Art that will make your hair stand up
Trajal Harrell: Hoochie Koochie Barbican Art Gallery, SE1
Three men dance on a makeshift catwalk, swaying like blissed-out disco devotees, each absorbed in his own internal reverie. Elsewhere, a man dances solo with only an artfully knotted scarf preserving his modesty, his gestures suggesting something of the sinuous flow of movement seen on ancient Greek vases and something of the pole-dancer.
This is performance art – but not as we tend to think of it. A hundred years on from its first appearance, the notion of performance in galleries still divides people. There’s a substantial constituency of gallery-goers who still cringe at the idea of artists “prancing about”, rather than making things.
Hoochie Koochie, though, is art that is also dance, which can be appreciated as a kind of living sculpture, and viewed as close-up as you would any piece of visual art, but is performed by trained dancers on peak physical form. The show is a kind of retrospective for New York choreographer Trajal Harrell – who is also one of the principal performers – with 14 of his works, from 1999 to today, distributed through the Barbican’s lower gallery, running on permanent rotation throughout the month of the show’s duration.
Harrell’s work has its roots in the Sixties New York “downtown” art scene, where pop artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns rubbed shoulders with postmodern choreographers such as Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer. Arriving late to this milieu, Harrell, born 1973, shook it up, introducing moves derived from street culture: the Harlem drag queen “voguing” scene (later appropriated by Madonna) and the fashion catwalk.
This collision of elements is clearest in Let’s Get Sick, in which two dancers hurl themselves through the gallery to a thunderous percussive soundtrack, swinging their voluminous garments as though fighting with them and the surrounding space – with the audience running along behind. The sheer ferocity makes your hair stand on end.
The mood of the pieces veers between austere, Zen-like ritual – as in The Untitled Still Life Collection, where the dancers work with their hands and lengths of string – and overtly camp display. The male performers make flirtatious, challenging eye contact with the audience, dancing on tiptoe, as though wearing high heels, in Caen Amour, which references the early 20th-century risqué Hoochie Koochie cabarets from which the show takes its name. Swooning pas de deux performed with designer garments seem to animate the spirits of the people who might have worn them.
Alongside his exploration of the interaction of high art dance, underground gay culture and transgressive popular theatre, Harrell finds space for more obscure sources such as butoh, the visceral post-war Japanese dance form. Much of the show feels more like “dance” in that its choreographed in relation to an existing soundtracks. But with work as entertaining and energising as this, such distinctions feel academic.
This is the most physically exciting exhibition you’ll see this year.