Gislina Patterson

Playing House:  

Queer and Young at the End of Capitalism 

Canada is in a housing crisis. Crisis comes from the Greek krinein meaning  decide. In late middle english crisis meant the turning point of a disease, the point at  which a patient recovers or dies. Housing itself is a kind of turning point, an axis  on which the spokes of capital turn. “…not only is housing an unequally-distributed  

consumer good and a globally-traded investment vehicle,” says sociologist David  Madden, “it’s also a site of labor in itself. Capitalism could not exist without the  constant work of maintaining workers, and much of this happens at home, unwaged.”1 Identifying this moment as a crisis in a plan released on April 12th, the Liberal  minority government can imagine nothing more than increasing tax rebates and  relaxing zoning laws2 to allow speculative investors to build more cramped,  unsafe, overpriced housing, while the Conservative opposition leverages  xenophobia, blaming immigration for the prohibitively high cost of rent and  home ownership. While these two neoliberal parties trade barbs and platitudes,  the unpaid, unseen labour of social reproduction is atrophying under above guideline rent increases, stagnant wages, collapsing healthcare, grocery price gouging, and over-policing, and a generation enters adulthood unsure if  housing, let alone a home, is in the cards for them. 

In Anaïs Bosse and Odéah Roy’s research, they dis-place contemporary dance  into domestic space. In the book Musical Elaborations, Palestinian author and  scholar Edward W. Said explores the gulf between private and public experiences  of music. He defines public performance as an alienating extreme occasion, one  that depends on the existence of unseen faculties and powers that make it possible: the  performer’s training and gifts; cultural agencies like concert associations… the  conjunction of various social and cultural processes (including the revolutions in  capitalism and telecommunication, electronic media, jet travel).3 He contrasts this with  

1 David Madden, Housing and the Crisis of Social Reproduction (https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/ housing/333718/housing-and-the-crisis-of-social-reproduction/) 

2 Infrastructure Canada, Solving the Housing Crisis: Canada’s Housing Plan 

3 Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (Columbia University Press 1991)

private experiences of classical piano music, specifically the mostly lost practice  of listeners playing scores on the piano for family and friends in domestic space.  Anaïs and Odéah’s research confronts the possibilities limitations of inhabiting  both of these engagements simultaneously. Through this experiment both are  transformed; choreography wreaks havoc on the home, the home wreaks havoc  on choreography. Their first sequence sees them in a kitchen, drifting in and out  of focus. The camera peers into a domestic scene, floating over two women’s  shoulders as they cuddle in front of the stove, cooking chocolate chip pancakes.  As the camera pulls back, one dancer gives the other her weight and spins,  landing with her hands flat on the counter, her leg in the air. She climbs onto the  counter, grabs a glass of a high shelf, and transfers delicately onto the other  dancers shoulder. The two dancers, now one, attached crotch-to-shoulder, float  across the room as the camera closes in and a thigh, an elbow, the back of a head  fill the frame. In a kitchen, this definitional site of domestic labour, their lift takes  on new meaning. The camera catches Odéah’s eye as Anaïs hands down her  glass, the look on her face is neutral, almost bored. Anaïs, her head narrowly  missing the track lights hanging from the ceiling, fills the glass with orange juice.  The colliding of this acrobatic feat – two dancers in a lift, transferring the weight  of liquid from one glass vessel to another, surrounded by sharp corners, knives, a  hot stove – with the causally affectionate interaction of the performers makes  visible the skill and craft inherent to the everyday labour of domestic care work.  

Subsequent sequences see the dancers in a bedroom, a bathtub, a dining  room. There’s an intense vulnerability to some scenes, a strange intimacy in  seeing piles of dirty laundry on their floors, the paintings and posters tacked up  above their beds. A centrepiece finds them crawling around a clawfoot tub with  the shower running, their hair and matching white slips soaking wet. There’s  something very indulgent about this dance, a lazy, languid quality to their  movements. Odéah reaches one red-fingernailed hand out of the tub, like Carrie  from her grave, and Anaïs pulls her up, reversing the dynamic of the first  sequence, setting her on the edge of the tub like a rag doll. These sequences are  obscurely framed, our access to the dancers tightly controlled, other shots are cropped close on hands, knees, sneakers skipping across astroturf. This  voyeuristic tension is most explicit in sequences where the dancers are viewed  through a frosted window at night, their silhouettes blurring together, dancer  and choreographer abstracted by distance and privacy film. 

