Michele Rizzo arrives by sound before sight. My friend and occasional collaborator Elisa Zuppini recommended his work to me over pad thai in 2018. I was skeptical. She described Rizzo’s work as bringing aspects of queer clubbing into the space of experimental dance. As a dancer, I have spent enough time at dance festivals, workshops, museums, and galleries to know that the importation of queerness or club sociality mostly involves the social reproduction of sexual rivalry and insider hierarchies under the sign of a new queer cool. But I like to arrive at dance through friends and was curious to see what intrigued Elisa about Rizzo’s work.
Before a dancing body ever appeared, spectators of the U.S. premiere of Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn at MoMA PS1 heard electronic musician Lorenzo Senni’s composition: a digital drip of electronic notes that descended into hollowed-out and muffled bass. Though altered in speed and pitch, this musical refrain continued through the duration of Rizzo’s piece. Its melodic descent made the space feel like a cave. Spectators quite literally felt the sound. Upon entering the rectangular room where the performance took place, we were instructed to sit and stand close to the walls in an arrangement that created an empty square in the middle of the space. This meant we were clustered around and in front of the subwoofer speakers that played Senni’s music. I felt the acoustics as soon as the performance began. In the absence of immediate on-stage action, I glanced around the room and scanned the crowd—predominantly white and middle-aged, with occasional clusters of BIPOC and even a few strollers and toddlers.
On PS1’s website, Rizzo’s piece is described as “consecrat[ing] PS1…ushering spiritual transcendence through rhythmic dance,” a reflection of the artist’s interest in “connect[ing] collective movement in social spaces to rituals of quasi-religious worship.”1Michele Rizzo, HIGHTER xtn. Accessible via MoMA PS1 website, https://www.momaps1.org/programs/412-michele-rizzo Having grown up in Utah as a non-Mormon, invocations of spirit are at once enticing, familiar, and a red flag. Eight dancers entered one-by-one, danced in unison, and left the space one-by-one. The dancers didn’t really look at each other, or the audience, directing their eyes instead towards their feet. Midway through the piece, when the music sped up and the performers’ once-minimal gestures of rhythmically stepping through the space accelerated into more intricate house-dance choreography, it became clearer that the dancers’ gazes were focused on minding their own space to avoid collisions—evidence of shared rehearsal time (togetherness, but not quite communion) and technical dance proficiency that ironically separated the dancing onstage body from the public.
Choreographic intensification was accompanied and facilitated by a musical change. The opening phrase blended with another musical leitmotif that cleverly evolved, with the help of the speakers, into a sonic surround that replicated the thumping environment of a nightclub. Though Rizzo’s performance lasted only 30 minutes, the dancers’ hip but loose-fitting and comfortable clothing and their sensible sneakers suggested that they might have arrived from (or were going to) techno clubs like Berghain in Berlin where, on Sundays in particular, dancing bodies spend hours.
Sound and sartorialism effectively cited the mise-en-scene of the club, while the gestural vocabulary of house-dance sampled its styles. HIGHER introduced dance to excite and animate the medium and museum of contemporary art. I was impressed by Rizzo’s formal finesse, but I didn’t quite feel communion. I was reminded that the club—with its powers of bass—is situated within a European musical history where drums are not native, but come by way of Arab, Asian, and African worlds.2Moreno Maugliani, “A brief history of the Drum in Europe,” December 24, 2020. Accessible via https://morenomaugliani.com/a-brief-history-of-the-drum-in-europe/. I wondered how to meaningfully situate the urban and primarily-black Chicago and New York milieux from which house music, dance, and fashion arises, or the elided black historiography of European techno,3Annie Goh and Alexander Wheliye, “’White Brothers With No Soul’ – Un Tuning the Historiography of Berlin Techno,” 2014-15. Accessible via CTM Festival website, https://archive2013-2020.ctm-festival.de/news-mobile/white-brothers-with-no-soul-un-tuning-the-historiography-of-berlin-techno/. within the aesthetic desires of HIGHER xtn or MoMA PS1. When the performative and sonic intensity of the piece picked up pace midway, I noticed that it was a group of white men who most enthusiastically bobbed their heads and seemed to want to join the dancers—their clothes and the rhythm of their hips suggested familiarity with this particular vocabulary of dance performance.
A few weeks after watching Rizzo’s performance, I met with my black German friend Milena who danced in the piece. The PS1 performance was the first time Milena went to the U.S. When I asked her what her impressions of New York were, she spoke of ghostliness. Firstly, of the way US media representations of New York ‘ghost’ its inhabitants – the overrepresentation of white people in popular media a stark contrast to the many BIPOC people she saw walking the streets. Secondly, she mentioned how the huge soaring buildings of New York City were alienating, as if the people who built these impressive structures were never meant to live in them. In the same way, I don’t think museums can currently host the messier, fleshier, and more unfinished durationality that keeps some clubs vibrant. Entry is neither belonging nor shelter, and some are always kept at the threshold.
