quit drama to begin an intensive period of dance training.
The works he’s made ever since have ranged from full-length dance pieces to short conceptual provocations, and they reflect Harrell’s continuing investigations into alternative forms. He’s become passionately interested in Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of butoh, who while exerting a huge influence on the world dance stage never himself performed outside Japan.
Hijikata’s aesthetic, developed just after the second world war, eschewed the elaborate decor of traditional Japanese dance theatre, returning to stark, dark, elemental forms. And when Harrell first saw the master’s work on a DVD, housed in a Japanese archive, he was astounded at how radical it looked compared with all the second-generation butoh he had seen. He perceived it as another outlaw dance, and he began to make connections between butoh and other non-institutionalised forms, such as the early vaudeville art dance, performed by Ruth St Denis and Loie Fuller, which were the unofficial precursors of American modern dance, and the travelling hoochie koochie acts whose bawdy mix of the erotic and the faux exotic were hugely popular in rural America for much of the 20th century.
Harrell has an oblique memory of this phenomenon, dating back to his childhood when his father used to take him once a year to a travelling fair. “There was a point in the evening when my father would always leave me with friends and go by himself into this booth. Gradually I came to understand that he was going off to watch the naked ladies dance, and, although we never talked about it, of course I imagined what it would be like.â€
This memory is one of the inspirations behind Caen Amour, a hybrid mix of lecture, dance and performance art that Harrell created in 2016. It’s set around a fairground booth and has three dancers (male and female) performing a slippery mix of fashion runway, exotic art dancing and stripping. Harrell himself flits through the piece, sometimes channelling a seductive fluttery hoochie koochie girl, sometimes contorting himself into raw, crumpled, keening states of physical emotion, as if embodying the spirit of Hijikata.
About a quarter of the way through the performance the audience are handed a page of commentary that points to the mix of influences on the work, to the politics of Orientalism, racism and sexual objectification that swirl around the history of hoochie koochie as they do around most other forms of dance. Yet the text is far weightier â€" and duller â€" than the show itself, which is funny, affecting and ironic in tone, and visually like no other choreography you’ve seen.
“Slipperiness,†Harrell says, is his real goal. “I don’t like people to settle into what they already know.†Although he believes his work is political, “because everything is politicalâ€, his first thoughts are always about making the movement: “I’m really old fashioned, I’m really into the craft of how to make a dance.†It’s only then, as the choreography evolves, that he believes the significance and the meaning can layer their way in.
Breaking off our conversation Harrell illustrates his point by dancing a neat, fleet-footed circle around me. “I can make this little folk dance, I know how to make steps and I’m always asking how I can learn more. But then the question is: how do I make something that carries culture and knowledge? How do I make dances that are meaningful to me, and that are relevant to today?â€
• Hoochie Koochie is at the Barbican, London, until 13 August. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
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