Kenya Gillespie | Give / 2023

give and take

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kenya Gillespie (screenwriter and director) Give / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

This highly sentimental film is further made nearly insufferable by using as its narrative a bad poem by Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy. If the director had been able to create a real script, the film might have almost engaged us. But the story of the young composer Adam (Bryan Mittelstad) and the classical singer with whom he works and evidently had a relationship, Patrick (Joem DeCandio) is instead presented as a kind of memorial to their sexual interactions.

    For reasons rather unexplained Patrick walks out of their relationship, leaving a longing Adam to attempt to compose logic and music for their breakup. The two seemed to hook up in the perfect coupling, composer/pianist with the wonderful singer. The film, in fact, begins in a church where Patrick is singing and Adam is accompanying him on the organ, and you almost immediately think of the possibilities of these two coming together and even marrying given the setting.

     But obviously their close friendship and sexual bonds are broken. If we only knew why. If we only knew what their relationship was truly about, it might help. But poet Duffy’s poetic narrative gives us no clue:

 

“Give me, you said, on our very first night,

the forest. I rose from the bed and went out,

and when I returned, you listened, enthralled,

to the shadowy story I told.

 

Give me the river,

you asked the next night, then I’ll love you forever.

I slipped from your arms and was gone,

and when I came back, you listened, at dawn,

to the glittering story I told.

 

Give me, you said, the gold

from the sun. A third time, I got up and dressed,

and when I came home, you sprawled on my breast,

for the dazzling story I told.

 

Give me,

the hedgerows, give me the fields,

I slid from the warmth of our sheets,

and when I returned, to kiss you from sleep,

you stirred at the story I told.”

 

    Unfortunately, in this film we are missing the story, which is truly necessary in film, despite its focus on the visual image.

     I advise you to leave this film behind unless you are into pretty boys running through fields, breaking up, and walking up to the ocean waves in despair.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2025).

 

Jorge Dunn (performer) | Bolero / 1982

call to sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jorge Dunn (performer) Bolero / 1982

 

I have never been a fan of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, and apparently he wasn’t either, responding when a woman, after hearing it, told him he was mad, that she was absolutely right. It is and endlessly repetitive piece of about 15 minutes if you follow the rhythms he prescribed, which the great conductor Toscanini refused to play (his version was 12 minutes), causing a break between the composer and conductor.

      But when I saw Argentine dancer Jorge Dunn’s sensual performance I realized truly how  homoerotic this piece was. Dancing bare-chested Dunn uses his entire body to lure the viewer in, even, at times, gesturing with what appear be kisses thrown at the observers. Dunn’s body thrusts forward and backward as if in an orgasm of sex. Meanwhile a group of men sit behind him, a couple joining him as he performs on a raised red circular structure; and then, gradually, others follow as the rhythms of the piece continue and obviously their attraction to this sexual object of desire grows. Slowly more and more of the seated men join in on the sexual orgy, until finally by dance’s end all of the have joined him.

     One might describe this as the male version of Salome’s dance of the seven veils, without any veils, and with an invitation for the observers to join in.

     This work is clearly and almost entirely a homoerotic invitation into the frenzy of dance, a wild call to his male friends to venture out of their voyeurism and join him in his sexual balletic maneuvers. It is the most sexual ballet, perhaps, ever created. It is a gesture for others not only to take notice of his body, but to join in the sexual frenzy of the 15-minute dance.

     I truly can’t imagine what Dunn’s performance is but an expression of gay sexuality, calling forth the lust of all the men watching him perform.

     Dunn danced with the Maurice Béjart's Ballet of the 20th Century, appearing in at least 4 films, one directed by his filmmaker nephew, Aliocha Itovich. He died of AIDS in 1992 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2025).

Vaslav Nijinsky (choreographer) | L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune (Afternoon of the Faun) [performance by Rudolf Nureyev with the Joffrey Ballet] / 1979

sexual illusions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vaslav Nijinsky (choreographer), L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune (Afternoon of the Faun) [performance by Rudolf Nureyev with the Joffrey Ballet] / 1979

 

Although we do have a 3-minute tape of Nijinsky’s original performance of the Claude Debussy-based Afternoon of a Faun, it is so badly filmed, with missing segments, that it is hard to know what his performance really looked like. But fortunately we have a full video/CD performance of Rudolf Nureyev’s 1979 performance, based on Nijinsky’s original choreography, that I couldn’t imagine being less sensuous that the original 1912 original.

    This ballet is not at all “gay” in its substance; but the focus on the faun’s body, with his constantly erect tale and seeming half-nude ballet costume with piebald shapes to suggest the faun’s skin is most certainly homoerotic, particularly since in ends in a kind of festishized frotting of one of the nymph’s shawl, dropped in her escape from the faun.

      The work was purposely archaic, the movements meant to looked like the figures on Greek urns. Yet the work was also represented a radical shift from traditional ballet, taking it in new directions that would lead to modern dance companies like the Joffrey (where I studied for a few months).

       And the gay dancer Nureyev does everything he can to eroticize the role, twisting his torso in ways that feature his groin and erect tail. Even his arm gestures early in the ballet, as the fawn awakens become somewhat sexual.

       The fawn, even if he is attracted to the six nymphs, particularly their leader (danced by Charlene Gehm in this production), acts as a king of narcissism, and it is his body upon which the dance focuses, as the nymphs merely move laterally across the stage in posed positions, hands high in the air as on the Greek statuary.

        Even after the departure of the nymphs, Nureyev draws attention to his movements as he performs a series of astonishing relevés as he moves up to stony cliff to his original sleeping spot.

       And his final fetishizing of the lost shawl upon which he rubs his full body is truly sexual. If it might symbolize the woman who wore it, it is his sexual act to which we are witness rather than intercourse with a woman. And, after all, the faun is left with only a shawl, not with a nymph. Even in Mallarme’s far more heterosexual original poem, we realize that the sexual encounters of the faun were just an illusion.

     Is it any wonder that this ballet both delighted and scandalized Paris audiences upon its premier? It also a parting of the ways between the Ballet Russes and choreographer Michel Fokine, Fokine jealous of Nijinsky and director Sergei Diaghilev’s attentions, both on and off-stage, to him.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 26, 2025).