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    Brontez Purnell Brings His Disparate Parts Back to the Dance Stage

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    “Dance is basically language, like another form of writing,” said Purnell, the author of “100 Boyfriends.” He is bringing a new solo piece to Performance Space New York.“I’m such a Cancer,” Brontez Purnell said. “Double Sagittarius too. Just so pointlessly optimistic.”With so many projects happening at once, Purnell, 40, has no reason not to be. Though he has been creating music, films, dance pieces and written works for years, it was his 2021 book, “100 Boyfriends,” that gave him a heightened cultural visibility. Part memoir, part novel, part ethnographic study, the book creates an impressive, no-holds-barred map of his sexual adventures and misadventures in Northern California and earned him a Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction, awarded this week. He maps those experiences back onto his body, a site of his art, as evidenced by his stunning array of tattoos.With Purnell, who was born in Alabama and now lives in the Bay Area, there is practically no distinction between body, mind and spirit, a unity that informs his dancing. Much like his writing, his onstage presence is so liberated it’s almost confrontational. And while he can be unrestrained, it’s always informed by rigor. He worked as a go-go dancer while studying contemporary dance with the modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, and other Bay Area choreographers; in 2010, he established the Brontez Purnell Dance Company.During the pandemic, his dance practice took a back seat to writing projects. But now he’s back, with his first evening-length solo dance piece, “Invisible Trial,” which premieres this week at Performance Space New York in Manhattan. Based on a paranoid short story by Sylvia Plath, the 40-minute dance loosely follows the nervy receptionist of a mental health clinic, who works under the watchful eye of the God of Anxiety.The work, which Purnell describes as “an intense condensing of structure, sculpture and text,” features a soundscape of original music and spoken passages from Plath’s story. On a minimalist set — with rope, bedding, a reception’s desk — the performance sees him cycle from tinsel-covered headpieces to office wear to full nudity.Purnell rehearsing at Performance Space New York. He describes “Invisble Trial” as “an intense condensing of structure, sculpture and text.”Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesPurnell has enlisted dramaturgical help from the playwright Jeremy O. Harris. Purnell’s longtime collaborator, Larry Arrington, a dancer and astrologer, did the choreography.“My role was more about supporting Brontez as he fleshed his ideas out, and constantly shower him with as much love and care as possible,” Arrington said in a Zoom interview, a framed photo of Purnell in blurry motion behind her. “You look at what he puts out and wonder how he takes all these disparate parts to make something beautiful and epic. How does one person contain this much kinetic spark?”In a quiet room at Performance Space New York, Purnell talked about his relationship to Plath, dance and the eternal martyrdom of the artist. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What has it been like returning to dance?I spent quarantine finishing my new sci-fi novel, and my new poetry collection, and had forgotten that dance is basically language, like another form of writing. It was time for me to put my body onstage again, to remind myself that I live in a body. The whole point of performance is to reignite the body. It’s a very important spiritual practice.Tell me about you and Sylvia Plath.I started reading her in, like, sixth grade. I had this teacher who gave me books, and they didn’t know what to give this little gay boy, you know, so they just gave me Sylvia Plath. She has this poem called “Mushrooms.” I don’t know, I had a rough childhood, and I just remember the last line stuck with me: “We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot’s in the door.”What about the Plath story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” draws your attention?It’s whip-smart, and beatnik-y, and I think really cemented Plath’s voice. It seems very autobiographical because she got electroshock therapy, and the story ends with the narrator getting it after her boss finds her snooping through the clinic’s files. It’s very tense, and she kind of sets herself up as a Christ figure, with the crown of thorns being the electroshock thing.Are you a martyr?Yes, but a really lazy one.You have all of this amazing body art, and so much of your writing is about using your body as memory. I feel like that’s martyr adjacent?I’m doing it so no one else has to. I’ll go do the dirty work and report back, you don’t have to worry about all this. Somebody said that about me in a review once, and I thought that was really funny. It was like, “Brontez is doing all your drugs; smoking crack; [expletive] your boyfriend, and your boyfriend’s boyfriend; drinking your vodka — all so that you don’t have to.”In “Invisible Trial,” Purnell goes from tinsel-covered headpieces to office wear to full nudity.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesYou’ve been trying to do this piece for 10 years. What held it up?I’ve never had time or given myself permission to do a solo, and this was something that I always wanted to do right, and with support. The San Francisco dance scene is OK, but I have never gotten a whole lot of monetary support from that scene.What do you feel gave you that permission? Performance Space? The success of “100 Boyfriends”?It had been so long since I had actually danced, because of quarantine. Most of my performance art stuff became me doing this humanitarian thing where I was giving free sex shows online to men in closeted countries.How did that go?It was awesome because, you know, men in homophobic countries are so much more appreciative of you and your body. It gave me a new eye on performance, on how much of your soul you’re sharing.What about “Johnny” made you want to turn it into a dance?I’ve always liked Plath’s nervous tension; she’s essentially always writing about anxiety. Here, she’s writing about the futility of being an office worker with other dreams. A lot of the books I’ve written were done in tandem with some terrible job I had. I think the piece is this weird allegory for someone who has other, bigger dreams in life, but are kind of earthbound by their 9-to-5.