You feel it before you see it. When you walk from the lobby into the theater, SLAMDANCE garage folds you into its metaphorical embrace, with a gentle loop that vibrates through your nervous system like a punk sound bath.
I want to be clear with you, dear readers, right from the jump. I’m trans, I’m a playwright, I’m a punk of the hardcore kid variety (you can argue amongst yourselves if it's not punk to call yourself punk), and I strongly believe that community will see us through. So when I read marketing phrases like “part hardcore punk concert, part communal ritual, and part performance piece,” I had a strong suspicion it was going to be my jam (and spoiler alert: it was).
After the threshold, you’re in Cheyanne Williams’ genius production design, an elevated playground with equal parts controlled chaos and intentional space. At the heart is a circle of percussion, strings, and technology, including a custom one-string bass as a nod to musical traditions of the African diaspora.
Projected on the back wall are captions that will continue throughout the entire show, with occasional pops of stylized font that never detract from the accessibility function.
Ian Andrew Askew, the creator and performer, is there immediately, bobbing and weaving through the audience in a shirt with a spine made of safety pins. They are everyone you might meet at a show; in one moment, the person content to lean against the wall and witness, then a body moving through the pit in circles, even once making sustained eye contact with a seated audience member, passing a gentle smile as the only person in the space unmasked.
When it’s time for the speaking to begin, Ian, our frontperson for the evening, shakes us from our stiff theater-going rules. Then, they get to work. They build each song right before our eyes, looping layers of sound until we get to hear them unleash their vocals. It’s everything, honestly. Some of the text is borrowed, hand-in-hand with the Black punks who are cemented in history like Marlon Whitfield in the documentary Another State of Mind: “if I was Black and normal, I’d still get fucked with, so I might as well do what I want to do and just take my chances.” Ian pulls time into a vortex with every song and sound clip that takes us through both outsider and insider perspectives on the subculture. I fear every word I try to use to describe this show will make it sound clinical, but to be in the belly of this show, to be the roiling guts, is one of the most visceral experiences I have ever been a part of.
Swung around from upstage, hugging the instruments, is a river of cables that feels like a hardcore art installation to the highest proportions. It’s into this channel of cables that Itohan Edoloyi’s lighting design breathes new life partway through the show, light traveling through not unlike veins or arteries. It’s behind this cabling that Ian slips, closest to the captions that they’ve been the entire show, to deliver a (cerebral, sharp, poetic) monologue about the function of a pit as a place to get comfortable with your body and your rage, a place to be in practice for the ongoing revolution.
In the days that have followed, I can’t shake the imagery of this monologue, the idea that up against cop cities, we might collectively know how to swarm, to move like a fluid, singular, massive body. I can’t shake the moment when Ian asks for an audience member, preferably someone who is also Black, to help them stop moving at the end of a movement sequence. I can’t shake the memory of the room taking stock of one another, reaching out to one another with only our energy or the moment of someone stepping forward to put a gentle hand on Ian or the moment of the two of them, together in their own performance within a performance, gently sharing weight back and forth. I can’t shake it and I don’t want to. Ian’s honesty is a relief.
If push comes to shove – literally – controlled consensual contact can prepare us to do what we might need to in order to get us free. All of us. And when the shoving gets to be too much, we must remember to hold one another, to bring each other back when the violence starts to consume us.
I’ll admit, some of trusting the nature of a pit comes from being in one. It is much like life in that regard, you have to be an active participant, and even then it’s not guaranteed to go well. But to know what it’s like to belong not only to yourself but also to the entire room of people around you? That you can only understand by doing it.
You don’t have to ever have been to a punk show before. You don’t even have to like punk. I don’t even think you have to like experimental theater. You just have let it hold you and crack you open. Somewhere tucked away inside a coil of cables, in a burst of light, spliced into Anthony Sertel Dean’s sound design, in the elbow throw of Justin Allen’s movement design, running through Ian Andrew Askew’s body, impossible to cage or pin down, is something completely, brilliantly alive.
--
SLAMDANCE garage is running at The Bushwick Starr through March 1st.
