US SWERVE
In Alex Baczynski-Jenkins’s Us Swerve (2014), performers on rollerblades orbit one another while reciting, remixing, and reformulating fragments of poetry that meditate on the subject of desire. This polyphonic choreographic “score” is perpetually altered by the performers’ movements, attitudes, and affects. As the performers circulate, they begin to channel a queer archive of verses and inflections, including lines from writers such as Essex Hemphill, Eileen Myles, and Langston Hughes. These articulations of desire and the sensuality of repetition both set the rollerbladers in motion and create a tableau for them to move through.
Performers: Zachariah Fletcher, Joseph Funnell, Carlos Maria Romero and Jake Sherwood.
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, performance view, Us Swerve, 2014, Such Feeling, Kunsthalle Basel, 2019. Photos: Diana Pfammatter / Kunsthalle Basel
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Us Swerve, 2014, performance documentation, 2019. Courtesy: the artist and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; photograph: Maarten Nauw
Presented at:
-Kunsthalle Basel for Alex Baczynski-Jenkins ‘Such Feeling’ 27. Sep 2019 – 13. Oct 2019
https://www.kunsthallebasel.ch/en/exhibition/alex_baczynski-jenkins/
-Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2019, co-produced by Julidans.
https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/events/alex-baczynski-jenkins-2#slideshow-72333