Monique Jenkinson aka Fauxnique. Photo by Robbie Sweeney.
A pivot is a dance move
Last fall I performed my cabaret show, Fauxnique. So Relevant. at the beloved queer nightlife and arts space, Oasis, shortly after they announced they were closing. In the show, which is about growing older, weathering changes, staying engaged, and of course, the concept of relevance, I offered a moment of tribute. I moved the tribute swiftly from solemnity to levity, as one must in a cabaret show, and, thinking about the moves Oasis-owner D’arcy Drollinger was going to have to make, reminded him about his background as a dancer and the vital skill we dancers know: the “pivot” – that word we’ve all been hearing for the last six years? It’s a dance move.
Rowena Richie, my friend and guest editor of In Dance, came to the show, and, hearing my tribute to Oasis and knowing my three-decade history in this city, invited me to write something about it. Indeed I know, from my experience, in my body, about what has come and gone in this city. I arrived in 1992 and made my first solo show in 2000, which was the last show to happen at the space at 22nd and Mission, where Dancers’ Group had a theater space. I remember the exact feel and smell of that wood floor on which I took so many classes and made so much early work. I started to conceive of an essay about spaces in San Francisco, about the ways in which they come and go, what it feels like to occupy them, keep them, lose them. I gathered my hopes for what might grow up in the empty space that’s left, and intentions of how to care for what we have. Then, as in a fairy tale, magic happened. A kind-hearted fan of Oasis convinced his billionaire family to swoop in and save our dear, queer nightlife safe space. Hurrah!
I could still write about other spaces, other losses, other hopes. Then I read the gorgeous “A Lungful of Possibility (or, A Wishlist for the Bay Area),” by Eric Garcia and members of the dance community. They articulated many of my hopes and dreams for what we might cultivate for the future; in the wake of loss and grief, yes, but also with forward-thinking, positive energy. They dreamed many of my own dreams.
My intentions for how we might care for what we have? That concept feels more slippery in the precarity that underpins the time and context in which we live. There are no guarantees. Even when you buy the building, even when you get the grant, even when you surround yourself with likeminded people. Even when the billionaire saves you. No one is coming to save you. That sounds ominous, doesn’t it? Maybe it could also lead to something that looks more like liberation. No one is coming to save us. And yet here we are. With and for each other.
As I began to pivot my plan for this writing, I found myself in the midst of digging deeply into the muck of my next show, How Do I Look? (which premiered at ODC Theater in April, and moved to On the Boards in Seattle May 7-9). “I’ll have something for you soon!” I kept yelling up to Rowena from inside the pit of the deep, dark, psychic space in which I went spelunking. Hi-ho. I went deeper. One voice told me you’re too busy to write a thing right now. Just say “I can’t.” “I can’t” is a complete sentence. Another voice said Yes. You want to write about this. You must write about this. This? What is this? What is the “this” I’m writing about?
Art is hard
This piece, this this I’m writing, I’m embarrassed to say, is, like everything, about how hard it is to make art. And when I say “how hard it is to make art,” I mean to be an artist, to place oneself in the state of being an artist. I hate art about how hard it is to make art. It’s a rookie move. But here I am. It’s what is on my mind. We endure and propagate a lot of clichés about how art chooses us, how it calls us. And, well, they’re right. That is the annoying thing about clichés.
I chose art and it chose me. I am not blameless nor helpless, but it is, in a sense, beyond my control. Art is hard and also I am miserable when I’m not doing it. And the “doing” of which I speak…. It isn’t just being creative, which is great. I will never not live a creative life, but being creative is not enough. I have to be in this process. I have to have something to really dig into. A big show. And so, as if my life depends on it (because it turns out it does) I’ve been digging, digging, digging into my newest work, How Do I Look? How Do I Look? came out of a period that was, both chaotically and predictably, challenging. I can’t fully articulate all of the details of how and why this time was so challenging. Some of it I do not want to say out loud and some of it is just inarticulable. The part I can and will say out loud is that I am a middle-aged, mid-career artist in a field and a world that valorizes young people (which I was for about five minutes) and ancestors (aka dead people, which we will all be someday). It is unconscionably boring to complain about being uncool and irrelevant. If you are lucky enough to live past fifty and cursed enough to wish to remain relevant, you too will know this feeling and maybe even complain about it. I know, cringe right? Ha ha.
