ON NOVEMBER 21, 1986, Them, a performance by Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper, and Ishmael Houston-Jones, had an infamous premiere at Performance Space 122; it nearly got the place shut down. Eight years ago, PS 122 revived the work, and this summer it returned to Ninth Street and First Avenue as part of the East Village Series inaugurating the newly renovated, and renamed, Performance Space New York. The work’s legend—in certain corners, though, I would argue, not enough—precedes it.
So I knew Them would break my heart, but I wasn’t ready for it, not really. Premonition makes for a shitty analgesic,I keep reminding myself but never learning. This is a part of the work, too—that sense of hurtling toward catastrophe.
Before the quiver of volition, Them begins with a performer’s back defiantly turned, and silence for long enough to itch. While the audience waits for something—anything—to happen, among the risers, I watch a man’s palm flatten and hover an infinitesimal distance behind the scalp of another. Guided by pure sensation, the hand grazes back and forth, luxuriating in the ends of what must be a fresh buzz. There’s no other softness like it.
Onstage, Houston-Jones approaches the still performer, Kensaku Shinohara, from behind, chin in hand, observing. He touches him, nuzzles him, blindfolds him, and pushes him to the ground. Then Houston-Jones dances, gorgeously, in a solo of gentle taps to the chest and waist, broken wrists and buckling knees, rippling movements equaled by the swell of Cochrane’s guitar. Stretching his right arm outward and letting it stay there, Houston-Jones gives a desultory wiggle of his fingers: a wave to no one, a caress of nothing. In another near-perfect moment, he grabs his crotch, a quick squeeze that exactly matches the cadence of Cochrane’s strum.
Such synchronicity is delicious in a work like this, which is composed through structured improvisation. In one duet, the dancers toss their weight onto each other, passing it between them like a shared joint. All the while, Cooper has been reading steadily about cruising, about fucking (the text is called “Bedded Friends”), vignettes of nervous approaches and cocksure ones, uneasy acquiescence and the sometimes-rapture of being given over.
Improvisation is something like this, less wild invention than a practice of intuition and reaction, accommodation and adjustment. You attune yourself to others and to your own whimpering automaticity; you examine the rehashing of patterns—and the breaking of them. Entwined dancers read each other, an unseen process with a visible product. Cooper names some people he once knew. This section is titled “Dead Friends.”
Then, the seven younger dancers—Shinohara, Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Michael Parmelee, Jeremy Pheiffer, Michael Watkiss, and Hentyle Yapp—make something like a frieze, enacting ancient scenes of violence and pathos. Every so often, the tableaux shift; sometimes they clasp hands, serving as one another’s counterweight. They arrange themselves on the diagonal, as if in a history painting. I think of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19, a work that, like Them, offers an image of chiseled male bodies in slanted relation, a thing of beauty made in the wake of mass death. In the painting, the forsaken men stalk the horizon for a ship that will never come.
Géricault famously brought body parts and corpses from the local morgue to his studio; he wanted to know intimately the look of mortality, even though his shipwrecked figures bore no signs of it. (His models included Delacroix.) Cochrane, Cooper, and Houston-Jones began the process of making Them in 1985. You could see the decimated, the dying, everywhere then. They were on the street; they were your friends.
“Our anachronism.” Renata Adler wrote that as if it were a complete sentence, a grammar I didn’t fully understand until watching Them. Though the new members of the cast have been trained in different ways, their bodies are nonetheless historically specific, products of recent years. You can see it in their ease with isolation and affinity for syncopation, in the way they so readily pitch themselves out of the sagittal plane. Perhaps it’s obvious to say that dancers move differently than in 1986, that dancing looks different, that everything is.
Temporalities plait. In the theater, they always do. Performance renders the past literally incredible; Cooper says it best: “I can’t believe I once felt what I’m talking about.” In the audience, one senses this distance from history. Them is at once a fossil of its time, a moment frozen in amber, and a work insistent on the obdurate present.
Yet the evening’s ultimate revelation was this: how much of it was rinsed in pleasure. A bass line emerges, and the dancers are overtaken by the libidinal economy of music, spotlighted as if on a club floor. Saw-toothed and contrapuntal, their movements are full of crunch and twist. They wring themselves out. Later, Yapp and Cruise-Mercer mount a kind of face-off, a scene from a western against which Cochrane’s guitar throbs and blisters. They lunge for each other, retreat, then do it again.
In the section that earned Them its infamy, a goat carcass is brought onstage. On the night I saw the performance, it was slung across Shinohara’s shoulders. Blindfolded, he performs a duet with the goat atop a bare mattress. Emptied of blood and entrails, the goat’s shell—no longer an animal but also neither meat nor trophy—is flung, hurled, grappled with. The two wrestle and hump, the goat’s neck careening. Behind all this: a beat. In the end, the duo are covered with a sheet. Beneath it, you can see the dribble of their breathing—and here I use the plural pronoun deliberately, because although one is dead, they are in this together.
The piece ends in the dark, a wail of feedback emanating from Cochrane’s amp and guitar. Two sounds, produced in an infinite loop, amplifying each other because of their interaction, their intimacy. It sounded like sirens. It sounded like New York.
Catherine Damman is an art historian and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities in Middletown, Ct.