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesWhat did the collaborations for this look like?The dramaturgy, with Jeremy, was just a series of late night phone calls about the structure I wanted to do, and how I want to execute it. With Larry, I just gave her certain parameters.But I don’t like to stress out my collaborators too much. I prefer just setting coordinates and then going in there and dealing with it, with their voices in the back of my head. I’m a bit anti-authoritarian, so you can tell me what to do, but not too much. Once you ask someone to choreograph and you ask someone to be a dramaturge, you’re basically asking someone to change your diaper and spank you.Why the new title, “Invisible Trial”?It’s about the idea that there are unforeseen actions happening all around you, dictating your behavior. For instance, if there’s a shadow campaign against you, do you actively confront that? Or do you keep just living your regular life and let the universe sort it out? Every time you bring it up, are you bringing something to the attention of people who had no clue? Now you’ve really put yourself in the spotlight. More

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      in Theater

      A Writer’s One-Act Plays Debut, Continuing Her Resurrection

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      By staging Kathleen Collins’s rich psychological portraits of Black women, a theatrical group aims to enlighten, heal and inspire.“No one is going to mythologize my life,” the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins said in 1984 to a group of film students at Howard University. “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.”Collins’s insistence on portraying the ordinariness of African American women’s lives rather than reproducing the Hollywood narratives that pathologized or mythologized them is resonating with a new generation of Black women artists who have recently discovered Collins and her work. Part of what makes Collins’s writing so appealing is her attention to the complex internal struggles and external journeys, of what Elizabeth Alexander calls those “Bohemian Black women” who often work as artists and academics, and have a robust intellectual life. Because she renders them with such care and imbues them with such vulnerability, her characters have heightened insights and are aware that they are both liberated and alienated by their knowledge of how others see and stereotype them.Such rich psychological portraits of Black women are what originally drew Afrofemononomy, a group of Black femme theater artists, to Collins’s plays. In addition to adapting that Howard University speech into a monologue, they are also performing “Begin the Beguine,” a quartet of Collins’s one-acts that have never been produced before.Over the past two weekends, under a program titled “Work the Roots,” Afrofemononomy performed the title play “Begin the Beguine,” about the actress Ruby Dee and her son, the blues guitarist Guy Davis, as well as “The Healing,” “The Reading” and “Remembrance” at various locations in New York City (from a lawn in Harlem to a park in Bedford-Stuyvesant). On Saturday, May 29, they will present the premiere of a mixed-media installation called “Gold Taste” that is a response to “The Essentialisn’t,” a theatrical work by one of the group’s members, Eisa Davis. The piece will be available for viewing until June 27 at Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theater.Jennifer Harrison Newman dances with audience members as part of the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe debut of Collins’s plays is part of a continuing resurrection of her works after her death from breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. Largely because of her daughter Nina Lorez Collins’s commitment to preserving her mother’s legacy, we are now able to access the gifts of Collins’s ambitions and archive, including the theatrical release in 2015 of her 1982 film, “Losing Ground”; the publication of her short story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” in 2016; and, in 2019, the arrival of “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a mélange of her short stories, plays, diary entries and film scripts.Davis, an actress and playwright recently seen in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” first became acquainted with Collins’s writing when she was asked to do a public reading of Collins’s short stories at the Brooklyn Public Library in 2017. But, she now realizes, Collins has been with her a lot longer. “She is a literary foremother for me that has just been under my nose all this time,” Davis said. “When Nina first gave me these plays, I was like, ‘Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins,’ and then I looked at my bookshelf and I found ‘9 Plays by Black Women,’ an anthology from the 1980s, and her ‘The Brothers’ in there. It’s the only play of hers that was ever produced, [a production of the Women’s Project, now WP Theater] at American Place Theater.”A line from Collins’s play “Remembrance” on a wall at Performance Space New York reads, “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOnce she read Collins’s other plays, she immediately shared them with her friends and other Black female theater artists with whom she frequently collaborated in the most quotidian of ways: over dinner, on museum trips and visits to the beach, via texts, after seeing plays together, and, in the past year, over Zoom. By 2019, their casual interest in Collins’s plays turned into the more concrete idea of staging and sharing them with the broader public.