The pungent scent of tire rubber permeates the Cascade Bicycle Club. I settle right into a folding chair and watch kelly langeslay pushing a motorbike and slowly circling the room whereas speaking with an viewers member. Langeslay is performing Untitled as a particular visitor of Kara Beadle and Andy Zacek, who created the bigger present, Automorphs, an experimental dance efficiency about bicycle rebels who defy a world subjugated to cars.
Langeslay’s murmured dialog continues with different chosen viewers members. I solely hear the occasional phrase, like “fall” and “first time.” When the home lights dim, langeslay positions a bicycle within the aisle subsequent to the primary row of the viewers and activates the headlight, illuminating a platform the place they elevate one other bike and climb up subsequent to it. Langeslay tears their T-shirt as they discuss, finally chopping a strip with a knife. Using the rag to wash the bike wheel, they describe a recurring nightmare. Something about driving a motorbike off a plywood ramp, a damaged collar bone and the way that they had by no means seen you cry. I start to surprise if langeslay is incorporating a number of the pre-performance interview materials into their poetic monologue. Meanwhile they cross a small delicate merchandise coated in bike grease over their eyelashes. The indisputable fact that I can’t inform if it’s a mascara brush or a bicycle software alerts the start of a blurring of worlds that this present is about. Machine/human, human/expertise…how do the methods we transfer by the world have an effect on how we present up in society?
When langeslay says, “You put the flying machine back in the shed and I had perfect faith in you,” I consider how the Wright brothers used bicycles and the ideas of driving them to create the primary airplane. They knew {that a} bike, like life, is inherently unstable and that it’s the rider’s accountability to maintain their machine balanced amongst continuously altering situations. A rider has to have the ability to circulation and adapt.
According to their bio, Langeslay’s efficiency philosophy imagines “alternative ways of being” and “investigates queer time” as described by the writing of José Muñoz. Muñoz describes queerness as a rejection of “straight time” and the insistence on the right here and now.
Knowing this when langeslay says, “We knew we were from another world,” I begin to admire that queer storytelling permits entry to new “ways of being” that I hadn’t thought-about earlier than. They strip off their pants and reveal they’re sporting a blue night robe the exact colour of their hair. They rear the bike up onto one tire and dance with it, unusually reminding me of a gliding Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers ballroom quantity.
As langeslay twirls off the stage, they activate music and my focus shifts to Beadle standing atop two bicycle helmets. Zacek, coated in helmets in order that he seems like an alien bunch of grapes, pedals a pink ten-speed on a coach, which holds the bike stationary. Zacek peddles sooner and sooner and the coach hums loudly. Meanwhile Beadle descends off the helmets, picks them up, drops them loudly to the ground and faucet dances with abandon. After eradicating their faucet sneakers, Beadle dons a helmet in order that it obscures their face, the usually protecting helmet turns into one thing that separates them from actuality, an uncommon filter by which to see the world. Zacek is totally ensconced in helmets like alien spoor pods about to burst. Zacek’s costume appears to embody the sentiment in his bio that claims “He believes in the empowerment that comes from cycling, and the potential for alternate, parallel worlds that become possible through self-empowerment.”
Amidst loud clacking and cracking sounds, Zacek sheds the helmets. Pacing like animals, he and Beadle placed on leather-based harnesses spiked with protruding steel rods. They take turns utilizing an influence drill to affix bicycle elements to the harnesses. These ingenious morphing-before-our-eyes costumes are Zacek’s brainchild, impressed by his work as knowledgeable bicycle mechanic. Although Zacek just isn’t a dancer, I don’t discover this truth till studying this system later. Frankly, the novelty of transformer-like costumes and the totality of the bicycle world overshadow my notion of the dance motion itself. I’m reminded of the 1982 science fiction movie, “Tron” the place characters are transported right into a videogame the place they develop into one with their modern bikes. One of the earliest CGI movies, the movie succeeded within the suspension of disbelief and sucked me into an all-consuming, mind-bending world.
As Beadle and Zacek work, the tune “Here in my Car” is enjoying and retains rushing up. Soon Beadle has gear and pedal assemblies on their chest mimicking robotic breasts and Zacek has curved handlebars like ram horns on his brow. The program defines this transformational course of as “automorphosis”— the bodily manifestation of “the twisting adaptations of [the bicycle rebels’] psyche, the dysphoric creeping of their identities.”
Beadle and Zacek shift weight collectively as if they’re making an attempt to synchronize their new identities, however their motion is awkward. They silently mouth, “Fuck you!” to the delight of the viewers. A type of reverse street rage, bicycle owner to driver that looks as if a metaphor for rejecting our energy-hungry, planet-destroying tradition.
For some time, leaning on their bikes, they make intersecting swooping circles. Strobe lights flash and Zaceck begins winging helmets at Beadle as if making an attempt to interrupt a spell or in frustration with what he has develop into. He disappears for a quick time, and when he reappears, he has a bicycle wheel connected to his again. Slowly, he bends till the wheel touches the bottom. Beadle leans over him and unhurriedly takes maintain of the handlebars on his head. They have develop into a brand new creature. As this system says, “one’s defiance becomes what defines them.” Slowly pedaling towards an unknown future and vacation spot, the present ends.
Beadle and Zacek, avid cyclists, partnered with Cascade Bicycle Club to current Automorphs as a part of a collection that shall be carried out throughout bike rides designed to encourage folks to navigate Seattle by pedal energy as an alternative of fossil-fueled machines. As queer dance makers, Beadle and langeslay amplify the partnership with the Club which is actively growing occasions to attract non-binary and girls cyclists.
I occur to be studying Ways of Being by James Bridle which references artist Zach Blas’s work. Blas’ Queer Technologies features a set of gender altering laptop cables that enable ‘male’ cables to be reworked into ‘female’ ones. “Crucially,” writes Bridle “by actually building the tools it imagines, it makes possible different ways of doing technology and thus of understanding the world the technology is part of.”
I really feel like I witnessed a metamorphosis of types right into a reimagined existence. A line that langeslay mentioned earlier captures the transformative spirit of the present, “You’re constantly redoing yourself. The version of you in my head is the only version I have access to.”
Automorphs was carried out on the Cascade Bicycle Club on November ninth and tenth.