Inhabit, by KT Neihoff, Aaron Swartzman, Bianca Cabrera, Oscar Gutierrez, Jessica Jobaris
by Clare Byrne

January 18, 2008
Joyce SoHo

It was a weird party, the kind of party where unexpected things happened that felt normal. It was the kind of party I wish had happened over my family holidays — an inner-world melt-down of movement emerging out of nowhere and necessity, plopped right there in the middle of the room and my conversation, demanding attention. It was a party where I witnessed a bar room brawl. I got to talk to someone I knew, two I had just met, and two crushes I hadn’t seen in a long time.

I didn’t know the hosts — Bianca Cabrera, Oscar Gutierrez, Jessica Jobaris, Aaron Swartzman, and KT Niehoff of Lingo Dancetheater — but they began as models of conviviality, ushering guests in to the Joyce SoHo performance space with wine, welcoming toasts and wishes. There was a bar in the middle of the space and good hors de oeuvres on the side. The hosts moved us around, skillfully maneuvering us to be right in the middle of the space — in clusters of chairs, here and there, sitting or standing. Music started and the hosts, minus KT, began short entrees of movement right among us, low and swinging to the floor, in peaceable unisons. I wondered how and why they’d decided to do these particular movements now, but the movements were easy to watch, innocuous.

The person I knew a little was Alan Goode. I talked to him after I was given a generous glass of red wine. It got me buzzed and linearly time-desensitized; I’m valuing this especially in relation to watching or doing dance. Alan is a wonder in that he is rambunctious and intensely interested in everything. He made a game of trying to talk to the hosts in the middle of their dancing and disrupting their cues.
They took this good-naturedly. Throughout the evening, I wanted to be more like Alan Goode — curious, a cat or a child, free to enter into the spirit of ideas and goings-on.

Slowly our hosts changed. Movements I did not always even see accumulated and mounted. Jessica, Bianca, Aaron, and Oscar dropped down into surreal — or perhaps more real — territory. The party got quieter. A slow and ambiguous conflict was articulated between Aaron and Oscar. Aaron showered Oscar with an outburst, a fit of questioning. He wouldn’t leave him alone, with silly questions was trying to pin down what he was doing. Oscar just lay down on the ground and said, over and over, “Hey, I’m really busy here. It may not look like it, but I’m really busy.”

The two people I met were Beck, as I was getting my wine, and another friend of the company, whose name I can’t remember. Beck was quiet with a kind of Eric Clapton/George Harrison look, and sadly I didn’t see him again until I was saying goodbye at the end of the party. But I met and re-met the man whose name I can’t remember, and during the party he laughed loudly and approvingly many times, as events unfolded. He gasped at particular movements: how our hosts, virtuosos of gravity, swam up from the floor or snaked themselves back down, or tossed themselves and were caught in space-holds in another’s arms.

Among Jessica and Bianca, another tension slowly grew, or was it a disjunction of viewpoints — Jessica called out, questioned Bianca over and over, asking what she really wanted. Jessica was on point, verbally articulate — Bianca young, intuitive, only able to articulate what she needed by moving through it. Aaron carried her through parts of this. This felt sad and familiar; I thought of my family and our Christmas.

Eventually the hosts, caught up in these moments, were judged completely disfunctional by KT — I quite didn’t grasp her overall role in the party — she commandeered them back into service, but they couldn’t really keep any unison going anymore. The tribe and their unnervingly familiar familial chain of events had to be addressed, with all of the guests as witness. We were drawn into a circle, under a center pool-table light, to watch the four players facing off, with KT looking on.

I didn’t witness an all-out bar room brawl, actually, but I wish I had. It almost happened, I felt it coming; it would have been really satisfying. Either that, or I wish I had jumped into the circle and start improvising my own familial disfunction and release. It would have been perfectly normal.

Instead we were all led away, down to the floor onto pillows, for a nap. My wine was taken away. As I lay there, slightly disappointed but then quite content, unaware of time, I realized eventually that the dance was continuing — in easy four-square unison just a few feet away from me, which I could watch at my leisure through half-closed eyes.

The two people at the party I hadn’t seen in a long time: Amii LeGendre, a choreographer famed in Seattle now living in Poughkeepsie.
She rocked my world at Connecticut College when I was eighteen years old by dancing a solo with an apple — Eve’s apple, if I remember correctly. She talked as she danced; it was clear she was setting the record straight about this male-female thing, and who had messed it all up. I thought then, if I could make dances one-tenth as hot and true as this powerful, in-the-flesh junior-almost-senior, I would be the happiest dancer in the world.

The other person was Julie Ana Dobo, the technical/production director at Joyce SoHo, who I had a crush on when I did a show there in 2001.
Coiled tattoos around her arms, too cool for words, to-die-for lips.
I remember I could hardly hold a conversation with her. Now, time-and-wine emboldened, I had a great talk with her about our lives:
my boyfriend, her girlfriend, the years therein accumulating, road trips around the U.S., snorkeling in Mexico.

With both Amii and Julie, I wasn’t sure if I was saying hello or saying goodbye. Probably somewhere in between. But I know that they are part of what family is for me — this huge extended family of dancers and dance-lovers, spanning rooms, cities, coasts, that I love tenaciously in spite of how sad and unsure I feel about all of us sometimes.
Like everyone I suppose, I’m trying to figure out where, and if, I belong in it. And I thought that Lingo was trying to figure out that too — or where dance performance belongs, and what comes up when you place it in its original container: a party. I appreciated the timeliness and sincerity of this questioning.