There’s another tension bubbling under the surface of this research. At 20  years old the dancers find themselves navigating the precarious space between  childhood and adulthood where it is important, both personally and  professionally, to be taken seriously by people who might be attached to an idea  of them as children. In our society children, as a class, are the poorest people.  They have the least rights. They are the easiest people to hurt and kill, yes,  because they are usually smaller than most adults but also because they cannot  decide where they live and with whom. They can work but they cannot decide  how to spend their money or their time. They can’t even vote to improve their  conditions. The class of people that holds power over children, that oppresses  them and benefits from that oppression, is adults. With that in mind is it any  wonder that adults, even well meaning ones, struggle to admit even to  themselves that someone they knew as a child has crossed that axis and become,  on some level, their social equal? (Take, for example, 20 year old dance prodigy  JoJo Siwa, at one point the most famous child in the world, who recently  announced on a morning show that she has picked out a sperm donor and names  for her first three children – Freddie for a girl, Eddie and Teddy for twin boys.4 Unable to transcend the identity of child on her own, she asserts it by creating  new children to be defined in contrast to.) This is the rocky terrain Anaïs and  Odéah are so gracefully dancing across. At the same time it’s important that this  project is about youth, that it feels youthful, that it’s made by young people. A  word that comes up again and again is professionalism. Of the chaotic marathon  shoots staged in their parents homes, Roy and Bossé self-effacingly cop to being  unprofessional. On the day I visit they’re filming in Odéah’s kitchen; there are  small appliances stacked against one wall, baby-gates holding two huge dogs at  

4 Hannah Sacks, JoJo Siwa Reveals She Got the Names of Her Three Future Children Tattooed: ‘Got  a Sperm Donor Lined Up’ (https://people.com/jojo-siwa-reveals-she-got-the-names-of-her-three-future children-tattooed-8602257)

bay. Butter burns on the stove, the kitchen fills with smoke, the hood fan is so  loud they have to shout. They repeat phrases over and over at each other, filling  the silence as they watch back footage, wash dishes, reset props. On the day I  visit this is, notably, the first few lines of JoJo Siwa’s universally derided new  single Karma. Communicating in shorthand, they adapt on the fly as their studio  choreography chafes against the size and shape of the kitchen. In their research,  they’re not just making work about youth, they’re making work with a youthful  methodology. This is clear in the way the collaborate, adaptive, elastic,  completely committed to a lateral structure, neither dancer pulling rank to get  their way. Edward W. Said suggests that the alienation of audience from  performer and from the process of making art is due to the professionalization  and rarification of musical performance. Maybe contemporary dance could  benefit from a little more of this kind of “unprofessionalism”. 

I was a bad girl, I did some bad things 

I swear I did it all for fun and it meant nothing

Though it resulted in a beautiful, engaging, and evocative choreography,  Bossé and Roy found the home a choreographic dead space, impossible to  choreograph in with a hostile architecture that very literally repressed their  expressions of queer love. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee  Edelman proposes a radical reimagining of queer identity as separate from, and  in conflict with, what he calls reproductive futurism, a futurism that he says is  always purchased at our expense. In this state a figural child, but not any living  child, embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in  the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are  allowed.6 In always imagining this future child, our needs today are dismissed in  favour of a possible tomorrow. Austerity politics, border control, the carceral  system and military industrial complex, all are justified by the figural child who  must never grow up7 and therefore queerness must assert itself in the now. The  

5 JoJo Siwa, Karma (Rock Mafia) 

6 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press 2004) 7 Edelman, No Future

housing crisis has to continue forever or the stock market will collapse, banks  will close, Gen X won’t be able to retire, the bubble just has to get bigger and  bigger and bigger. The housing crisis can’t exist without capitalism, capitalism  can’t exist without the family, the family can’t exist without the home. There is no  future. We can bend to reproductive futurism and dream of it anyway, or we can  choose to self-negate, cancel the future, and build our dream-house now. 

