Gutierrez, whose work often calls attention to the precariousness of life in the performing arts, is experiencing a period of midcareer abundance.
The choreographer and performer Miguel Gutierrez, known for his outspokenness onstage and off, sometimes jokes about his reputation for complaining. As he put it recently, while chatting over lunch at a restaurant in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, “I have such a brand of, like, kvetcher.”
Gutierrez, 51, was reflecting on the opportunities that had come his way since 2018, when, as a prominent midcareer artist, he had struggled to secure funding for his latest project, an effort chronicled in his podcast “Are You for Sale?” In contrast to that discouraging moment, he is now entering one of the most bountiful periods in his 22 years of making dance-based performances.
Over six weeks this spring, in an alignment of plans that he likens to “some bizarre astrological event,” three of Gutierrez’s pieces will be presented at three New York City theaters: “Cela Nous Concerne Tous (This Concerns All of Us),” for 25 dancers of Ballet de Lorraine, April 21 and 22 at N.Y.U. Skirball; “I as another,” a new duet with the dancer Laila J. Franklin, May 4-7 at Baryshnikov Arts Center; and “Variations on Themes From Lost and Found: Scenes From a Life and Other Works by John Bernd,” a revival of a 2016 collaboration with the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones and the composer Nick Hallett, May 25-June 3 at Danspace Project.
After decades of piecing together an income through short-term teaching gigs, grants and assorted side jobs — like so many artists working in the chronically underfunded field of experimental dance — Gutierrez is also settling into life with a newfound level of job security. Last year he became an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in January he was awarded a two-year residency at New York Live Arts, which comes with a full-time salary, health insurance and ample support for the creation of a new work.
When asked to compare his frustrations of five years ago to his current abundance, he laughed. “I know, right?” he said. “It’d be so shady if I keep complaining.”
But Gutierrez’s complaints have never been just about his own difficulties; they have called attention, more broadly, to the precarious material conditions of a life in the performing arts, especially in the United States. His prolific output of interdisciplinary work — spanning dance, theater, music, writing and combinations thereof — has often included trenchant, darkly funny structural critiques, addressing the faults in the very systems that undergird his art-making. As three performers (one of them in costume as Gutierrez) pointedly sing in the second installment of “Age & Beauty,” his 2014-15 trilogy dealing with themes of queerness and midlife anxiety:
So success in our age is defined by the rules of late-stage capitalism
If you want to resist, can you ever [expletive] pay your rent?
So do you join a system that’s underscored by all the -isms?
Or do you find a way to make your artwork a voice of dissent?
Gutierrez may have less to kvetch about these days, but he doesn’t intend to leave the dissent part of his artwork behind. Even as he has landed “a nice cushy university job,” he said, he’s committed to “not using any sort of success as a shield from progress or evolution in the field.”
In ways both direct and subversive, that rebellious spirit animates his works on view in New York this spring, perhaps most obviously in “Cela Nous Concerne Tous (This Concerns All of Us).” Created in 2017 for Ballet de Lorraine at the national choreographic center in Nancy, France, it is Gutierrez’s largest-scale work to date. When invited by the company to respond to the theme of France’s political uprisings of May 1968, he had been thinking about how to summon “an unpredictability of form,” he said, through combinations of improvisation and set choreography. Against a bubble-gum pink backdrop, the colorfully clad (and unclad) dancers investigate and liberate their bodies in what looks like a hybrid of protest, orgy, dance class and bacchanalian rite — and one that doesn’t contain itself to the stage.
Petter Jacobsson, the company’s general director, described the work in a video interview as “a crescendo — it goes from zero, so to speak, up to madness.”
Escalations toward unruliness appear in many of Gutierrez’s works, and while some viewers may see pure chaos, his colleagues often comment on its underlying order; there’s a method to the madness.
“He can weave this sense of freedom or anarchy or joy,” said Judy Hussie-Taylor, the executive director of Danspace. “But underneath it, there’s real fine structure. He’s like a craftsperson.” Houston-Jones, a longtime friend of Gutierrez who has performed in two of his shows, sees a similar quality in his presence onstage, calling it “this wildness that’s also controlled.”