One annoying cliché about the state of being an artist is that it requires resilience and also sensitivity, which is a complicated combination to manage. If one wishes to mature as an artist, one must manage it. I have seen some great talents collapse under the mess of its mismanagement.
Some of my favorite artists crumpled several times. The writer Eve Babitz, one of my problematic faves (look her up, I don’t have the space here to explain her), started as a painter, but quit when a dear friend looked at a work-in-progress and asked “is that the blue you’re using?” Eve told (or re-tooled) it as “is that the blue you’re using?” and used the phrase as shorthand for any diminishing remark around any creative process. We’ve all heard some version of “is that the blue you’re using?” and perhaps it has upset our own delicate balance of resilience and sensitivity.
I’ve been struggling to manage this balance myself over the last couple of years. I want support for my work, but I want to make what I want to make. I need to make what comes from my own unique experience, my own sensitive soul. And if that isn’t what the culture has decided it wants, what it needs, that news has a way of hitting one in the sensitive spot. The piece by Eric Garcia, et al, floored me with this one: “We’re tired of forcing every idea into a neat social-justice elevator pitch just to get basic resources. We want grants that don’t require us to pretend we’re public health departments, superheroes, politicians, or social workers.” Thank you! Thank you for writing what I’ve been afraid to say out loud, but shouldn’t be. It is exhausting to have to try to prove that our art is necessary. It is exhausting to try to be what you’re not.
An exercise in futility
His name was Jonathan. He was a darling boy. A thoughtful hippie type, of whom there were a disproportionate number among the scant amount of boys at our tiny liberal arts college. He approached me awestruck after a dance show, one of the last before graduation. “That was amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it! Wow… But, dance? Isn’t that, like, an exercise in futility?” I was furious, although he wasn’t being malicious. He was just wondering out loud the way we all did. The way our school had taught us to. I was furious. Furious because I had just poured everything I had into that show (well, half of what I had. I was a double major. The other half went into my literature thesis on an obscure Russian Symbolist poet). I was also furious because I kind of knew. Yeah.
I think about sweet Jonathan’s comment from time to time. I don’t dwell on it, but I’ve never ever forgotten it. During a waxing phase of my feminist anger (my feminism doesn’t wax and wane, but its anger does), I thought about it, and him, with disdain. That was around the time when I read somewhere that one had a better chance at getting a novel published if one’s name was Jonathan than if one were a woman. I just spent forty-five precious minutes searching for the source to no avail on a platform whose hivemind is meant to replace the work in which I am engaged right now. I thought about it again a few weeks ago amidst the Timothée Chalamet calamitée. I too got real mad at TC for calling ballet & opera irrelevant. I too felt the tingle of schadenfreude as arts communities defended their highfalutin’ aunties with memes and discount codes. But I also kind of knew. If ballet and opera, the establishment, felt betrayed and diminished by the comments of that callous child, where did that leave contemporary dance?
In the midst of relentless doubt, fear, sadness, joy and self-critique, and with the deep spiritual support of my collaborators, I premiered How Do I Look? In it, I: discuss my deepest fears, lay out many of the measurements of various parts of my body, dance around a lot on my two titanium hips, do a standup routine in which I roast myself, sing a song by a suicidal Gen-x troubadour about the ambivalence of being perceived, show my fifty-five-year-old tits. It is not about how hard it is to be an artist, but it’s not not about that either. The piece, which received a blessed amount of institutional support in the form of presentation (deep, eternal gratitude to ODC and On the Boards), but for which I applied for zero grants because I was convinced I would not get them, pulled me out of the quicksand in which I’d been sinking. It may have actually saved my life. It has also received a glowing reception, another reminder, which I receive constantly, that one’s most personal work is invariably the most resonant. It’s about me, but maybe you’ll find that it’s also about you, about us. Many people have told me they love the piece and some have even told me that they need it. And this is why I continue to do this hard thing of being an artist. To make that connection. Not to have people tell me they love my work (although that is undeniably nice), but to remember that here we are – with and for each other. It might be all we have.
