I  remember being a kid, standing in the wing of the theatre, getting ready to go on stage. I was performing a solo in Cats in the part of Grizabella (the old and ragged one), in pointe shoes, dancing to the epic song Memory. I think that the most interesting part of the act, the real show, was the actual preparation in the wing. I was supposed to be graceful yet suffering, so I tried to think of the saddest things I could. I stood there bringing myself to tears before I entered the stage.



In my early twenties I saw a performance that made me finally decide I wanted to work with dance and choreography. I had been dancing since I was five, and I was in the middle of a higher education in dance. Up until this performance I felt I had not yet been given access to the artistic and creative sides of dance. I saw a flyer for the performance, it was for only one audience member at the time. This caught my attention.

It was the first time I experienced a dance performance that was solely focused on the experience of the spectator, with the total absence of conventional virtuosity on the performer’s part. This got me excited, as I had long worried that I would not become a good (or rather skilled) enough performer to work with dance. In this performance it was really the thought that counted; the thought that lay behind the gesture and how the gesture was placed within a composition. I never even saw the performer’s face, yet it was the most intimate and precious experience I had ever had as a spectator.

The fact that a choreographer had made this work meant a lot to me. It was a dance performance, I could feel and recognize the interest and care for the body, for movement and for composition, yet there was no dance as I had known it present. Until this performance I had felt that all my interests outside of dance were disturbing my focus on becoming a dancer, as if the only way to go forward was to be forced into an isolated bubble. The absence of conventional dance, in this piece made by a choreographer, opened the dance world—that had felt so tight—to endless possibilities. I slowly realized that to choose dance was not to be stuck in dance, but to go through it, to approach other interests through strategies dance had given me. I got my long-lasting suspicion confirmed; that dance is in fact art.




No single dance is about any one idea or story, but rather about a variety of things that in performance fuse together and decide the nature of the whole experience. (Banes 1993: 14)









Some years later I entered a working space that Julyen Hamilton created for his instant composition practice. The space was created by Hamilton’s presence, but also through his language and the way he used language. When you are not generating movement through copying external movements or shapes language becomes crucial. This language can exist on many different levels of awareness. Hamilton’s language is strongly connected to poetry and philosophy. Although we were also given concrete physical tasks, it was the language not directed towards the dancing but existing next to the dancing that I connected with. The language allowed me to move in a way I was interested in moving. The parallel activities of dancing and thinking, happening in the same space, with writing as a continuation, made me feel like I had arrived in a space of immense potential.          

When dancing I started to experience that, let’s say, only half of my activity—the movement my body was doing, the images and shapes and energies my movements were producing—was visible to the people around me. I was also doing an internal work, moving on from just repeating the tasks I was given, to actually producing language. This internal production consisted of words, thoughts, lines of thought and grasping ideas. The only way of making them visible was walking over to my notebook and writing them down. I was switching between producing and composing on the (dance) floor and on the page. At some point the relationship between the language and the dancing switched. Instead of using language to be able to move the way I wanted, I was moving to be able to produce language and write the way I wanted. Through dancing I found my way into writing.









No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
(excerpt from Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto, 1965)




I had an idea of Yvonne Rainer before actually knowing that much about her, she represented something I thought of as dry dancing. I’ve been watching (on video) and thinking a lot about her most famous choreography Trio A. I have also been connecting with a couple of her phrases (or titles): “feelings are facts” and “the mind is a muscle”. They are both undermining a well known dichotomy between the mind and the body. And then there is her No Manifesto, where she rejects everything we usually fill dance with. I have always related strongly to absence; my mind wonders to what I experience as missing or not (yet) there. The way Rainer emptied the dance for content and meaning, made me excited for the vacant space that was left: what was yet to occupy dance? I had experienced, when dancing, how crowded the dance could be—so many demands, so much going on. Maybe the moment everything was thrown out, leaving the dance empty, there would be space to think.









