It was a mid-January evening in an old New York Playhouse that conjured up the spirit of the Gilded Age. If I turned my head, I half-imagined that I’d spot Boss Tweed in attendance. Instead, the audience, some already seated by the time I arrived, filtered in slowly, casually greeting others or meeting up with friends. The evening was part of the OUT-FRONT FEST, a Queer Dance and Film Festival curated by Pioneers Go East Collective that spanned ten days in January over two locations: The Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center and the LGBT Community Center. That evening, in Abron’s Playhouse, was the world premiere of Annie Wang’s had my mouth, an exploration of self-protection – of an ever-expanding self – channeled through Movement from Chinese dance and martial arts. How can we protect a self while it stretches, grows, and becomes someone else, Wang might ask.

The performance started with two land acknowledgments: one conducted by Abrons over the loudspeaker of the theater, and the other by Pioneers Go East projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. The words lingered in the air, and it was not lost on me that we were in the building of a Settlement Home (The Henry Street Settlement, to be exact), which, many years earlier, saw generations of social workers and volunteers welcome immigrants into a country we now acknowledge wasn’t theirs. The gravity of this thought was totalizing.

At the end of the acknowledgments, the theater went black, and while it appeared nothing was happening, a body slowly emerged from the left theater door moving down the aisle. As it came into the light, the figure revealed itself as two bodies connected. One dancer sat atop the other, their feet resting on the other’s shoulders, squatting for foundation and stability. As the figure passed, the difference in costume became evident (the perched body in white, the supporting body in black), and I noticed a corn on the pinky toe of the perched dancer. On the back of their tops was a long line of what appeared to be tape in a green forest pattern – a marking conjoining the two movers. The figure proceeded to the stage, and, upon arriving, the figure in black bent down, allowed the figure in white to dismount, and the piece began. These were our two dancers: choreographer Annie Wang and dancer Ching-I Chang. I had incorrectly identified each of them during the performance, believing Annie to be in white and Ching-I to be in black. It was the reverse. Annie had led Ching-I to the stage.

Upon descending, Ching-I had the stage while Annie took the area just below the proscenium. The two conducted mirrored movements on different planes, conversing with each other with the rhythm of a capoeira (The Brazilian martial art form) set, as the two stretched their arms to the ground, knees bending in a sort of narrow crisscrossed lunge, brushing their hands to the floor. They greeted the earth to define it, making their bodies known to the terrain beneath them. When the two dancers came together on stage (Annie eventually ascended), they didn’t always act in concert. They sometimes swooped and swirled in unison, and at other points one of the dancers moved to the ground to assume a fetal position, pushing away the other body as if it posed a threat. It wasn’t exactly clear to me what the threat could be – they had just moved in conjunction – had danger arisen without my seeing it?

A few times both dancers lay down, quietly, with their limbs wrapped beneath them. At various points, one or the other froze in a position (often sitting up resting on their knees) to vigorously open their mouth and bear their teeth. Every time Annie did this, the effect was so visceral and chilling that I wished I could have taken my phone out and filmed it. Her face, almost vibrating with intensity, channeled something in between a Cindy Sherman photograph of a beaming woman and Marjorie Strider’s Girl with Radish (1963). Experiencing Annie’s smile felt like the whole of Wang’s motivations for the piece. Something about her gaze, and its vulnerability, was the most successful contribution to extending this piece beyond the context of the choreographic score, lending it to a larger conversation. What that conversation could be I’m not sure. What about the mouth, so clearly highlighted in the piece’s title, is significant? Were they bearing their teeth in preparation to kill? Screaming silently in agony? Conjuring lost joy of their youth?

Halfway through the piece, in a moment when both dancers laid down on their stomachs on stage, a woman (Catherine Chen) appeared with a microphone and knelt to capture each dancer’s breathing – given how much they were moving, their breath was heavy and weathered. The two dancers traced her presence, perching themselves up to watch her exit the stage. They resumed their movement, at this point now traveling downstage approximating breakdance-like moves on the ground, and exited the stage. In their absence, the performer appeared again. This time coming out to recite a poem, stool in hand. She settled the stool upstage right and started to recite a poem discussing terrains, roads that called forth vistas, and a great natural beyond. The dancers replaced the poet, and then the poet met the dancers, sans stool, continuing to read the poem, but was this time accosted by the dancers. They tried to prevent her from reading, working their way up from her feet, swiping her legs, and then standing to actively rip the pages out of her hand. Despite some attempt to protect herself, the poet fell victim to the dancers’ mischievous whims, and the papers, crumpled and ripped, flew into the air. When the dancers succeeded in attacking, they exited the stage. The poet, only slightly disturbed by the experience, pulled another fresh copy of the poem from the pocket of her top, unfolded it, and continued to recite it again. It was a clever moment – we all laughed – but the poet’s presence felt arbitrary and lacked incorporation with the piece’s arc thus far. Had the addition of a third non-dancing body held a clearer significance, I imagine this moment of levity would have been even more satisfying. It would be interesting to see Wang’s comedic talents incorporated into a piece with a clearer structure.

The piece ended with the two dancers in a final movement score. There had been a few false endings where the lights were partially dimmed and audience members started clapping. The end of the dance didn’t come across as conclusive beyond the piece’s ending. I wished they had used the aisle again, or for the initial distribution of space to be reversed: Ching-I assuming the front-of-proscenium space Annie had used earlier. Instead, the movement ended and the lights went down. We clapped. 

It am not certain what this piece sought to contribute beyond a deeply proficient score, which is worth noting. Oftentimes, in experimental pieces, the ideas take a primacy over the movement seeking to communicate them. In the case of Annie Wang, there was perhaps the reverse problem: I saw lovely, beautiful, sweeping, and rich movement by two beautifully-trained dancers who I would happily have watched for hours, but a subtext, if there was one, never came to the forefront for me. But, in a world where material reality threatens the very livelihood of this kind of art, downtown grassroots collectives dedicated to social betterment, how can work not attempt commentary? The theater that evening evoked – albeit on a much smaller scale; I wish the audience had been fuller – the origins of this kind of work: New York‘s downtown dance of the 1970s. The conditions by which the work of this era was made no longer exist, but the need for work of the same nature is as vital as ever.