not to be confused with all out, FULL OUT... - 19 Minutes

Created and Performed by: Joel Mejia Smith

Music: 

​

Premiered at: Not Festival, UC Riverside Performance Lab, Riverside, CA, February 18, 2018

​

Supporting Materials This Review Period

Festival Website: Not Festival

​

​

My creative activity has also taken shape in solo form and as an extension of the work I developed last review period in Loop(ed) and UNSCENE, where I challenged ideas about queerness, (my) male body and its refusal to be fixed. In Not to be confused with all out, Full Out…, premiering as part of the Not Festival at the University of California, Riverside, an international festival of queer and experimental performing artists, I similarly interrogate representations of (my) queer subjectivity. I work with Avant Garde Jazz and popular music as counterpoints, and experiment with the Jazz dance training living inside my body to question what it means to be Full Out, references to outness intended. First approaching the dancing from its roots as an improvisational form, to the popular industry dancing that is largely fixed in its choreography as codified steps, I stage the work as a diptych, one idea next to another, to show contrast, but also to defy any expectations that might be placed on (my) body to be a/the thing it’s expected to produce – masculine/rigid/ tough and/or feminine/fluid/articulate. Wearing black briefs and latex high-heeled boots, I improvise Jazz dancing, embodying ideas of sensuality, erotica, circularity, ritual, pattern, repetition, syncopation, and resistance all while demonstrating the labor of the form – heels to demonstrate the precarity of being up when I should be down (or the challenge of being off-balance), and movement that I would teach in my Jazz classes but that in this work never crystalizes into a combo, or “choreo” as our students say. In part two, I dance a long winded combo straight from my Jazz classes, this time fully clothed with sneakers, to Michael Jackson’s “Get on the Floor” in more of commercialized version of the form – codified steps, virtuosic attack, use of balletic movements with kicks and turns, low and syncopated. The work culminates with me bringing audience members on stage, returning  back to the ‘social’ which Jazz is largely known for.

​

Note: I have always wondered how I can teach Jazz as a movement practice class, but don't perform what I teach as part of the dances I present for the stage. While my Jazz training certainly informs how my body moves in my professional work, I largely avoid it. This, what felt like a contradiction and recurring question of mine,  "How can I encourage and help shape students to dance the form with integrity and full-commitment - FULL OUT - and not perform it myself in my current professional practices"?, led to Not to be confused... Could I perform Jazz and work with the form to support and sustain a longer, substantial work, that was theatrical, critical, and that was not derivative of what I teach by way of combos nor what is so prevalent in competition studios, music videos or television shows? How could I do this for one? 

​

​

Work Sample