Cloak by George Stamos

This was my favourite event of the entire trip, despite not actually being something on our itinerary. George Stamos presented Cloak on three nights only, a world premiere in New York City. A few of my friends were interested in going and gave me the description of the event, which matched my current artist statements almost exactly; with a quick trip on the subway and we were there to see it.

The show itself was the same theme as this blog, looking and gendered performance and the fluidity of gendered identity, but was done in performance, video, music and interpretive dance. The three dancers were mostly dressed identically, wearing black bottoms and no top, erasing gendered dress. While at one point a dress made its way around the stage, it was donned by the male and female dancers, not being exclusive towards any gender. Stamos made use of blank masks and balloons as breasts to form the body into gendered expressions, but hid genitals that defined the body as male or female. His attempt to eliminate the perceived sex/gender connection was successful to me, though may have been lost on other audience members.

His use of media was amazing and at one point a video of his body was projected onto a screen in front of the female dancer’s body, allowing us to see her head and limbs with his body juxtaposed on top, erasing the gender that is implied by body shape. They matched their movements which meshed the bodies into each other, creating a male/female hybrid. This moment was not only technically proficient, it was able to separate body and gender, portraying identity as human rather than stuck within the binary gendered roles.

The only critique I have of this show is the expression of sexuality apparent through the dance. With two female performers, one of them more of a singer (Clara Furey), the other more of a dancer (Luciane Pinto), and one male dancer (George Stamos), the romantic pairings were always heterosexual. I feel this accentuated their gender a little more, because it was less about the romantic exchange and became about the male/female pairing. However after accentuating the genderlessness of the bodies through performance, perhaps I should not be seeing the pairing as heterosexual, but merely a human connection devoid of gender. It was not obvious of whether he had deemed this detail unimportant, or overlooked it in his composition.

Unfortunately Claudio La Rocco from the New York Times didn't have an eye for his abstraction, and praises him for being 'a handsome dancer' but misses the point completely on the theory of multiple identities "At other times, Mr. Stamos occupied the small raised screen, his torso shuttling through ghostly sequences while, below the screen, a woman manipulated her legs to make it seem as if the live-video hybrid were one person. Was such a cute gesture meant to invoke multiplicity?" This reduction of Stamos' theory into such a condescending review is exactly how I expected people to take the mixture of movements and new media that spoke of fluid identity and gender multiplicity; to be reduced back into social terms of understanding, judging Stamos on his gender and identity.

I stole these photos from Stamos' flikr, taken by Nikol Mikus.