the Function: a response by Laaura Goldstein
the Function
June 14, 7:30pm
Land + Sea Department, 3124 W Carroll Ave
the Function is created and performed by some of Chicago’s boldest independent artists. Erin Kilmurray is the director, choreographer and production designer. Along with Kilmurray, the collaborative team includes DJ / sound designer, VITIGRRL aka Hannah Viti (self described ‘radical, queer, dyke’ of Slo Mo Party and Good Girls Collective), technical director Bran Moorhead (production manager of Chicago rock venue, Thalia Hall), and celebrated performers Keyierra Collins, Kierah KIKI King, Hannah Santistevan, and Maggie Vannucci. The creative team also includes Sarah Ellen Miller (assistant director), Dani Wieder(dramaturgy), and Sal Yvat (costumes).
Pronouns for the performers are: Keyierra Collins (she/her) , Kierah KIKI King (they/them), Hannah Santistevan (she/her), Maggie Vannucci (she/her).
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On my way to the Function, I considered the impact the title had leading up to the performance itself, and how the word function functions (haha) as both a noun and a verb. It denotes an event, but it also means that something is “working”, whether that means operating in a basic sense, merely functioning, or the subtle connotation of something working well. I relished the journey to the venue on the red and green lines through various parts of the city, going underground and then up to the buildings’ shapes again. I arrived at the Kedzie stop on the green line where gels give the platform’s windows tints that throw the distant skyline as well as the surrounding summer trees into elevated hues of turquoise and orange. During the performance, lighting gels would also be used to “shift the energy”, as a quote from dancer Keyierra Collins explains on the back of the green zine put together by dramaturge Dani Wieder that I grabbed upon entry to the space. Truly what defined this experience for me from beginning to end was how palpably the emotional and kinetic energy shifted as part of a set of decisions made in real time through a system of exploration and trust, and how that experience was shared deliberately and generously with the audience.
In an email to me before the show, choreographer and director of the Function Erin Kilmurray suggested that “the work begins as soon as you enter the building.” As I arrived, a beat curated by DJ / sound designer, VITIGRRL aka Hannah Viti beckoned the line of ticket holders into the space, and upon entering people could be seen recognizing, greeting, and embracing each other. I wandered in to orient myself in the seating that formed a U around a portion of the floor sectioned off for the performance, notably not a stage, but did have a raised platform for seating along one of the sides. I climbed up. Already imbued with the familiar aspects of a certain queer Chicago artist hospitality, I could already sense how Kilmurray fostered and amplified the real interactions of the performance and arts community for this experience. What makes the Function work and work well is a careful, loving and extraordinarily talented direction by Kilmurray of an agile and talented team in which collaboration is a tool that elicits euphoria for everyone involved.
Kierah KIKI King and Maggie Vannucci | photo by Sarah Joyce / Glitterguts
At some point, the DJs shifted seamlessly from VITIGRRL to Bran Moorhead, the technical director. Kilmurray adds that: “Bran does not operate any of the sound cues externally, but manages any of the levels as needed. The dancers cue all of the sound from the onstage laptop.” So as the performance began, someone near me wondered in conversation, “is a performance something that’s experienced by people simultaneously?.” And then “this is for the dancers,” answered a voice between beats from one of the four large speakers surrounding us. Now, the four dancers in their layers of white and gray teased their presence out onto the floor. Like clouds in stages of timelapse, dressed in gray and white, they began their play with shape, proximity and relationship, and established their presence as a beginning, like weather. One dancer grabbed a light and lit another one up, then lit themselves up, as if the sun were in their hands.
Throughout the night, the dancers moved in and out of synchronicity as they supported each other and arrived time and again in a place where they could celebrate their unity. The audience was swept up into each instance and paid their attention in waves of ecstatic exclamation. Soon after the dancers had arrived in the sky, their myth continued its construction in transparency with ladders, lights and lenses dragged and placed around the floor, making new scenes. The dancers moved a laptop around and showed us how they chose tracks, they embraced and held each other’s emotional moments of catharsis after particularly grueling bursts of sustained movement. A quote from Kilmurray in a press release states exuberantly that, “it is so electric and so messy; impulse, desire, and chaos happen just like real life.” I love this quote but my experience of the production reminded me not of daily life, but of the primal forms of life itself: raw energies as old, or older, than the first star.
Keyierra Collins, Maggie Vannucci, and Kierah KIKI King | photos by Sarah Joyce / Glitterguts
I was thinking about how energy itself must enter bodies to experience life, and how those bodies, in turn, must give their energy out to a group and form a system of exchange that sustains life through time. The act of ritual has historically been a way for humans (and other animals) to understand themselves as participants in life in our particular forms, with our particular resources. In versions of modern ritual like the Function, our attention as an audience is drawn into a charged space of intention. We can feel so distinctly somewhere in our bodies how deliberately this space was made equally for everyone who enters it. From the conception of the piece, Erin seems acutely aware of the need for a ritual that crosses and sits in the boundary between our constant need to gather to dance, and our delight in watching others perform dance. And as it unfolds in time, the Function includes pause, transparent set change, and the witness of physical labor in real time as the dancers create and even rip apart their own production. Erin had written to me, “[i]t is really messy and difficult to control, and watching them navigate those errors and strategize forward is just as much of the 'show' as the 'dancing'.” Here is where the Function addresses a need for spontaneity, collaboration and chaos, both in observation and in participation.
Extension cords were distributed among members of the audience sitting in the front rows, which looked like nautical rope from where I was perched. People held it like the lines and curves of waves, and the dancers dropped beneath the surface of this ocean. In this part of the show, we watched them swim towards each other and curve into dreams of a new dance while dance-sleeping. We watched them wonder back towards the sun they had left in a previous chapter, lit up in blue. Electric pieces of torn up cellophane in pinks, purples and blues scattered onto the floor from a hand in front of a fan like a star had finally exploded.
I felt like we all arrived at a state of cleansed exhaustion at the ending having absorbed how much energy it takes to sustain life, to carry the history of life, and to tell the story of life. It takes a lot of energy. At the end of the day, all of it, the joy and its memory, the grief and its echo, is so so hard. I feel like we realized that we’re all working and performing and lighting each other up from somewhere and in a moment of light or from your spot in the seats we’re all keeping all of it together.
Hannah Santistevan, Maggie Vannucci, Keyierra Collins, and Kierah KIKI King | Sarah Joyce / Glitterguts
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Laaura Goldstein's first collection of poetry, loaded arc, was released by Trembling Pillow Press in 2013 and their second collection, awesome camera, was published by Make Now Press in 2014. They have also published several chapbooks with vibrant small presses across the country. They began performing their work as well as teaching in Philadelphia for the Center for Literacy and helped facilitate workshops for Poetry for the People as well as worked at Temple University as a Dean's Appointment. They are now are a Senior Lecturer in Core Literature and Writing at Loyola University Chicago.
