For Round 4 of the ongoing series But is it an Essay?, I’ve asked Mario Zambrano, Addie Tsai, Jaime Shearn Coan, Wes Jamison, and Katie Jean Shinkle to respond to dance artist Miguel Gutierrez’s Everyone.
Gutierrez characterizes his work as “performances that are about things and are things themselves. The things they are about are big: how to live in the world, how to love, how to feel about being yourself.” Everyone approaches these questions by establishing a kind of collective energy, the large cast interacting with each other and the audience (seated behind the stage) through gestures both familiar and surprising. Music builds, and a text is spoken that ranges from the daily to the global. It is an incredibly alive dance, a responsive dance during which the dancers are in a constant process of figuring themselves out and inviting the audience to do so, too.
I wanted to ask some writers about Gutierrez’s piece because I think about the essayist’s duty to her readers at times. I like it when the essay includes me, when I feel that my reading is dynamic and that in that dynamism I am connecting with something more honestly than I could possibly connect with it were I excluded, just made to read. Everyone implies to me that there is no real going alone, that the audience is on the stage and the reader is on the page. And so, although we so rarely think of an essay as a collaboration, this collaboration feels to me like an essay.
Check out what the other writers had to say below:
What is it?
An effort.
An attempt.
A decision not to turn away but to turn in to the thought or idea or subject that’s grappling you, begging you for attention.
You let it in, you welcome it into the room of your mind, into a space as comfortable (or uncomfortable) as a living room where you sit down and have a discussion with it. Walking around the room is merely a strategy; the courtesy of offering it a drink is also a strategy. You want the subject to relax and open up to you; if not, you might pin it down and ask, What are you doing here? Why am I talking to you, or listening to you, or merely looking at you?
“Everyone” by Miguel Gutierrez isn’t written on the page and I’m hesitant to even consider it as something to be experienced on screen, because if I was pedantic about the experience of a work’s intention I’d tell you I should be sitting in one of those seats in the theater in which “Everyone” is performed. Being present and in the room is part of its intention. Being there evokes something entirely different in me from when I’m not there, because when I’m not there I’m sitting in a room by myself in a pair of boxers at half past midnight looking at a computer screen. It’s not the same. You know this. I’m just restating it.
The form is the shape in which the question rises, and rests, to the point.
What is the artist, the writer, the singer, the choreographer, the sculptor trying to tell me?
If he were silent, if he were merely looking at me, still, what is he trying to tell me?
It’s grandiose but it’s simple, too, the definition of what an essay is or isn’t meant to be, what you think it is and what I think it is.
I know what it means: it means different things to different people, and when we sit down to discuss it or post our comments about it, that, too, is what it’s intended to mean. With humble, sometimes arrogant, efforts we try to tackle the question; we tackle our efforts to express ourselves. All of this is a process, a conversation, either with the self or with a reader, a listener, a viewer, about the subject that’s arisen in the mind.
And when I sat down to watch “Everyone” to ask myself whether or not it’s an essay, I’d already decided before it even started. Because the attempt, the effort, the mere action of trying to express itself, is an essay.
So yes.
Everybody’s got one, two, three-plus ways of looking at things.
The curtain rises and we find we are backwards.
The performers go into the house and hover, paused in flight, over the seats—an optical illusion.
Do you care about dance? Do you care about poetry?
Everyone is running back and forth, making druggy discoveries, making out, pausing on the verge of something.
It’s not / It’s something / It’s not / It’s un / It’s not / It’s something / I needed you to know before you left / It’s un / It’s not / It’s something
What is Everyone? Is it an essay? Is it a video recording? A concept? A place? Is it a live event?
Is it the audience?
Is it Miguel Gutierrez, Anna Azrieli, Michelle Boulé, Abby Crain, Isabel Lewis, Daniel Linehan, Otto Ramstad, Elizabeth Ward, and Chris Forsyth?
Is it the score? Is it the performance text? What is a performance text—when it’s not being performed? An essay?
Miguel Gutierrez calls Everyone a Piece.
Everyone’s saying the same thing: I made it up. I thought it would sound meaningful, important.
I once heard a haughty art historian say that “certain” dancers shouldn’t use text in their work.
Everyone performs text—transplants and exceeds text.
If an essay is an object that remains and a performance is ephemeral, why not move from noun to verb? To essay is “to make an often tentative or experimental effort to perform” (Merriam-Webster).
Everyone essays to reach you.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.—Virginia Woolf.
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It’s in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.—Richard Rodriguez
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had never been alive.—James Baldwin
On Monday, Salon re-printed a syllabus from David Foster Wallace’s Creative Nonfiction course and excerpted from The David Foster Wallace Reader, and titled the piece David Foster Wallace’s mind-blowing creative nonfiction syllabus: “This does not mean an essayist’s goal is to ‘share’ or ‘express herself’ or whatever feel-good term you got taught in high school.” The quote is from the course description, which distinguishes between expressive writing and communicative writing, and defines the word creative in creative nonfiction:
…the adjective creative signifies that some goal(s) other than sheer truthfulness motivates the writer and informs her work. This creative goal, broadly stated, may be to interest readers or to instruct them, or to entertain them, to move or persuade, to edify, to redeem, to amuse, to get readers to look more closely at or think more deeply about something that’s worth their attention…or some combination(s) of these. Creative also suggests that the kind of nonfiction tends to bear traces of its own artificing; the essay’s author usually wants us to see and understand her as the text’s maker. [Insert article title here.]…In the grown up world, creative nonfiction is not expressive writing but rather communicative writing. And an axiom of communicative writing is that the reader does not automatically care about you (the writer), nor does she find you fascinating as a person, nor does she feel a deep natural interest in the same things that interest you. The reader, in fact, will feel about you, your subject, and your essay only what your written word themselves induce her to feel.
