#trans dance

Trans Day of Visibility 2019 (many months late)

I did write this to be published a week after TDoV and then became very very busy and never did. Anyways, here it is now!

  Tl;dr Being a trans dancer is exhausting and it makes visibility very difficult too. 

  I didn’t write something for Trans Day of Visibility this year because I’m tired.

  I’m super super tired.

  I feel like this is a regular theme in my life and my blogging and everything…

A Helix Critical Squad Review by Buzz Slutzky

niv Acosta’s I shot denzel at New York Live Arts might have gone over the heads of the New York Times, due to the performance's coded criticality. The final installment of the denzel series, I shot denzel opens with niv gesturing to an imaginary mirror, an image that references vogue movements, and also asks questions like: “What do I look like? How do you think I look? How do I wanna look?” His series of denzels calls out the tokenism and lack of black roles inherent in Denzel Washington’s ubiquity. In a previous interview, niv told me that during his transition, he was forced to look to Denzel as his archetype of black masculinity.

  niv then mouths along to a repetitive audio recording of himself singing, “The hills are alive with the sound of music," emphasizing the distance between niv and Julie Andrews; as niv’s voice repeats, it conjures an experience of being force-fed whiteness (or Aryan-ness, even).  It's a sort of Julie Andrews drag, or a joke on disembodied sound in drag performance. (Perhaps the “hills” he speaks of are actually the curves of his body, alive with hormonal transformation!) As the tracks begin to overlap, they mimic the fragmentation of the self, and how states of being at different moments converge in one time-space.  This moment reminds me of Hilton Als’ recent book White Girls, wherein certain black male characters are literally referred to as white girls, based on the idea that white archetypes rub off onto the very experience of black bodies.  niv deals with this in a similarly jarring way, but neither body actually becomes white; it is this tension that produces such a strange effect on stage, misread by the New York Times.  It is disorienting and difficult, as it emphasizes the cruelty of racist imbalances in cultural representation.

  While much of the piece post-Sound of Music is a more abstract exploration of gesture and performativity, another meaningful moment directly positions niv’s body against media representation. A white wall the shape of a movie screen is built into the corner of the stage, and niv repeatedly hurls his body at it—a gymnastic attempt at diving into an impossible space. With varying levels of pain and failure, he is never able to quite enter the screen’s cinematic landscape. In a similar act, Marina Abramovic has also hurled herself at a wall; but while her work merely asked how much pain women are able to endure, niv’s restaging directs critique to the screen itself: how long will it be until you let me in? When will I be able to see myself reflected in you, and if never, then why not absorb my actual body?

  After a section of the show in which niv seems to be a young flower in bloom, his movements become glitchy and repetitive like a .gif. The audio shifts as vocalist Yessenia Acosta, niv’s mother, joins him onstage in a glittering necklace, and a silver ensemble that matches niv’s but with upscaled fabric qualities; she appears as reigning diva. Yessenia belts a despairing Spanish love song to niv (a classic ballad written for a lover, we learn in the Q&A). The oedipal undertones in niv’s song selection reflect a critical dismantling of traditional kinship systems; the small age difference between mother and child here seem to have an equalizing effect on their power dynamic. He disappears offstage and we find him standing atop a square white wall. He recites a dry manifesto with phrases like “I died to be happier”, “die to be newer” or “die to be good”.

  niv’s grandiose performance defines gender transition as death, which allows his mother a space to grieve, but also confirms her perception of his prior gender as a discrete person. However poetic, this separation between nivs feels misleading, probably for most of niv’s viewership, which is trans-accepting. While the assumption of death is a central theme, we haven’t seen niv perform death so much as growth. (There’s even a live brass band at one point!) Yet, just as archetypes like Denzel Washington, Maria von Trapp, and the world inside the screen form the psychological foundation of the Denzels series, perhaps Yessenia Acosta, literally the mother of the artist, is the ultimate foundation of I Shot Denzel. So why shouldn’t the plot be written inside of her framework? At least Yessenia’s grief was not without a heavy dose of pride-- for her new son has been recast as the hero of his own epic poem.

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i shot denzel. New York Live Arts. January 30 - February 1, 2014. Created by niv Acosta, Performed by niv Acosta and Yessenia Acosta, with live music by Lydia Berg-Hammond, Caitlin Marz, Gary Zema, Amy Gall, Aleksei Wagner, Lee Free, and Julia Read.