At the end of the video, Odéah steps off of a chair into Anaïs’s arms, who  carries her out of frame. The camera lingers on the empty dining room, the red  taper candles burning on the mantle and the dancers step into real life, 3  dimensions in 2D domestic space. Dancing in the beam of the projector their  bodies disappear into the walls. They’re real, realer than ever, but the spectre of  the home negates them, turning them to shadows. 

Consciously or sub-consciously, Roy and Bosse’s research embodies the  moment of crisis in which they happen to be transitioning from childhood to  adulthood by pushing on the accepted hierarchies of choreographic practice.  Dissolving the lines between dancer/choreographer, labour/play,  professionalism/unprofessionalism, work/home, the work they create is truly  contemporary, almost painfully so, existing only in the moment it is danced,  witnessed only by a camera, relinquishing the ironic distance of making work  ‘about’ something. These researchers aren’t examining their subject, peering  through a microscope at bacteria in a petri dish, they are the subject, the are the  bacteria, granting us a peek at the edges of their maturation and mutation  refracted through a camera lens, a mirror, a frosted window. When one observes the  self, says memoirist Dodie Bellamy, if one stays true to what one sees there, the self  becomes a portal for the rest of the world to rush into, a wavering point from which  history past and present streams. Observing the self, one taps into the larger culture in  which it is embedded.8 

When I asked if they ever play characters when they dance, Anaïs and Odéah  8 Dodie Bellamy, Unbearable Intimacies, in Bee Reaved (Semiotext(e) 2021)

were quick to answer. No. Definitely not. When I’m dancing, I’m me. Even if I’m  playing a tree; it’s me, as a tree.

M.A.D. 

For Marie-Anne Dufosset 

the wrong body was born  

out of a wrong body &  

a wrong body before that 

the body was so wrong it spoke  

french 

it slept at night & rose in the morning 

it got sick & got better 

the body wanted it wanted 

if it had not been wrong you see  

it would not have wanted 

anything 

i was born in the wrong body 

i let the devil mark it in three places 

actually i asked her to 

actually i begged her not to 

actually i faked it 

actually  

i can’t remember 

wrong body stands upright 

needs water, nutrients, 

exercise  

wrong body rides the bus 

or drives a car 

wrong body goes to work 

drinks tim hortons coffee 

kicks the can down the road 

the body was wrong it had to be 

burned 

& the body the body came from 

& the bodies the body 

touched 

for five weeks 

you sat at the window 

with your head shaved 

fingernails pulled out 

wanting 

hoping  

for rain

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Portage  Avenue? 

Abolition Geography in Winnipeg Square 

Maura García’s first impression of Winnipeg is that the ground is soft. When  she digs in it with her fingers, there are no stones. Dirt here is dark in colour  which she’s only seen in places near the ocean, but there’s no ocean near here.  Maybe there was at one point, she doesn’t know. She claims not to know much  about geology or geography. I don’t know much about geography either, in high  school my geography teacher decided he could teach us anything he wanted  because, as he saw it, geography was the study of the earth and everything that  happens there. By this metric, I believe Maura may be the worlds foremost  geographer. 

In contrast to strains of contemporary dance that cling to the traditions of  ballet where dancers float and feign weightlessness, Maura García’s  choreography is all about the ground. Part of her research transforms adaptive  movements she developed while healing from a broken bone into choreography.  In one move, called the three legged bear crawl, she bounds across the studio one  one leg and two hands, the other leg raised high behind her. Watching Maura  share this choreography with another dancer, she specifies that this is about  travelling, not about lifting your leg higher, or moving with the most grace.  Watching her perform this choreography herself is awe-inspiring, partly because  Maura is an incredibly skilled dancer, but also because it lives in her body as a  real, motivated, everyday movement, a choreography of survival. In a practice so  often resistant to difference and adaptation, Maura’s methodology rigorously  incorporates body diversity as a gift, rather than an impediment, to  contemporary dance. Moving in this way, with her face close to the ground, is  where Maura’s curiosity about the earth and what lives beneath it comes from.  She bases choreography on the routes of groundwater, the movements of  centipedes as they go from walking to swimming. She wonders if centipedes  walk or swim when they are under the earth, and she will never know, because 

what happens underground cannot be observed without being disturbed. 

