Trajal Harrell combines vogue, ancient Greek theater in 'Antigone'

Five years ago, New York City choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell posed this question:

"What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ballroom scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?"

To explore that idea, that query, Harrell, 40, has produced a series of sized pieces (as in "small," "extra-small," and so on, according to length) exploring notions of race and gender identity.

Two of these are being performed at the FringeArts Festival: a 25-minute Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (XS), which hit on Tuesday at the FringeArts hub at 140 N. Columbus Blvd.; and, also at the hub, the 135-minute Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (L), which will be performed with four additional male artists on Friday and Saturday.

It's worth unpacking all the cultural references in those titles. The "XS" is "extra small," and the L is "large." Judson Dance Theater was a group of modernism-rejecting, avant-garde movement artists who worked at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village in 1962-64. They based their work on the teachings of Robert Dunn, a musician who studied with John Cage. Paris Is Burning is director Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary about New York City's feverishly competitive drag and dance ball culture among young black, Latino, gay, and transgender communities. Voguing, or pose-dancing, was an element in both the Judson group's work in the '60s and the ball culture of the '80s. And Antigone is Sophocles' 441 B.C. tragedy.

On Tuesday, Harrell, solo, in near darkness, wriggled and vogued slowly through a Satie-meets-Sakamoto-like soundtrack. Slight, with a friendly manner, Harrell was all too willing to provide insight into his brand of minimalism, and his imaginary pairings of cultures and traditions (ancient Greece meets Manhattan dance culture).

"I always find it interesting to propose a collective reimagining of historical impossibilities so as to create new possibilities for the world we live in," says Harrell, a Yale University graduate who studied with, among other groups, the Martha Graham Dance Company. "I think voguing is probably not that different from what the ancient Greek theater was like.

"There are so many arguments about the ancient theater and how it was practiced, but my instincts tell me that there are major connections between it and voguing in terms of men playing female and male parts; the staging of movement; the competition aspect; and the unbridled fervor of the event, among other things."

So how does one vogue Antigone? Harrell says "the answer will take us back to something 'authentic' to the ancient Greek theater."

Harrell sees the generation before him as anti-spectacle - but Greek tragedy certainly wasn't. And its use of masks and choruses suggests a connection to voguing. "I wanted to get back to the foundations of Western drama," he says, "with voguing the essence of Greek tragedy. According to research on ancient Greek theater, those plays closely reflected rituals and attitudes, gender performativity, and the carnivalesque. In addition, Antigone gave me an opportunity to expand the dialogue with the spectator by opening myself to the theater audience and offering a vision no doubt closer to the original perspective."

Attending vogue and drag balls throughout the late '90s and early 2000s, Harrell found the dancing more postmodern than what he was seeing in theater. In 1999 he performed a solo show that combined voguing with postmodern dance.

"Voguing seemed to me very flamboyant and the opposite of minimalism, and I liked this opposition," Harrell says. Throughout his Antigone Sr., there are looks and poses directly related to the characters in the play, performed by himself and his all-male cast. His "Mother of the House," for example, relates to Queen Eurydice.

And then, with the cross-gender performances, there are elements of drag. When contemporary audiences see men performing as women, it is easy for some to think "drag," "camp," or "travesty," or to base their reactions on existing assumptions about sexual identity. But, as Harrell knows well, sexual identities in ancient Greece did not fall into our categories. "Therefore, perhaps [Greek performance] of mixing genders had its own codes and references. Can we imagine that there was 'Greek Theater realness,' where, like voguing, gender and class or social status were revealed as constructions of codes of fashion and movement?"

Trajal Harrell would like to think so.

Trajal Harrell's Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (L)

7 p.m. Friday and Saturday at FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Blvd.

Tickets: Adults, $29; students, $15.

Information: www.fringearts.comEndText