REYES LETS HIS BODY GO WITH THE FLOW
Dancer/choreographer seeks pleasure voguing in provocative FTA show
From an early age, dancer/ choreographer Gerard Reyes considered himself a misfit, and at 37, he still thinks of himself that way. Although he performed for seven years with Montreal’s Compagnie Marie Chouinard, known for its provocative style, it was only four years ago that Reyes found a dance style that he believes generously accommodates misfits. That style is voguing, which is at the root of his solo The Principle of Pleasure; it’s one of 12 contemporary dance shows in the two-week Festival TransAmériques, which begins on May 25.
Reyes has long, slender legs and arms, and when he is voguing on stiletto heels and in tight, skimpy clothes, his sinuous swaying can give serious competition to the seductive sashaying of female runway models.
“Voguing is inspired by many things, among which are supermodels and fashion but also ninjas, martial arts, Egyptian art,” Reyes said in a recent phone interview. “But it’s hard to summarize because there are different styles, each with its own musicality and vocabulary. There was the Old Way, which is hieroglyphic, symmetrical/ asymmetrical, linear. The New Way added flexibility, contortion and stretch. Contortion being ugly turned the idea of beauty on its head. Vogue Fem is a style that began with trans women in New York who softened up the lines created by gay men who had established the Old and New Ways.”
Voguing began in Harlem’s gay ballroom scene in New York in the 1960s, but it was Madonna who drew mass attention to the style in 1990 with the video for her song Vogue. Her cool moves were choreographed largely in the Old Way by voguing pioneer José Xtravaganza, who was among Reyes’s voguing teachers during a sojourn in New York.
“José told me, ‘Don’t think of voguing so much in strict terms, because it can be an inhibitor to feeling creative and to selfexpression.’ ”
Reyes feels horror at labels, whether they are applied to dance or to himself as a gay man. The very term “LGBT community” disturbs him.
“Who says it is a community and that all those people get along and hang out with each other?”
He is also disturbed by the conventions that have grown up around voguing over the last half-century.
“There are very strict rules, especially at (voguing) balls, that you need to abide by. This is where I feel some friction for me between the rules and how I want to dance. This is something I came up against as I was creating Principle of Pleasure. I was discovering myself as an artist on my own terms and discovering new pleasures such as voguing and dancing like a stripper. All of these forms have their own rules. As an individual, I don’t need to follow these rules.”
Reyes plans his solo as an interactive encounter with audience members who will stand around him, 70 at a time, in the studio theatre of the Monument-National. “In the piece, I tap into what’s happening in the room and who is engaged with this material. I move toward these people. What happens between me and that person is left to manifest itself at that moment. I try to pick up on cues.”
Nude at times in his solo and dancing to a remix of songs by Janet Jackson, Reyes imagines creating a feeling of interaction with the audience akin to something that strippers might feel.
“I’ve been inspired by many strippers, mostly female but sometimes male. It’s an intimate relationship with your body and sharing that with spectators. It’s one-dimensional to think of stripping as just taking off your clothes. It’s a dance of seduction, and (strippers) are willing to go further than what you see on stage. There’s the lap dance. Stripping starts as a dance for everyone and then becomes one on one.”
Whether all strippers welcome lap dancing as an intimate encounter is highly debatable. After all, the act is usually performed not for personal satisfaction, but for money. And some spectators at Reyes’s show might well be reluctant to interact with him. Reyes was clear, however, that his performance is not aimed at promoting gay lifestyles, but at bringing people into greater contact with the sensual pleasure latent in their own bodies.
“If someone of any gender, race or religion is willing to be open, then they are welcome, but they need to want to come.”
Some people could find Reyes’s in-your-face initiation to the sensual body to be too aggressive. Dance has many subtler forms of portraying and drawing out the body’s sensual side. Dance also has a carnal side. The FTA’s opening dance show, 7 Pleasures, for example, shows nude bodies and sensuality in a far different way than Reyes. Created by Brussels-based Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, 7 Pleasures brings 12 male and female performers together at times in tight hedonistic groups.
In an email exchange, Ingvartsen wrote about “how to represent live naked bodies on stage and about the possibility of inventing different sexual practices than those that are communicated to us through mainstream media, and how these new practices could transform our ideas about pleasure, what it is and how we can make our bodies experience it differently.”
Audience reaction to her show has varied according to time and place. In Paris, the show played soon after the November 2015 terrorist attacks.
“The response had a lot to do with the political importance of exercising the liberty of expression and sexual freedom.”
In other countries, Ingvartsen observed that “very often people say that the piece is not pornographic in spite of it dealing directly with sexual representation, which they seem to consider a good thing.”
In addition to voguing on stage, Reyes teaches voguing and helps organize voguing events.
“Traditionally voguing has involved LGBT people, but more and more straight women are becoming interested. It’s a dance for misfits that creates a space to be powerful.”