Neil Greenberg - Leigh Witchel

Remembrance of Things Past

“Quartet with Three Gay Men," "Not-About-AIDS-Dance"
Dance by Neil Greenberg
Dance Theater Workshop
New York, NY
June 23, 2006

by Leigh Witchel
copyright ©2006, Leigh Witchel

“At this point in the making of the dance my friend Michael Mitchell died.” The last line projected at the back of the stage in Neil Greenberg’s “Not-About-AIDS-Dance” (1994) encapsulates the urgency of it. Eight friends died while the dancers created the piece, as did his brother Jon. Greenberg himself was HIV+.

Fast forward twelve years later. Protease inhibitors made him asymptomatic. Greenberg looks in admirable dancing shape, better than I have seen in a few years. He’s still making dances.

“Not-About-AIDS-Dance” is a long quintet that copes with the demons and the devastation of the AIDS crisis in the most natural way for Greenberg: by making a dance. Working in his usual method — improvising material himself and then amplifying it to group choreography as well as including material from earlier works, Greenberg fashioned a cool dance of curlicues and stammering phrases. The dancers are dressed in simple white shorts and shirts in a bare black box lit with a soft incandescent glow. Projected above the stage are spare nuggets of personal information, some funny (“Ellen was a big pothead in High School”), some desperate (“This dance is clearly my latest immortality project. I wonder if it will work.”)

The intersection of art and life is an important theme in “Not-About-AIDS-Dance”. “I’ve known I’m HIV+ since 1987. I don’t know why I’m revealing this publicly. I don’t know what made this ‘private’ in the first place.” In 2006 there’s another dimension added: Time. Greenberg knew about this years ago — a projection from 1998’s “Luck” about dancer Justine Lynch: “Justine will always be 23 in Not-About-AIDS-Dance. But she's not anymore. She's 27.” Lynch reprised her role in the dance; she’s 35 now.

As good as Greenberg’s dance itself is, the history behind the dance can’t be downplayed, and everyone will have a different connection to it (or none at all) and react differently. When it was over, my companion turned to me and said the last thing I expected: “I knew Michael Mitchell.” I see the lives of the dancers, all of whom I have watched for more than a decade. I did not see the original 1994 cast except on tape, but saw the revival in 1998 when Christopher Batenhorst still did his original part and Paige Martin joined the cast replacing Jo McKendry. For me, time has now become the biggest element in the dance — what changes, what stays the same. If anything, Greenberg and Ellen Barnaby, another original cast member, look better than they did originally. ynch looks older and wiser (it’s hard to remain eternally 23), but still dances as well. Martin is not as central in the dance as she was in Greenberg’s magnificent “The Disco Project” (1995); perhaps McKendry’s absences that were chronicled in the projections made the part more peripheral than the others.

The biggest change is the replacement of Batenhorst with Antonio Ramos, and it’s an awkward one. Ramos is as good a dancer as Batenhorst was but they are totally different; Ramos is as warm and florid as Batenhorst was cool and remote. Ramos’ solo dancing was some of the best of the evening, but the projections describing Batenhorst (“Here’s Christopher, lost in a mysterious universe”) don’t describe Ramos at all. When Ramos dances, a slide says “Christopher wanted his dancing to speak for himself.” Quite true, but it has nothing to do with what we’re seeing in front of us now. Greenberg hasn’t fully decided what to do about that. Sometimes slides refer to Antonio, other times to Christopher, once Greenberg gives up and refers to Antonio/Christopher. If these performances could be taken as an epilogue where we catch up with the characters, perhaps it’s appropriate that Batenhorst’s absence is the most mysterious.

The other change is time. We’re in a new era with AIDS; one of hope for many. When he originally made this dance, the urgency of what Greenberg was facing ran headlong up against his analytical choreography and forced an artistic breakthrough. That time has passed and no one would want to relive it. But it was the urgency and tension between those elements that elevated “Not-About-AIDS-Dance” from a well-constructed work to a deeply affecting one. Greenberg’s work needs that urgency to balance its coolness; it was missing in the current performance.

Life moves forward. As a prelude to “Not-About-AIDS-Dance”, Greenberg offered “Quartet with Three Gay Men”, a tantalizingly brief dance for four men, Greenberg, Ramos, Luke Miller and Colin Stilwell. The dance, set to snippets of disco by RuPaul that also show up in “Not-About-AIDS-Dance”, is the first all male work Greenberg has done. It also uses other dancer’s improvisatory material as well as his own for the first time. It’s still pure Greenberg. The four men dance on the same stage, doing the same rubbing and shimmying material, shifting in and out of canon but insulated in their own space. They never touch, as in all of Greenberg’s work that I have seen, there is no partnering. The title of the dance brings up a million questions, the most obvious is, “How do gay men dance?” In the cool brevity of the piece, these questions remained unanswered.

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Remembrance of Things Past