Fallow Fields Bear Fruit: MGPP’s LAST MEADOW

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People/LAST MEADOW
Posted by: Benjamin Ford Asriel
Know this: I’m biased. When I first encountered Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, I was a college student and a comparative troglodyte. Seeing MGPP popped my dance-cherry and redefined my conception of art-making. Awash with post-performance awe and emotion, I wrote Miguel a love letter telling him that MGPP was vital and must continue. Tonight–6 years since my first Powerful performance–I watched the world premiere of Gutierrez’s LAST MEADOW, and I say it again: MGPP, your work is vital and I am honored to see it.

Yet, LAST MEADOW is challenging. Watching it, I struggle to find a safe perspective from which to view it; can I see it as physical theater? dance theater? a staged reading? live film? But LM consistently bucks genre: verbatim James Dean reënactments elide into Modern dance; an emotionally honest monologue reveals itself as premeditated meta-choreography; stylized theater exercises collapse (or explode) into non-fictive candor. I’m thwarted! What can I trust? What’s going on? What is this?!?
In her post, Ariel Frager contends that LAST MEADOW categorizes itself as Performance Art with a capital “P.” Each tag in her litany of performance-art signifiers–“industrial soundscape, wigs, cross dressing, simulated masturbation, simulated intercourse, repetition, witty monologues, innovative dance/movement”–does occur in LM, is an accurate descriptor (except for Neal Medlyn’s fantastic sound, which was more -track than -scape and anything but industrial), and seems to support her case for LM as cooler-than-thou performance art. Perhaps i’m letting my liberal heart bleed in response to the D.K. Row/Tim DuRoche populist vs. elitist debate, but this label-based interpretation falls short of the full picture.
LAST MEADOW, despite all my mental gear-grinding, is dance. It’s choreography, and MG won’t let us forget it. In one memorable moment early on, the action stops abruptly and the performers, who have done little physically but speak and gesture, break into deep pliés, battements, and lunges. Tarek Halaby, in a full-circle skirt, shows off his stunning arabesque, à la Martha Graham. It’s as if Miguel is saying, “don’t forget, y’all, this is a MFing DANCE piece. You know i’m brain-smart. I know i’m brain-smart. But dance–this dance and every dance–is about BODIES.”
In an e-mail blast that Miguel sent out about the premier, he says this, “[In making LAST MEADOW] I thought about how people don’t get dance, and how great it is that there’s something in the world that people don’t ‘get.'” Last Meadow isn’t “gettable,” nor should it be. In between, underneath, and around all the meanings that can be expressed with words, labels, and categories, the dancers’ bodies are palimpsesting their own ur-meanings, desires, conditions, and directives (and all sorts of other connotations one can’t write). This is the language of Last Meadow–time, light, space, sound, relation, bombardment, landscape, breath, sweat, history, future, texture, reference, sex, and bodies–in other words, dance. Go, open your mind and your body, and see what these fantastic dancers have to say.