“In a lot of ways, this was an attempt to take the model of our friendship and then apply it to the conditions under which we collaborate,” Davis said.The director Lileana Blain-Cruz (“Marys Seacole”) said learning about Collins’s plays enabled her to take different risks. For the project, she has thoughtfully transformed Collins’s “The Reading,” a 30-minute play that anticipated our conversations about racial microaggressions today. Set in a Black psychic’s waiting room, a tense conversation ensues between Marguerite (Kara Young), a Black fashion designer, and Helen (Amelia Workman), a white romance novelist. As Helen tries to assert her entitlement, Marguerite pushes back, and eventually denies Helen an opportunity to take up the space that she, as a white woman, feels obligated to inhabit.Amelia Workman in “The Reading.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members at the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFood, books and more were on display.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“For me, the celebration and the exploration collectively around Kathleen Collins’s work is another way of seeing each other before we even knew how to see each other in existence and collectivity,” she said. “That, for me, is really moving because I was like, ‘Oh, this is somebody that I should have known.’” She added, “Now I get to discover, and I don’t have to discover alone.”In addition to the moving performance by individual actors, these plays, which were not open to critics to review, were made even more engaging because of the casting and staging. Collins wrote “The Healing” and “The Reading” with white characters but because Afrofemononomy cast from within their group, they provided a space in which Black actresses were always front and center. This gesture was intensified by the intimacy of their set. At the end of “The Reading,” the audience was led by the actress Jennifer Harrison Newman to dance with the cast, an invitation that turned the luminescent installation and graffiti scrawled wall that read “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God” (a line from another Collins play in the quartet) into a communal party celebrating Black women’s creativity.April Matthis, left, and Stacey Karen Robinson perform “Begin the Beguine,” by Kathleen Collins, at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy inviting us to these tender moments in which Collins’s Black female characters pull back their layers, the performances themselves transport both those fictional characters and this real-life Black cast far beyond the strict racial and gender categories that envelop them and us.“These are stories about the interior lives of Black women,” Nina Lorez Collins told me. “One of the reasons I like the “Begin the Beguine” is because it is about race, but it is also not. It’s really about the interior life of this artist, this young woman. And I just don’t think we’ve seen anything like it.” As avant-garde as Collins’s characters were in her time, they still remain singular today, giving us rare social insights into how we can navigate our unique moment of slowly returning to each other, to public spaces, and ultimately, live, in-person performances. In the foreword to “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” the fiction writer Danielle Evans described Collins as “a master of the moments when the interior becomes the exterior, when all pretense drops away.”This blurring between our inner selves and the identities projected back onto Black women was at the heart of Afrofemononomy’s take on “Remembrance,” described as “a kind of personal séance.” Under the directorial consultation of Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”) and featuring Davis as The Woman and Kaneza Schaal as Collins talking to the Howard students, this becomes a conversation between two Black women who, while each giving their own monologue — one taking place in a bathroom, the other at a lectern — end up, at times, dissolving into each other. All the while they demand the audience see Black women in public with the same clarity that we see ourselves in private.April Matthis and Stacey Karen Robinson performed “Begin the Beguine” at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut such revelations and reversal of gazes will also be critical to large swaths of the American theater community that is still grappling with debates about inclusion, equity and white gatekeepers as it seeks to attend to the harm of racism, and institutionalize the healing that Collins’s vision offers for her Black characters and for the Black female theater artists who embody them.After spending two weeks performing, and a couple of years studying Collins, Afrofemononomy decided to close with Davis’s music theater piece “The Essentialisn’t” in the group installation “Gold Taste,” and reimagine a much earlier moment when the Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen debated racial representations in their era. It begins with the ever vexed question, “Can You Be Black and Not Perform?”Extending Collins’s legacy to Davis, the Afrofemononomy member Kaneza Schaal said, “Eisa is [also] sitting on a trove of plays she has written. And it is up to us, to see to it, that our own daughters are not the first people to produce that work.” She continued, “It is urgent to address Davis and Collins simultaneously. The intellectual harmony Eisa creates with her foremothers is astounding, and yet another extension of this fabric.”The Essentialisn’t: Gold Taste installationMay 29-June 27 at Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue; performancespacenewyork.org. More