Mestiza

David Krasner in his essay “What Have We Learned?” writes that "[w]e are landscapes of influences and associations." (Krasner 2006) He breaks the essentialist lock on identity, posing the self as a place that bears a unique genealogy capable of being affected by and, in turn, reciprocally affecting "community, race, gender, [and] sexual preference" (587). In this short clip from Julie Tolentino's full-length 1998 performance, Mestiza—Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes, all attempts to know and to satisfy one's curiosity about the other through racialized and sexualized terms fail. The demand to voice an identity on another's terms is refused and instead re-articulated, as Julie says, "in the rain of rice as free flow, the mouth silenced yet free to bleed." Her body performs in and as a landscape influenced by her background yet continually revised through her self-determined agency. She exceeds the terms that strive to contain her. She effects her own release, one that is often pleasurable but sometimes almost unbearable to watch. For the spectator, those are the moments that intersect and influence our own bodies. She achieves an intimacy with those who watch her. She demands that you feel her presence but never dictates how that presence should be felt. Mestiza—Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes stages a struggle to connect with the influences that make you stronger and the constant search for the venues of resistance that allow one to endure.

—Debra Levine

A True Story

A True Story About Two People clarifies the crucial distinction between affect, the chance and joyful encounters a participant may experience joining in an idea that increase the powers of one's body, and affection, the artist's knowledge of the "rules of life [which] give [the] possession of the power of acting" (Deleuze 1978: 21). Julie Tolentino makes space performative; she builds a box, installs it in a gallery and invites people to dance with her inside it. The box is a temporary structure that squats in and among other more or less stable structures and events. Installing herself inside, she becomes a host. Having hosted the Clit Club for over ten years in bars both in the U.S. and in the UK, she already has rehearsed modes of creating politicized spaces designed as actions that utilize affect, movement and temporality to think differently about what can be done in embodied encounters.

The box's one-way mirrored panels deflect and defend participants from the chaotic gazes that occur outside of it. Its walls make the act of spectatorship visible; they imprint a fractured image of the spectator's visage over the body or bodies moving on the inside. The rules of the performance challenge the spectator's desire to organize, own and/or participate in that act. They also reveal the structure's parasitic spatial relationship to the gallery. From the moment Julie steps inside the milieu to begin her 24-hour performance, the panels and skeleton frame organize and intensify her body's movements and micro-movements. Her motions manifest multiply, a step, a turn or the raising of an arm is raised to the level of theatrical while the almost imperceptible everyday movements—lips parting, a toe wiggle, the rise and fall of her chest, a hair loosening itself from her skin, a pulse—also gain visibility. She is barefoot on the plot of grass that carpets the structure; the surface of her skin is inscribed with tattoos; she is sheathed in a velvety black gown that exposes her arms and décolletage and blindfolded with a stiff black cotton band. Under those conditions and in that space she assumes the biological and social capacities of a host body.

Moving to randomly shuffled songs, cricket sounds and silences, she waits for successive bodies to enter her space and move her as they wish. According to her rules, whether alone or with another, she must always be in constant motion. One at a time, people hold her, move her, confess to her and breathe with her. Each pairing and every absence in between pairings marks the movements and rests of the performance's encounters. Each encounter possesses its own duration, in which occur a multitude of intensities and flows that individually assert what is vital in the composition of relations. You can observe the expressive qualities of these intensities on the extensive surfaces of her body: blood from broken capillaries pooling under the surface tension of her skin, a smell of sweat, smears on the glass from her and her partner's skin oils and hot vaporized breath.

But Julie occupies a different duration from her partners, and sets a different task for herself. While we as the spectators are affected by our hyper-visibility, blindfolded she must struggle with an inconnaissance, an inability to form an idea of her partner through sight. She cannot anticipate their approach. The participant works from or against a desire to perform to the gallery's spectators, and must struggle with the way in which she or he desires to be recognized and indeed remembered.

I am privy to the documentation of this event and to Julie's reactions shortly thereafter, for without them I can only mark the following two durations. Early during the first evening of the performance I watched her dance with others, with old and new friends of ours. I was reluctant to dance under the gaze of the art crowd who had wandered into the space holding their wineglasses and clad in their too fabulous attire. And I wanted to care for her, to come at a time when it was likely few people would come to keep her company. I returned at 6:30 the following morning. I stepped on her cold feet several times and never relaxed into her, but my arms held her bare skin and I whispered into her ear.

As I left the booth, my 12-year-old daughter, whom Julie had not seen since she was an infant, decided to take off her shoes and dance after me. From the outside, I watched Ruby Rae, named after our mutual friend from ACT UP, Ray Navarro, laughing with Julie and moving in perfect rhythm with her body, slowly, with careful steps and hands intertwined. Julie later told me that energy came to her in bursts and that Ruby had been one of her partners who was so present in their body that she felt cleansed and re-animated by her presence. I already felt that. Watching one dance with another implicated me in Julie's affective network of joy. Jean-Luc Nancy, in Shattered Love, writes that

to joy is not a fulfillment, and it is not even an event. Nonetheless it happens, it arrives—and it arrives as it departs, it arrives in departing and it departs in the arrival, in the same beat of the heart. To joy is the crossing of the other. The other cuts across me, I cut across it. Each one is the other for the other – but also for the self. In this sense one joys in the other for the self: to be passed to the other [...] Joy makes felt and lets go the very essence of the sharing that is being. (Nancy 1991: 106)

What Nancy calls the "syncope" of joying is broken by the partner's parting, for Julie confesses that with each departure, she felt that the performance had ended even though she was aware of her commitment to an entirely different duration (Nancy 1991: 107). Heartbroken, she had to reestablish herself in order to make a transition. All she had left to stabilize herself was her own body's motion, "maybe just a funny twitching in my hand" (Tolentino 2006a.). She deliberately sets up her milieu to allow for the seepage of chaos, but paradoxically, chaos and intrusion are two affects that strengthen her becoming host. She enters into a composition with the very chaotic elements most humans fear will decompose their power to act. It is not a matter of resisting chaos but her specific way of responding to it that affords her the capacity to continue moving.

—Debra Levine

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles. 1978. "Deleuze/Spinoza: Cours Vincennes – 24/01/1978" in Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=spinoza&langue=2 (accessed 25 April 2006).

Krasner David. "What Have We Learned?" Theatre Journal 57 (2006): 585-587.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Shattered Love." In The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Conor, trans. by P. Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland and S. Sawhney. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Tolentino-Wood, Julie. 2006. A True Story About Two People. Participant Gallery, New York, New York.

———. 2006a. Telephone conversation with author, 22 April 2006.