In 1971, the city of Winnipeg made a deal with the Trizec Corporation for a  new development at the intersection of Portage Avenue and Main Street. To start  the project, Trizec required the city to acquire the dozens of buildings already on the land, demolish them, and build foundations for their planned bank, two  office towers, hotel, and winter garden. After four years of demolition and  construction, Trizec threatened to pull out unless the city agreed to one last  condition: close the famous Portage and Main intersection to foot traffic and  build an underground concourse and shopping mall that pedestrians would  have to use to cross the street. The city, already down $11,000,000, agreed,  commodifying not just the land, but the people walking on it, turning  pedestrians on a public street to consumers in a private mall. Three years later  Trizec changed their plans, and ended up constructing only one office building,  aptly named the Commodity Exchange Tower. Instead of a hotel, bank, and winter  garden, the tower was surrounded by a concrete plaza that sat empty as  pedestrians were directed off the street and into the maze-like, windowless  tunnels of Winnipeg Square.9 At the centre of the concourse is The Wall, a 127  metre long poured concrete sculpture by Bruce Hall, a University of Manitoba  educated artist who passed away in 2010. The piece is beautiful, tactile, textural.  It’s astonishing in its size. To get to the four corners of Portage and Main, you  have to walk around it. In an interview with the CBC, art historian Patricia Bovey  said, That work, for me, underlines his deep knowledge of the geology of this place, of the  geography of this place, and gives us a sense of depth. In the middle of the sterile mall  environment, The Wall reminds you that you’re underground, that the walls  around you are holding back tonnes of moist dark earth. In 2023, a membrane  between the street and the concourse began to fail. Like the indefinitely closed  Arlington bridge, this failure wasn’t a surprise, the city knew from the beginning  that parts of the concourse’s infrastructure had an expiration date. In March of  2024, City Council voted 11-3 to open Portage and Main to pedestrians for the  

9 Doug Smith, Winnipeg: Where the buildings have no names and the streets have no crossings (https://policyfix.ca/2018/09/19/winnipeg-where-the-buildings-have-no-names-and-the-streets-have-no crossings/)

first time in 50 years, and permanently close the concourse, sealing The Wall  away underground forever.10 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yic2zdEZ7o 

In exploring local geography, García takes a photo of an excavation site11 across from the Red River College campus. The land itself is owned by  descendants of Alexander Ross, a Scottish colonizer who was given the stolen  land when he moved to what was then the Red River Colony to act as Sheriff.12 The site is currently under the control of Centreventure, an arms length real  estate development corporation created by Winnipeg City Council in 1999. Glen  Murray, mayor at the time, believed that Centreventure must have access to city  assets in order to do business. His plan for Centreventure characterized Winnipeg’s  busy, populated, well-utilized downtown as ‘empty’ and ‘surplus’ because its  residents were primarily poor, working class, disabled, and indigenous. City  council approved this plan, transferring funds to Centreventure out of affordable  housing programs and selling the corporation 44 downtown properties at 1  dollar each. Centreventure then offered this land to wealthy developers who  would build expensive condos whose wealthy residents would demand that the  city increase police presence in the neighbourhood. If there were ever any doubts  about Centreventure as a project of ongoing colonization, they made this clear  themselves when, in 2010, they granted land, along with a government  contribution of $6,000,000 to a white evangelical christian organization to build  Youth For Christ, a ‘community centre for north end youth’.13 In the 14 years  since, Centreventure has continued apace, pushing marginalized residents out of  downtown to advance the gentrification of the Exchange District and Centennial  neighbourhoods, giving land to private real estate developers, building  

10 Cameron MacLean, Winnipeg council approves plan to open Portage and Main to pedestrians (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/portage-and-main-opening-to-pedestrians approved-1.7151756) 

11 Maura García, What The Hell Am I Going To Do? (https://maurathedancer.substack.com/p/what the-hell-am-i-going-to-do) 

12 Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Ross, Alexander (http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ ross_alexander_8E.html) 

13 Owen Toews, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg (ARP Books, 2018)

expensive condos, and occasionally offering the ground floors of those condo  buildings at below market rental rates to arts organizations.14 The excavation site  Maura García photographed is part of an ambitious development project: Market  Lands, a hub of cultural production, mixed affordable and market rate housing  (I’ve heard that one before), and an unspecified ‘community zone’.15 Before  demolition in 2020, it was the site of the euphemistically named Public Safety  Building,16 which served as the headquarters of the Winnipeg Police Service from  1966 to 2016. From the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation: The Brutalist  monumentality of the building, with its insular, fortress-like appearance, is directly  related to the function of the building as a jail and police headquarters… Officers of the  police force worked closely with the architects in the planning of the complex… The  Public Safety Building contained courtrooms, a small detention area, communication and  crime detection facilities… the clerk of the court, the police traffic division, station duty  office… the detective division, crime laboratory, morality division, juvenile division…  female detention [and] male detention quarters.17 The Public Safety Building was  designed by Leslie J. Stechesen, who also designed the Royal Winnipeg Ballet  School. 

In Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence, Earth and Environmental  Science professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes prisons as extracting the force  of life, time, from incarcerated people. The extraction of time from each territory-body  specifically and viscerally changes lives elsewhere—partners, children, communities,  movements, the possibility of freedom.18 In her research proposal, Maura refers to the  rhizome, the underground network of roots that form complex unobserved  communities under our feet. This network is diverse but connected. In her  choreography, she has dancers perform the same movement at different paces,  

14 Centreventure, Art breathes life into heritage building (https://www.centreventure.com/news/art breathes-life-into-heritage-building) 

15 The Winnipeg Foundation, Market Lands Creative Hub (https://www.wpgfdn.org/arts/market-lands creative-hub/) 

16 Unlike most brutalist architecture, the Public Safety Building was not made of concrete but of  tyndall stone, which has a mottled appearance that comes from the burrowing of marine creatures into  limestone deposits. 

17 Winnipeg Architecture Foundation (https://winnipegarchitecture.ca/151-princess-street/) 18 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso Books, 2022)

falling in and out of synch, calling to mind the interactions of plant life in the  rhizome. Gilmore goes on, connecting carceral extraction to resource extraction: At the same time, the particular also implies entire historical geographies in constant  churn. For some examples, think: Gentrification. Auto or steel manufacturing. Coal  mining. Gold mining. Conflict minerals. Fracking.19 Compare this list to the list in  Maura’s research proposal: We empty our lungs. We release our bladders and bowels.  We sweat from our pores. We cut our nails and style our hair. We exfoliate our skin and  clean our teeth. All are mundane, all are elevated moments of spirituality. Each gesture  delays our decay and creates nourishment for the rhizome. Our rituals produce co2,  water, and fertilizers for the rhizome. The rhizome graciously receives these offerings.20 Describing her dance training, she recalls a period spent in a community garden,  planting food in the soil, harvesting, cooking, sharing, feasting, a free give and  take. Her dance transcends the stage, becomes a way of place-making, of being in  the world.  

Gilmore ends her essay with a story: In 1989, in reaction to rising solidarity  among male prisoners, the California Department of Corrections built the Pelican  Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit; The history of SHUs has yet to be fully told;  

it is indisputable that they induce mental and physical illness, which can lead to suicide  or other forms of premature, preventable death. The first strike, whose organizers  represented all of the alleged prison gangs, sent its demands upward to the department of  corrections, asking for modest improvements for all SHU dweller’s experience and fate:  better food, improved visitation, and some way to contest SHU sentences… People in  many non-SHU prisons joined the strike in solidarity, and one died. … 

The Pelican Bay State Prison Collective, hidden from one another, experiencing at  once the torture of isolation and the extraction of time, refigured their world, however  tentatively, into an abolition geography by finding an infrastructure of feeling on which  they could rework their experience and understanding of possibility by way of renovated  consciousness.21 Maura Garía’s research proposal ends: What does the process of the  

19 Gilmore, Abolition Geography 

20 Maura García, Beginnings (https://maurathedancer.substack.com/p/beginnings) 21 Gilmore, Abolition Geography

receipt sound like? What likely unperceivable to us movements does the rhizome make,  each and every root, depending on what it is receiving? Can we even begin to perceive the  depth of its way of sensing, sounding and dancing?22 

Infrastructure fails, the ground pulls us closer to it. It opens up and invites us  inside. It recalls our deaths and the endings of things- days, cities, empires,  prisons. We can’t know what it’s like under the earth until after death but Maura  García’s choreography, rooted in the earth, skipping across it, wriggling under it,  reminds us how much life there is underfoot. It’s not lonely down there. 

22 García, Beginnings