As is so often the case when one is en route to out on any weekend or weekend adjacent night, on a Thursday in early September, I find myself bounding up the subway steps, running 10-15 minutes late and hoping that an excuse as trite as an L train delay could come off as charmingly true. When I emerge from underground, Google Maps doesn’t seem to know where I am, so I track down the bar using the only tried and true method– by following the first person I see with any combination of an off the shoulder top, fishnets and/ or fresh shag likely cut by a bi-con in Bushwick. Lucky for me, there are seven to choose from. The one with the eyebrow piercing serves as my North Star. When we round the corner, the street opens up to a crowd of similarly pierced and glittered contemporaries. I know I’m in the right place: standing outside 3 Dollar Bill waiting to experience the sixth installment of Kiss My Face.
Born of a desire to foster community outside of commercial and concert dance, the show was founded by Serena Wolman and co-produced by Jake Tribus, Emmy Wilson, and Lavy, all New York City based creatives with differing dance backgrounds and a common investment in the eccentric.
Each show features a range of choreographers, performers, and dance styles to showcase the breadth and depth of the experimental dance scene. From the classical to the completely unhinged, the eclectic dance based variety show has it all. High and low forms of dance are not reconciled, but Frankensteined into an amalgamation of the two; a gorgeous monster with body paint, winged eyeliner and perfectly pointed feet. Kiss My Face is an ineffable evening best described as the glittering underbelly of the New York dance scene. What follows is an account of one such evening…
On the other side of the no nonsense bouncer, patrons of the bar, patrons of the arts, and performers pre-show sparkle in the space, adorning the bar and sprawling across seating areas with their fishnets and character shoes kicked up on the tables. It’s 30 past showtime and the anticipation is palpable as a spotlight goes up on dancers– one in a lipstick marked morph suit and another in latex– moving through the crowd. As the back doors fly open, excitement crescendos into oohs, aahs. The crowd files in, and presses up against the stage. I’m swept up first by the momentum of the stampede, then by the momentum of the night, as the lights go down and the audience settles in to witness a show of tenderness and athleticism dressed in pink body paint, our first piece of the evening, choreographed by founder Serena Wolman.
The duet changes tone as the dancers turn their attention up stage to where our host for the evening resides in a baby pool. Thrashing, she’s lifted from the shallow water in a quasi-biblical birth sequence, clad in only her dance nudes. The music pauses. She pulls on her baggy pants. The beat drops. And the dancers finish out the piece with a hip hop combo.
After the piece, Emmy Wilson, co-producer and host, introduces herself. She calls from offstage, boasting a costume change, claiming to have “popped her pussy”. She’s met with a standing ovation as she returns to the stage dressed like a performer in the Non PG-13 version of the Moulin Rouge. Both she and the crowd consider her pussy popped.
Throughout the evening, there is an entropic reciprocity between choreographers, performers, producers and audience that makes the show much more than the sum of its parts. It’s this palpable sense of collaboration– of celebration, of community– that is the lifeblood of Kiss My Face. The program proceeds in this way, each piece more eclectic than the last, offering a contrast in style but compliment in energy as MC interlude and dance piece bleed into one another, playing on the energy of the evening. A jazz solo, performed by Joyboy, turns to monologue and invites audience participation. A monkey masked performance piece, choreographed by Nando Morland, turns into a fusion duet. And to close the night, foreshadowing the impending party, dancers in leather and latex take the stage as the lights strobe and the techno kicks up in a piece choreographed by Akira Uchida.
There’s an auto-referential nature to the show. The pieces are not self-conscious, but playfully conscious of self; conscious that it is a dance show composed of dancers dancing about dance. Kiss My Face plays on this idea of Dance as artifice, as a genre to be fulfilled, fractured, oversaturated and, ultimately, reclaimed. From the professional to the only after two, maybe three, tequila shots dancer, the audience, too, consists of performers, making this reclamation all the more rewarding.
The program oozes camp in its distortion of the classical and its ability to find beauty in its excess, irony, theatricality, and exaggeration. Splicing spoof and original, Kiss My Face is simultaneously celebratory and irreverent. The show is spectacular in this way– that is, basking in the joy of the spectacle. As if to prove, there is pleasure in performance.
As the show comes to a close, the directors take their bows. The stage goes dark, and the evening gives over to a party. The directors hop off the stage and disappear into a crowd taken by movement. I try to track down the dancers, but they’re impossible to find, as the dance floor opens up it becomes indistinguishable where the performers end and the audience begins.
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