"Home: The body as place", Dance Performance by Noemi Lafrance

From "Home" (above)















From "Noir"

Question: Why can’t deer be strippers?
Answer: Because their clothes keep getting tangled in their antlers.

Thus the women in the performance “Home: The body as place”, all of whom had antlers strapped to their heads, struggled to pull their tops and dresses off. But it was only a bit of oddness in an increasingly odd night.

Upon arriving at the performance site - an apartment in Brooklyn, we were asked to put on a name-tag and wash our hands. I knew the performance involved bodies – did that mean we’d be touching them, or performing surgery? Dear God.

It was a small space, only 20 people could attend each performance. We were led into a small room and seated around a long wooden table. There was a chandelier, bookshelves, sideboards. Oh yeah, and a naked pregnant woman with antlers lying in the middle of the table. It took a while to adjust: to the dim light, to be facing other people in the audience rather than sit side-by-side, to be so close to a naked pregnant woman. I felt dizzy and claustrophobic. Warped electronic music pulsed heavily, punctuated by strange sounds floating over top, like animal noises. The whole effect was rather crazy. The woman was hugely pregnant. She lay on her side and running down the length of her, from her rib cage over her hip and down her leg was an entire landscape, a miniature forest. Her skin was covered in a shiny, brown dirt-like substance, which was blanketed with tiny model trees. Closer inspection – we were given magnifying glasses for this purpose – revealed miniature flocks of deer and sheep, and some cows, none larger than a few centimeters.


The magnifying glasses got us over the initial discomfort – my first impulse was to look away and stare at my lap for the whole evening. She took a seat at the head of the table and stared at all of us, one by one, for untold, excruciating minutes.

As hard as it was, I liked this motif of making us as uncomfortable as possible. After all, isn’t that the idea with the Daily Show interviews, with Borat? It just took some getting used to. It was hard to formulate our reactions at first, especially since we could all see each other. She would do something strange, then something possibly funny, then something embarassing, like bark and hiss at us, and you had no idea whether or when to laugh or keep stone-faced. After all, she was extremely pregnant and extremely naked. I wished we had those electric, blinking signs from 50s TV shows that said “laugh”, or “applause”. Though I doubt they ever made one that said “avert your eyes in shame”.

Pregnant deer woman (who turned out to be Lafrance herself) announced that our bodies were temporary, and that we would all die someday. She then commanded us to stare at each other across the table, like a performance art icebreaker, and soon we were somewhat less embarrassed and freaked out by the whole thing. For a few minutes at least, until she slid back down the table, rubbing a cold, gel substance under our chins that I prayed was hand sanitizer.

The New York Times was not as charmed as I was. They hated it, which I found surprising because they loved another performance which sounded, from the review, to be just as wacky. That performance also started with the principle dancer announcing to the audience, “someday you are going to die.” Were they not as tickled as I was that there was a week in New York City where you could be told you were going to die at two different performances? How much had we all paid for this?

Pregnant deer woman left, and another deer-woman came in in a short, flared skirt with ruffley underwear and a slinky, fur-necked top and a feather duster, and stiletto heels caked in mud. She did a kind of strutting dance, pacing back and forth on the tables, occasionally petting people with the duster. When she perched at the edge of the table and stripped – it took a good two minutes to get her outfit over her rack (pun intended), and started doing laundry in a basin on the floor, I knew we had reached performance art nirvana. This is what people talk about when they make fun of performance art! It was like a caricature of performance art, or a Saturday night live skit.

She left - presumably to get her clothes into a dryer, and pregnant deer woman came back and sat at the head of the table. Her two assistants brought out a tray of tiny cups, a kettle of hot water and a bowl and strainer. She slowly performed a tea ceremony, dipping each cup in a bowl of hot water with tongs. She grabbed a clump of what I thought were tea leaves from a pouch, poured hot water over it into the kettle, then poured it into the little cups. Oh God, is she going to make us drink the kool-aid? Of course she is. It seemed petty and lame not to drink, so we all politely sipped. What's that flavor? It was rich, smoky… sencha? Oolong? A few sips later I realized it was tobacco. She had brewed tobacco, and we were drinking it. Each sip grew more smoky, it tasted like an ashtray, or like at a party when you pick up the wrong beer bottle and almost drink, the one everyone’s been ashing into. Except this time, you actually drink it. Of course, she didn’t drink her cup, she just poured the tea over her nipples.

I imagine pregnancy is a challenging journey for all women, but it must be especially bizarre for dancers, being so intimately connected and so hyper-aware and sensitive to every part of their bodies. A dancer friend of mine who was pregnant told me she could feel when things were changing with the baby, like an organ was forming, or when certain bones were fusing together or growing apart. If you ever go to a party with dancers you end up talking about your body for hours: every body part, every piece of food you put in your mouth, and every resulting biological reactions. Lafrance specializes in site-specific works. The first piece of hers I saw was on the spiral stairwell of the New York City Court Building Clocktower. The second I saw, Noir, was in a parking garage, and the audience sat in the parked cars. So this new piece was taking place, literally, on her own body, and not that far from ours.

A different deer woman, fully dressed in skirt, blouse and jacket, and glasses came out and laid towering stacks of white paper at the head of the table. She passed out black, oily crayons and gave us our instructions: paper would be passed around one sheet at a time and we were to write one word then pass it to our right. We started off, but were too slow because she kept yelling at us to go faster, to keep a steady assembly line of word-writing and sheet-passing. When the sheets reached her she would read our random stream-of-consciousness words. She yelled at us to use punctuation, to start making the lines look like sentences, and she kept barking at us to go faster. The words grew increasingly frustrated and involved many curses and longings for her to leave us alone and shut up.

We were all bent over our papers frantically scribbling, so it was only when she started hurling the paper at us directly that we looked up and noticed she had stripped down to bra and underwear. She climbed onto the table and slid across on her back while the assistants passed out glasses of water. I'm still a little unsettled that, by that point, we were all completely on board, and without any prompting we dutifully began writing on her body. Some people gleefully began covering her arms and legs in words and drawings. I felt bad for her because people had written on the inside of her thighs, and her chest was also filling up quickly. Jump, sky, Julien, Amanda, bird, purple, kiss, stop, why, pictures of birds, cats, arrows, words in French and Spanish. I was more reluctant, but managed a few words: fur, fever, full moon, and I drew a naga on her arm for protection.

She slid off the table, then returned, this time with no antlers. The assistants placed bowls of liquid in front of us – I thought water, and gave us what I thought were washcloths. That’s nice, I thought, we’re going to clean all this crap off of her. Silly me. It was paper mache and strips of gauze. We were going to mummify her. Thankfully the assistants had to prompt us on this one - we were not so brainwashed and high on cigarette tea that we could collectively entomb her on our own. Thankfully, it was also the finale.

Was Lafrance successful in communicating the strangeness of pregnancy? Beyond the initial shock value - I worked in family planning and have seen numerous pelvic exams, not to mention abortions, and I was pretty shocked - it was hard to get a sense of her intentions and what her deeper meanings might have been. It was more performance art than dance, but I still feel like she created something unique and amazing. The most compelling aspect was, unlike other performances I've seen, I was much more affected viscerally. All of my reactions were shortcutting my brain and happening within my body, instead of my passively viewing it from the safe distance of a stage and processing it first, then deciding how I felt. And I was more charmed than annoyed by the weirdness factor. I love the idea of her turning her body into the landscape for her ideas, but I'm not sure I loved watching the result. It was a brave, bold and strange concept, but I'm still looking forward to seeing her return to a slightly more formal form of dance.