Since Monday, this link has popped up all over my Facebook feed, with an implied agreement in its content, a kind of unspoken Finally! Someone is addressing this! kind of declaration behind it. But, it doesn’t take much investigating into the every amoebic-expanding genre called Memoir/Essay/Creative Nonfiction to discover that our world has become (has always been?) so narcissistically-encouraged as to promote the very thing that DFW was hoping to discourage in his formative students. In other words, we do still hope, believe, imagine that every reader must be interested and fascinated in our interests, our lives, our meals, our stops along the way in life.
How are we to know as individual artists in the worlds who make text or dance or theater or cinema or whatever else of our own spit and blood, our own malleable insides, what will connect our interiors with the interiors of the world?
Miguel Gutierrez, the choreographer (in part, at least the Vimeo reveals a collaboration with his performers/dancers) of Everyone, appears to struggle with this often—at least, so says the New York Times review of the piece in 2007. The piece mixes spoken word monologues and running and dancerly movements and music, it mixes the ordinary every day with the more interior anger and sadness and erotic and hysteria of a someone. It embodies the alone and the together, the separate and the collective.
Is it an essay? To be sure, but what kind? If we take our definition from DFW, is it expressive or communicative? Is it enough to call yourself Everyone to, as Woolf says, “be a curtain that shuts in, not out.”
For those who have witnessed modern dance and interpretive dance (whether well-intentioned or meant as satire), the movement from standstill to waving arms to unison monologue to jogging across a stage to sitting in theater chairs to an enraged solo with camera close up will feel familiar, even if it won’t feel redundant. But what about to those who have only seen these kinds of moves exaggerated and mocked on Saturday Night Live skits? What importance do these arms around the head give, or the one leg raised awkwardly, or the running here and there? And for those who are not familiar with this language of body, text, and sound, will this lose its communicative appeal?
Is there another question to ask here beyond whether or not this serves as an essay? How does Everyone get to be about everyone without including everyone? In other words, without taking the sitting spectators in their arms, or invite them to express their own rage and joy and irritation? Where does the curtain begin, and where does it end? Where does the performance intersect the personal with the private without involving the audience or the reader? How can we separate from the self-made important to a curtain made and enclosed by writer and reader (or dancer and choreographer and audience) alike?
Wes Jamison:
Any discussion of multi-modal work must incorporate each mode; to not would be to discuss only one inch of a painting as if it were the whole. Here, Gutierrez gives us dance (danced not by one but by many bodies, which is its own mode), music, and words. (I am tempted to include the video itself as another mode, but I will operate as if I am in the audience.)
The dance (the dancing) feels to me like a quintessential essay. I was taught that an essay has to open. It has to open, and it has to open to something. And an essay can open as many times as it wants and to wherever it wants. Here, I considered the pauses, the breaks, the stares as these openings, these ways of saying, “Okay, there was that. But let me start over. Again.” But then the curtain rose to an empty auditorium. The audience is now on stage, as performers, unknowingly. The preceding forty minutes felt like this was not a performance at all—for the curtain has just now risen, and there had been no one for whom to perform. And then, once only one performer remains on stage, we are given the opportunity to fix our eyes on who we can pin as the creator, the “I,” and everything else has been the audience intermingling/co-creating with the author (as in Barthes).
If the dance is essayistic, the music, as a separate part, is not. The music appears utilitarian, a way of keeping sync and rhythm; it is a way of giving cue, the way the end of a page is the cue to turn it. The music is necessary in this regard, but, hypothetically, the performance could go on without it. Does it add to the work’s meaning and quality? Yes. Do I find anything essayistic in it? Not particularly.
The words, however. Taken separately, of course it reads as an essay: the quotidian, the element of conversation, the candidness, the “truth.” But we cannot look only at the words. We have to consider that the one voice comes from many mouths. They are, for the most part, in sync. But then, at 17.28, they are not. And that sudden cacophony provides us with what I would consider perhaps the most important element of any essay: universalism. Many people (can) say/feel/think this, and it is “true” from a plethora of vantages.
But, ultimately, the words and dance create a relationship, and it is that relationship that tells me that “Everyone” is an essay: The dance enacts, performs, the (subliminal, emotional, literal) content of the verbal.
Part of essaying is to understand movement and the rarity of anything standing still for long. Everyone understands the importance of documenting this motion, what movement, for who. Us, it says. How do we make meaning and who are the gatekeepers of meaning. The audience is uncomfortable. The audience shifts focus, weight from one shoulder to the next, energy. What energy. In the beginning, there was repetition. And when the repetition is going on & on & on, in the right hand corner of the screen a three second knowing look between two audience members that says can you believe this shit. A three second reaction to a flavor of uncanny valley, what happens when confronted with time and space and collective energy. If part of essaying is to capture energy, movement, reflection, a tear in the narrative, how nothing stands still for long, Everyone is an essay.
Here is Us Now, it says. Us, Now, Presently, it says. How time and memory are an uroboroic entity of slipperiness and fallibility. What is left but energy, mirrored.