Meet Me in the In-Between: a response by Ryan Adelsheim
Erin Kilmurray and Kara Brody in Knockout
Photo by Sarah Larson
Knockout
Chicago Artist Spotlight Festival, The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago
April 26-27, 2024
Concept + Direction by Erin Kilmurray
Choreographed + Performed by Erin Kilmurray + Kara Brody
Sound Design by Corey Smith
Dramaturgy + Co-Direction by Katrina Dion
Costume Design by Mary Williamson
Production Stage Management by Bran Moorhead
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Erin Kilmurray—gatherer, choreographer, space-maker—co-creates with precise attention to care while playing in and adopting movement languages with abandon. Their most recent piece in development, Knockout, co-choreographed and performed with Kara Brody, co-directed and dramaturged by Katrina Dion, and sound designed by Corey Smith is a thrill-ride duet-in-progress that embraces mess and collage. Knockout lives in the space of the punch—between the moment of contact and hitting the floor, a space of possibility and suspension, of intimacy and desire, of co-creation and queer relational edges.
The queerest question: Do I want to fight her or fuck her?[1]
This between space is also one of play and expansion. Knockout begins with an acknowledgement of the audience—together Kara, Erin, and Corey cast us as spectators in the boxing ring, other bar patrons, and fellow occupiers of their liminal space, continuing Erin’s long project of blurring the line between performers and audience—and then launches into a series of jump cuts. Kara and Erin circle each other, throwing punches with carefully timed cartooned sound effects (generating power, but not danger), moving through a feminine Bond-girl-inspired seduction, and introducing their prismatic characters. We begin to learn their multiple timescales, flashing through all the possibilities of their relationship as they find the edges of possibility: a near kiss turns to roughhousing, a fight sequence to a romantic partner dance. As the piece expands, they begin to move inside the question of queer time, building a collage of intimacy, desire, play, care, and refusal— they are alternately kids in a backyard playing thumb wars and tired lovers in a bar going shot for shot and strangers facing up in a spaghetti Western and superheroes throwing themselves into stunts against the back wall. Liz Gomez’s spectacular lighting design throws Erin and Kara as their own shadows, emphasizes natural time scales with a flashing orange sun or a harsh spotlight as wind blows, and provides the pink light boxes of the bar. It’s a world of possibility that can change in a heartbeat orchestrated by Smith’s layered soundscape, intentionally fractured, staticky, and sometimes stuttering.
Do I want to be her…best friend? Romance or showdown? Partner or rival?
photo by Sarah Larson
The gift of being invited into Erin Kilmurray’s rehearsal room is to see emergent movement and revision, vulnerability and processing, rigor and care in committed action. Knockout is directly reflective of its process, an electric mash of impulses and questions, answered by moving together. Kilmurray talks about coming of age under the shadow of high-femme “ass-kickery” like the 2003 Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle or Gwen Stefani’s post-No Doubt solo debut that defined her early identity and sexuality. Kara and Erin began exploring these vocabularies, commissioning friends to respond with collages or writing, and developing solos with a high-femme vocabulary and seeing where their layering and interruptions produced useful asynchrony and collision. They find moments of play together, ranging from a one-upping game of dance moves, darting behind an audience-bank to take control of the sound cues, to pantsing each other to reveal underwear and jock straps, to gender play as they alternately play up their femininity and strip it down. Clare Croft reminds us that queer dance demands that we are open to collision and sensation —Kilmurray’s work is a perfect case study for this productive interplay, an example of how queerness is central but in a way that cares less about identity than it does to following the impulses of embodied communication. Kilmurray unsettles our experience of time—moving us through memory and movies of assorted genre (Bond films, film noir, and spaghetti westerns all make memorable appearances), dropping us into the texture of realized space, letting us experience the sweat and stickiness of effort in finely articulated silences. The space of these collisions—of story, sound, and movement—form their own language.
Where are the lines between me and you? Mess and motion? Reality and imagination?
With each snap of the sound and lights, each shift from high-octane technical movement to competitive one-uping to an extended, intertwined slow motion, we experience their rushes of adrenaline and desire. With Erin and Kara’s vulnerability, we find our own middle space of mess as we are drawn into the emotional pulses of the piece. We feel the pulls between suspension and action, a rush of relief when they find synchrony, a moment of despair when they refuse, a sharp gasp of the unexpected thumb in a mouth, the surprise of interruption. In Knockout, Kilmurray presents us with multiplicity, of upholding Croft’s insistence that queer dance allows us to see anew, to see multiply, to see each other. What results is erotic, surprising, and familiar—a rollercoaster of interruptions and uncertainties, of being with each other in experimentation and impressive stunts, of a power patterning that is pushing towards something new and undefinable. We are gifted an unfinished becoming that tips its hand to its ongoing development. To start and to show in-process is an act of trust, an insistence that we will be with each other in the space of draft and experimentation, of queer questions and in-betweens.
[1] This form of interruption is borrowed from my favorite piece of dance writing by Clare Croft, who has sparked my own obsession with between spaces. Clare Croft, “Not Yet and Elsewhere: Locating Lesbian Identity in Performance Archives, as Performance Archives,” Contemporary Theatre Review 31, no. 1–2 (April 3, 2021): 34–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1878504.
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Ryan Adelsheim (they/them) is a new play dramaturg, producer, and lecturer at Tufts University, with writing appearing in Theater and the forthcoming Routledge Dramaturgy & History: Staging the Archive collection. They are a doctoral candidate at Yale Drama, where their research focuses on queer theater and performance. ryanadelsheim.com