There was an impersonal aspect in it. The class was very dry. You went, you did your work, and you were totally involved with ideas and concepts, so that if you were rejected, you didn’t feel personally destroyed. There was a kind of objectivity in the situation. (Banes 1993: 23)









I don’t ‘begin’ by ‘writing’: I don’t write. Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text. History, love, violence, time, work, desire inscribe it in my body, I go where the “fundamental language” is spoken, the body language into which all the tongues of things, acts, and beings translate themselves, in my own breast, the whole of reality worked upon in my flesh. (Cixous 1991: 52)




The first course I attended in University was called Gender and Philosophy. As an obligatory part of the course, I had to do a presentation. I don’t remember what it was supposed to be about because I anyway used the opportunity to speak about what I wanted to. I remember thinking that anyone could recite the curriculum, but I wanted to contribute with something that I felt the situation needed. I first spoke about my background, then I started to make comparisons between the roles given to men and women through western thinking in relation to the roles of performer and spectator. One being active, knowing what would happen and the other passive, without control on the situation nor its development. I used the very situation we were in as an example; me, in front of the class giving the presentation. I was so nervous that my voice was shaking, but I persisted. At one point I even said that my favorite philosopher was Julyen Hamilton and that he was a dancer. When I was done, the first feedback I received was from a fellow student who commented that I hadn’t really fulfilled the task I was given. No one else said anything in particular, but when we were dismissed one girl approached me in the hallway. She said that she appreciated my presentation, that she could hear the shake in my voice, but that it only made it better, making clear that something was on the line. Thinking about this now makes me almost scared, I would not dare to do this again.




There are possibilities that have never yet come to light. Others, entirely unforeseen, that have come over us only once. Flowers, animals, engines, grandmothers, trees, rivers, we are traversed, changed, surprised. Writing, first I am touched, caressed, wounded; then I try to discover the secret of this touch to extend it, celebrate it, and transform it into another caress. (Cixous 1991: 45)




One of the things I really appreciated in the academic context was the presence of Hélène Cixous. Her writings comforted me and made evident that I could also participate and contribute within this context. She was on the curriculum for my aesthetic theory courses and her texts were always the most “far out”. I remember in one class, the male professor didn’t even bother to go through her text, because no one understood anything. She was the only female author on the curriculum and her text was the only one we didn’t go through; it is this exact tendency that she is often writing about.




Cixous coined the term Écriture féminine which translates as women’s writing, it focuses on language as crucial for the understanding of the self, and thereby inscribes the female body into the realm of language. Cixous puts experience before language. Her writing is non-linear and cyclical. The connections she makes between language and the body, the subjective and the personal has resonated within me from the start. For, at the same time as she produces this connection she also engages with deconstruction. Her thinking and its written manifestations make use of a broad range of radical strategies. She wants it all, while acknowledging the power structures at play, questioning who is allowed to have a voice and who is (not) allowed to meddle with language. Her writing functions beyond understanding, it does something to you, it is at once a work of art, a poem and an academic essay. It makes use of and breaks the rules of all genres. It is impossible to capture, it is wild, it lives its own life regardless of your ability to follow it, but being in its company is truly empowering. Her texts are events—there is a sense of before and after when reading her—something irrevocable happens, something that could change everything. She has become one of my enablers, when there is something I think I cannot do or when I think I will stretch the rules too far, I think of her and go for it anyway. When reading her I would suggest to be a selfish reader; to allow yourself to both indulge and drift away when needed, to take everything you want and throw the rest away.




Worldwide my unconscious, worldwide my body. What happens inside happens outside. I myself am the earth, everything that happens, the lives that live me in my different forms, the voyage, the voyager, the body of travel and the spirit of travel, and all of this with such suppleness that I go in and out, in and out, I am in my body and my body is in me, I envelop myself and contain myself, we might be afraid of getting lost but it never happens, one of my lives always brings me back to solid body. (Cixous 1991: 47)                  









My entire childhood I was dancing classical ballet and I loved it. I was a shy kid and dancing was the only place I was able to express myself and take up space. I am a brooder by nature, so I think it is very good that I kept dancing, so as not to totally implode into my own head. The feminine ideal of classical ballet fitted my body and my body fitted into the ideal. I was a skinny child and ballet was the only place where this felt like an advantage and not a problem. The expectations that came along with being a girl and those of classical ballet went well together - I fulfilled them almost too well.




