Words by Liana Zhen-ai.
I walked up the escherian steps to Pageant in Brooklyn knowing only one thing about how the evening would proceed: evan ray suzuki promised to punch me in the face at the end of his new, evening-length work, plot hole. All I’ll say is that he didn’t deliver, but more on that later.
What we received instead was a series of tableaus that more than fulfilled plot hole’s tagline of a Lynchian Spring Breakers reboot. The opening image, a group of four dancers sprawled over an open, empty refrigerator, takes place in hospital bright lights to a soundtrack of Skrillex’s ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’, a direct reference to the film.
Sunglasses on, bikini tops in place, each performer seems to be in a private K-hole of their own design. Slowly, the dancers melt – I think of sped-up videos of fruit decaying into soft mounds of mold. A hand falls off the butter drawer, a blackberry White Claw is cracked and spilled, and Sabrina Leira turns to stick her head into an empty cupboard, from which vape smoke quickly starts to emerge. Her turn is another reveal: “plot hole” is bedazzled in Swarovski perfection across the ass of her booty shorts.
A question that I’ve asked myself often in seeing dance work is, “how does this tell us something about how it feels to be alive today?” suzuki’s work has always answered this question for me in embodying a kind of apocalyptic doomscroll feeling. A friend recently posted a meme that read, “Gonna zone out for the next hour, lmk if you wanna sublet my body.” As the dancers transition from their prone positions on the refrigerator to the open theatre space behind them, Leira stumbles behind, staring intently at the door frame on her way. “Somebody has GOT to sublet that girl’s body,” I think.
The next section of the work, performed to the sounds of Leo Chang’s improvisational score, finds the five dancers in constant motion. Amelia Heintzelman shows off all the post-modern movement a body can muster: spokes and exhales abound, with porn star moans to match the red thong hiked over her left leg. Zo Williams bounds into a solo that looks like the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’, while Benin Gardner lets loose a brief, cow-like bay. The Pageant space has been transformed by broad swaths of theatre curtains stapled into two-dimensional conceptual art pieces, with the windows open to the street. It occurs to me that the space has never looked more like the skyscraper scene from Fight Club.
The gestures, as well as the brilliant costuming by zo roze, are referential but devoid of meaning. Suzuki’s use of butoh reveals the suffering of a world that is well-cushioned, built for labour that can be done in overpriced Williamsburg coffee shops. But what this comfort belies is the anxiety of being alive amidst imminent climate crisis, genocide and authoritarian creep. For much of the work, many movements happen, but they don’t amount to coherent events. In her book, Hopeful Pessimism, Mara van de Lugt quotes members of a Crow tribe during the community’s relocation on to reservations: “I am trying to live a life that I do not understand,” one states. “Nothing happened after that. We just lived,” says another. This nothing-happening is a hallmark of suzuki’s work; one that exemplifies the endlessness of a world no longer understandable.
Just as the audience succumbs to movement that feels truly probabilistic, Emma Lee with her face coated in a thin layer of silver sequins emerges to croon a cabaret-perfect rendition of Addison Rae’s ‘Diet Pepsi’. The mask makes the earnestness of the moment perfectly attenuated; her hands and feet fidget as she sings. She abandons the mic to drag suzuki, cowboy boots on and lampshade on head, heavily into the space. They sit on the side of the stage as the rest of the dancers revive like car accident victims waking from head trauma. suzuki’s lampshade falls off, revealing a lit lightbulb in his mouth. He makes his way slowly, drunkenly, against the back wall of the space. When he falls, the scene shifts, and the dancers gather into a spotlight and strike poses halfway between fashion catalog and a 2012 sleepover Photo Booth session. The piece ends.
In this numbness, what else is there to do but ask someone, anyone, to punch you in the face? I don’t remember precisely how this theme emerged, but each recipe-testing session, fire hydrant smoke break, or beer run I’ve gone on with evan has included this request. On the rain-soaked sidewalk outside the show, I make small talk with show-goers and compatriots until evan emerges. “Should we do it here?” he asks. We agree that the moment has passed, and that the punch wouldn’t be nearly as good after his three-show run. There will always be next time, so I run for the B43 bus route.