Trajal Harrell’s Tightrope Act

Outside the Casa de Vidrio, the iconic São Paulo home of modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi, the dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell moved back and forth across the terrazzo driveway, holding a length of string high in each hand. His collaborator, the São Paulo-based artist Carla Chaim, held the other ends of each string and the two moved slowly in circles as they pulled them taut or let them slacken in the gentle wind. The two performers took pains not to let the strings tangle as they moved ever closer to each other and to the house: their parallel motions tentative but never quite faltering, like those of two bodies negotiating the contours of intimacy in a time of social distancing.

The work, Untitled Still Life Collection, was first performed in 2011, but it could not have been a timelier inclusion in the 34th São Paulo Biennial, a high-wire act that opened in September, having been delayed for more than a year by the COVID-19 pandemic. Titled ‘Faz Escuro Mas Eu Canto’ (Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing), after a poem penned by the Amazonian writer Thiago de Mello in 1965, shortly after Brazil’s democratically elected government was overthrown by a military junta, the biennial opened in a country foundering from a third year of leadership by the right-wing authoritarian government of Jair Bolsonaro. Optimism seemed mostly absent from the spacious Oscar Niemeyer-designed biennial pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, where a second Harrell performance – Dancer of the Year (2019) – felt, at points, like a lamentation.

In five solo acts, Harrell melded movements from vogue, modern dance and African-American praise dancing to a plaintive piano score. Clad in a flowing black dress, he pranced and swayed his arms from side to side – seductively at first, then in seeming distress, as his hands moved in front of his face, as if to deflect a blow. This physical melodrama slurred in the second act as Harrell stumbled across the stage’s red carpet, barely picking himself up each time he appeared ready to fall. In the third and fourth acts, his arms swept up towards the ceiling in broad arcs that resembled, variously, vogueing gestures and affirmations in a Black church, as his face contorted in either spiritual agony or ecstasy. Finally, as the piano soundtrack grew more frenzied, Harrell’s footing became light and capricious. Once again, he seemed to vogue along the red-carpet runway, finding power and grace in his body just as it neared the point of exhaustion.

Harrell developed the piece in response to his selection in 2018 by Tanz magazine as ‘Dancer of the Year’. Each act reflects a stage in his artistic development, from early explorations of his own physicality to forms of modern dance, and finally to a kind of apotheotic mastery. Harrell first achieved acclaim for Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church (2010), which examined the racial legacy of the Judson Dance Theater, filtering the modernist gestures of choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton through the movements of ballroom. Dancer of the Year follows course, melding references as diverse as Japanese Butoh, Merce Cunningham and Pepper LaBeija.

Harrell’s performance took place on the curving parapet of the biennial pavilion, around which unfurled a curatorial thread of Black self-representation, including photographs by Deana Lawson, collages by Frida Orupabo and assemblages by the late Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. The significant presence of Black artists seemed, on the one hand, cover for the lamentable absence of Black curators on the biennial team and, on the other, a necessary corrective to the historical whiteness of Brazil’s biggest arts institution, particularly in a country whose population is more than half Black or mixed-race. It was also a reminder of Bolsonaro’s policies, from his degradation of the environment to his COVID-denialism, which have disproportionately hurt the racially and economically marginalized. Yet, as Harrell testified, there is still dancing in dark times. His unique combination of Black queer movement and high modernist dance offers hope that some artists will not just make it through this moment of crisis, but come out stronger.

The 34th Bienal de São Paulo, ‘Faz Escuro Mas Eu Canto’ (‘Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing’) is on view at the Bienal Pavilion until 5 December 2021.

_{Main image: Trajal Harrell, Dancer of the Year, 2019, performance by the artist at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, on 3 September 2021. © Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo}