Dance Art

Trump and TikTok

I saw Malcolm-x Betts’s and Nile Harris’s performance Temporary Boyfriend last week. Malcolm is such a uniquely compelling performer. There’s a sense of freedom, catharsis, and absurdity in the way he moves his body through space.

Is he a “good dancer?” Yes, but he’s also at all times aggressively undermining his own grace, agility, and virtuosity — an impish trickster throwing shapes. This tension makes him a better dancer than perfect dancers imho. (Which isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the Black Swan tragic suffering of perfection’s pursuit. It’s romantic in a different, old-school way.)

Thinking about what being a “good dancer” means I had déjà vu. Eight years ago, days before Trump’s first inauguration, I’d also gone to a dance-art performance, Richard Kennedy at Artists Space. Billed as a “ballet” and foregrounding technically trained dancers, it was in a way focused on the “good dancer” and I reckoned with this celebration of virtuosity backdropped by presidential politics:

“The history of performance art is marked by the deskilling of theatre, and in recent decades the intermingling of dance and visual art in the non-dance and conceptual dance movements has spotlighted the untrained or amateur performer in gallery spaces... As the most unqualified president in U.S. history begins his reign, it’s worth questioning the well-worn idea that celebrating amateurism is automatically democratizing.”

Eight years later skilled versus deskilled is less interesting to me. And besides, it takes great skill to appear as casual as Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris do in Temporary Boyfriend.

What I care more about is the enigmatic power of charisma, style, and expression.

TikTok changed our relationship to dance. This morning I woke up to the news TikTok is back online, for now at least. Trump is taking credit, of course, for its return, but also led the ban effort. This may appear a contradiction, but as a performance artist, he has an intuitive grasp of compelling tension.

I looked up if TikTok even existed the last time he was sworn into office. It launched in China in 2016 and landed in America in 2018.

Yesterday Natasha Stagg wrote about her week, including my birthday party. She found out way more about possible TikTok deals there than I did. I had no idea guests were giving such an inside scoop.

Further reading: The current Whitney Review (a biannual print publication I edit) has Kyla Gordon on Nile Harris and Kevin Gonzalez on Alex Tatarsky (get a copy). Malcolm-x Betts, Nile Harris, Alex Tatarsky, Crackhead Barney, and Tess Dworman are all capturing an affect that feels alive to the strange dissonance and unreality that defines our contemporary moment.

Up now: I enjoyed Mark Leckey’s video show 3 Songs From the Liver at Barbara Gladstone (the 21st Street gallery). I went on my birthday with Paul Kopkau and Michael Bullock, and they explained Leckey is most famous for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999): A video you can watch on Youtube, about dance.