That tension is partly what drew Franklin, a 25-year-old dance artist who performs in “I as another,” into Gutierrez’s orbit. Before the two began collaborating on a duet that she describes as “concerned with the opacity of relation” — or alternately, a portrait of “strangers on a spaceship” — she had seen video of his boisterous 2019 work “This Bridge Called My Ass.”
“I was really interested in how it felt so chaotic but so self-contained,” she said. Her biggest takeaway from being immersed in his process, she added, “is that there’s logic to the structure, even if it’s not apparent from the beginning.”
Both “I as another” and “This Concerns All of Us,” Gutierrez said, channel a recurring preoccupation: contending with “the enormity of feeling that we carry, trying to understand what to do with that enormity, or that spillage of feeling. I think the stage is one of the places where I really allow for that excess to come, that can’t really be expressed in daily life.”
Gutierrez has been seeking an outlet for that excess since his days as a self-described “jazzerina” growing up in New Jersey. Born to Colombian immigrant parents in Queens, N.Y., he wound up, contrary to their wishes, on a path that was far from linear.
“My parents were really hell-bent on my sister and me getting a good education,” he said. “That was literally their reason for living, especially my dad.” When Gutierrez dropped out of college on the East Coast to join the Joe Goode Performance Group in San Francisco, it was, he now observes, a “bourgeois” rebellion against their expectations. (In 2020, he returned to Brown University, where he had first enrolled about 30 years earlier, and completed his degree.)
“I don’t think I was ready for college when I got to college,” Gutierrez said, noting that his strict upbringing left him little room for self-exploration, especially with respect to his sexuality. Aside from parental pressures, his training at local dance studios reinforced rigid gender roles, in particular his ballet partnering classes, which “didn’t make a lot of sense to me,” he said. “I think I really, really, really needed to have sex, gay sex, and do drugs and just unravel the first 18 years of life’s lessons.”
Gutierrez later grew closer with his parents, but their early resistance to his artistic aspirations gave rise to what he calls “a backlog” of creative impulses, “a fertile ground in my imagination for everything I could possibly want to do.”
That’s one theory he proposes for why, as he said in a 2011 performance of his riotous solo “Heavens What Have I Done,” “I like to just always be making things.” His myriad projects, not limited to dance and choreography, include a cabaret show, “Sadonna” (melancholic Madonna covers); “Stargayze,” a sporadically updated blog on the emotional intensity of celebrity sightings; and “Sueño,” a bilingual album and musical performance.
In rehearsals and classes as much as onstage or on the page, Gutierrez prizes “really going for it,” said the artist Stephanie Acosta, his dramaturge for the past several years. “Nothing stresses him out more than thinking that people have gotten bored or disconnected. That for him is just like, What are we even here for, if not to be alive in the room together?”
After calling New York home for 25 years, Gutierrez is now adjusting to bicoastal life, while also completing a masters’ thesis through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (in a program that allows for remote study). To his own surprise, he has gravitated toward a genre that was brand-new to him: drawing. “There’s no way to overstate how weird it is to make a thing that then exists,” he said, comparing his experiments on paper to the evanescence of live performance.
Looking back on his decades-long devotion to a fleeting medium, Gutierrez offers another explanation for his drive to always be making: “I came up in the age of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic, and I feel like a lot of people didn’t get to fulfill their work. That made a huge impression on me, and so I do feel like it’s my responsibility — I don’t feel like my creativity is mine to hold onto.”
In “Variations on Themes,” his collaboration with Houston-Jones and Hallett, the artists have constructed a new work based on the archive of John Bernd, an interdisciplinary artist and a friend of Houston-Jones who died of AIDS complications in 1988, at 35.
“That piece feels very much about ancestry in a way that is not generic,” Gutierrez said, “because it’s very directly about a particular artist, who touched the lives of many people whose lives touched me.” When he says, of this exciting and busy moment in his career, “I didn’t do it by myself,” it’s a reminder of community, lineage and the rebels who have come before.
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