Payton McCarty-Simas: Rhymes with Mose

Payton McCarty Simas’s short film explores the unconscious impact of gendered upbringing on the formation of genderqueer bodies and identities. In collaboration with dancer Madison O’Halloran, they inject insights from Japanese butoh dance into the hyperfeminized dictates of Western ballet, seeking to express the affective relationship with one’s genderqueer body brought about by performing a rigidly gendered movement form.  


Rhymes with Mose: Affect and Emotion, Dance, and the Biological Unconscious

 

  The central concept I wanted to explore in my final project was the relationship between affective and emotional expression as laid out in Deborah Gould’s Moving Politics. Connecting the idea of diffuse affect that Gould defines with Wilson’s exploration of what she calls “the biological unconscious,” or the fundamental relationship between the body and the mind/mental states, I decided to attempt a symbolic depiction of affect and its relationship to the biological unconscious through an experimental dance short film. My concept changed over the course of pre-production, but eventually, my question became something like: “how can the affective state occurring in a genderqueer body forced to perform a hypergendered style of dance and how can that dissonance be depicted on screen? How does the affective relationship to one’s body come into tension with the emotional performance of a dance with a rigidly gendered set of symbols? Can affect be expressed at all?”
      To begin this project, I was inspired by Cortázar’s short story “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” and Possession (1981) in the way they both use the physical–– particularly generative/procreative–– properties of the body to convey affective meaning that is not clearly articulated by the individuals themselves. This sort of symbolic representation fits Gould’s definition of affect (“nonconscious and unnamed, but nevertheless registered, experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to stimuli impinging on the body… it has no fixed object, no prior aim; rather, it is unattached, free-floating, mobile energy” [Gould, 20-1]) as well as Wilson’s biological unconscious that posits that the reactions of the body and the mind are linked inextricably. While the flailings of Ana or the regurgitations of Cortázar’s protagonist arise in response to circumstances in the characters’ lives (the dissolution of a marriage, an alienating stint in the apartment of a woman whose life the protagonist envies), their responses are unfixed, fluid, and biological. From there, I spent several weeks talking to my dancer, a genderqueer, often feminine presenting AFAB person, about dance. Very quickly, they brought up their experience with ballet as a child and the discomfort and dysphoria it brought them. After they walked me through the myriad hyperfeminine signs and expectations inherent in the costumes and even steps female ballet dancers, I asked them to create a sequence using the kinds of moves they had described. I asked them to rehearse without music to allow their body to set the pace independently in a nod to Wilson’s piece. I knew I would set the final piece to “Moses Supposes” from Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a song based on a children’s rhyme that evokes the same themes, and allow Madi’s movements to be out of sync if necessary. When we shot, I decided to represent the forced manifestation of gendered performance inherent in ballet through the regurgitation of a rose–– the choice of orange was meant to signify the individuality Madi (who is a ginger) still brings to that performance irrespective of its rigidity–– in a nod to the Cortázar story. This choice was also inspired by Eikoh Hosoe’s photo, “Ordeal by Roses” and Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses (inspired in part by Hosoe’s photos). I was struck by the use of a rose in Funeral Parade as a specifically queer feminine signifier, particularly in conversation with the athletic body of Mishima Yukio in the original Hosoe photograph, and wanted to bring that kind of affective relationship between a feminine symbolic and the body into my piece.

 Thus, I began with the choice to place Madi into a feminine space using traditional feminine ballet clothing and dance in a hyperfeminine setting (the cherry blossom grove in Central Park) and deconstruct that as the dance progresses. Opening on Madi’s regurgitation (what Wilson would discuss as “conversion”–– in her words: “the fauces is a site where the communication between organs may readily become manifest” [61]) is meant to preface the formal dance with the act of affective bodily manifestation. I contrast this organic image with the hyper composed image of all of Madi’s old pointe shoes (themselves a site of intense, painful, physical trauma and transformation, actively shaping the dancer’s body into an unattainable feminine ideal at the cost of lost toenails and broken bones) hanging in the cherry blossom trees to establish the ideal at hand and contrast Madi’s roses with the cherry blossoms in a symbolic representation of gendered difference. The music is salient here as well: “Moses supposes his toeses are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously. Moses he knowses his toeses aren’t roses as Moses supposes his toeses to be” This simple rhyme in the context of Madi’s dance comes to signify the disconnect between the performative feminine ideal and the affective body at hand. The performance is a process of forced gendering that devolves as it goes. Therefore, after depicting the ideal through shots of the shoes and the ballet dance itself, all traditionally shot and edited (while the rose is cut rapidly and shown at odd, less traditional angles for contrast), I cut to the shot of Madi’s hand within the cherry blossoms as the performance breaks down. For this shot, I asked Madi to improvise with their arm alone, to focus on the physical sensation of moving each body part while still echoing the ballet moves they had just performed. No further directions were given, allowing for a somewhat freer expression of affect within the ballet style.
    The music skips with their movement, heightening the dissociative quality I wanted to convey. To quote Hijikata’s “Wind Daruma”: “the feeling somewhere inside your body that your arm is not really your arm conceals an important secret… I am an empty box” (75). From this point, I let Madi improvise freely on their own in different locations, allowing the space (one natural and one artificial) to influence them. I let my camera movements echo their physical movements as a means of collaboratively channeling the affect of their performance. The choice to stage them in the woods was inspired by butoh’s relationship to the natural (“I am distinctly aware that I was born of mud and that my movements now have all been built on that” [Hijikata, 74]) and impacted Madi’s performance. The choice to stage them in the tunnel was inspired by Possession. I intercut both sections with constructed images of femininity (an angel statue, a frieze of a woman watching Madi dance), and add another sequence of rose regurgitation, this time dripping wet, to suggest that even this more diffuse style of dance is hemmed in by the external eyes of gendered expectations and femininity (thus they keep on their dance clothes). To quote “Moses Supposes”: “couldn’t be a lily or a taffy-daffydilly, it had to be a rose ’cause it rhymes with Mose;” inevitably, the rose Madi produces is colored by their experiences and the perceptions of others as a gendered being and a dancer. I concluded from this project that while affect can be conveyed through improvisation and naturalized mise-en-scene in the style of butoh, inevitably as a visual medium it is hemmed in by the gendered body and the limits of visual media. The visual language of film conveys this as well–– each shot choice conveys affect, but comes within a set of pre-existing symbolic logic.
  Thus, the final shots are Madi, spent, at the end of their dance, eyes blank, whose eye line is then matched by a final shot of the shoes in the tree. The performance is all colored by the original performance of ballet. My understanding of both butoh and the biological unconscious in particular were deepened by this process as I watched and guided Madi’s process of improvisation. I also found myself increasingly fascinated by the concept of affect in political performance, re-reading Gould repeatedly. I think outside of class I’ll continue to explore these themes in my art.
Julio Cortazar. “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” in Bestiary: Selected Stories of Julio Cortazar(London: Harvill, 1998), pp. 55-72
Deborah B. Gould. “Introduction” in Moving Politics: Emotion and Act Up’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Tatsumi Hijikata, “Wind Daruma,” The Drama Review (TDR) 44:1 (Spring 2000), pp. 71-78.
Hosoe, Eikoh. "Ordeal by Roses" (1961-1962)
Singin' in the Rain, (Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen, 1952)
Funeral Parade of Roses, (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969)
Elizabeth Wilson, Gut Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press 2015)
Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)

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