At some point this coupling of my girlhood and ballet training started to become a problem. I couldn’t ethically defend the ideals of classical ballet and I knew it was just plain luck that my body fitted into this tight and violent frame. My fulfilling of peoples’ expectations started to feel limiting, as if I was becoming only one thing, when it had always been the connections between different things that excited me. Slowly during my early twenties my appearance began to grow more and more androgynous. I wanted to place myself in the middle of the scale, where I felt I had the most opportunity. Pointing in no direction was to point in both directions, in all directions. It was at this moment that I stopped doing ballet. After training classical ballet every week for seventeen years I quit, cold turkey, dedicating myself fully to improvisation and choreography.




Because virtually nobody fits the definitions of male and female, the categories gain power and currency from their impossibility. (Halberstam 1998: 27)




For many years I was a big fan of drag and I followed the local drag community. I found something I needed in the space they created; the possibility to turn all expectations on their head. There were no drag kings present in the local scene, so I only watched drag queens perform. Being an androgynous woman watching men indulge in all the feminine traits that I myself had rejected, was a comfortable position for me. It took many years for me to start doing drag myself, I basically thought that I was already doing it. I felt that what I could choose or change about my appearance was pointing towards masculinity. Then I realized that I had never really moved myself on the other side of the scale, tipping into masculinity. After getting into drag I experienced that the realm of masculinity is not as much of a given as I had thought. To be able to make use of the whole spectrum between femininity and masculinity I had to actively work to approach the masculine end of the scale. The society was always tipping me back towards femininity. Also, being read by the surroundings as an androgynous woman is very different from being read as some kind of male person.









I am using the topic of female masculinity to explore a queer subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity. (Halberstam 1998: 9)




The gender theoretician Jack Halberstam insists through his book Female Masculinity that masculinity is not the domain solely of men. He argues that also women have practiced and contributed to the development of masculinity as an expression. According to Halberstam, masculinity as a phenomenon is first made visible the moment it leaves the straight, white, middle-class, male body, which functions as a norm in our Western society. Female masculinity is not an imitation of male masculinity, it is something in itself, an alternative masculinity that exposes the normative version as the construction it really is. Drag king performances exposes the very way normative expressions of masculinity operate, by explicitly performing them such normative expressions of masculinity turn into spectacle. As a drag king I am developing my very own masculinity and I am making use of a repertory of male archetypes. The male roles I put on in different social situations, or on stage, function as a layer on top of my own masculinity as a woman, which is always present and shining through.




Sometimes female masculinity coincides with the excesses of male supremacy, and sometimes it codifies a unique form of social rebellion. (Halberstam 1998: 9)





 









My drag name is Robin. My grandmother wanted my father to be named Christopher Robin, like in the tale of Winnie the Pooh. My grandfather found this ridiculous and refused, they compromised by naming him Christopher Paul. But everyone has always called him Paul. My only brother is named Christoffer after him. So, Robin is named after the name my father never got, Robin being the son he never had. Robin and Ann-Christin have a lot of similarities. Yet they are received very differently by their surroundings and people have different expectations of them. Having two names and identities available, and two possible appearances at my disposal, opens up a lot of new possibilities. For each event I think of attending, I consider who should show up; Ann-Christin or Robin?




I have begun thinking of the possibility of entering old territory, at some time in the future, through re-exploring femininity as an expression. For Ann-Christin this might be old news, but for Robin this unknown territory is full of potential.









<sup>Bibliography:
Banes, Sally: Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964. 1993. UMI Research Press.
Cixous, Hélène: ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays. 1992. Harvard University Press.
Halberstam, Jack: Female Masculinity. 1998. Duke University Press.




This text was written for a publication within the frame of the choreographic work ABOUT; an investigation into the relationship between theoretical, aesthetic and performing aspects of an artistic work. ABOUT is made up by two performance lectures and essays: ÆØÅby Solveig Styve Holte and Pointing back by Ann-Christin Kongsness.

ABOUT is initiated, led and produced by Kongsness, co-produced by Black Box teater, Dramatikkens Hus and FRANK and funded by Arts Council Norway. It premiered at Black Box teater in January 2018.

For more information: www.annchristinkongsness.com

Photos of Ann-Christin: Tale Hendnes
Photos of Robin: Ingeborg Bjerke Styve</sup>