"A dancer dies twice," is one of many aphorisms attributed to Martha Graham, who, at 65, was immortalized on film as the demure Bride in her austere masterpiece Appalachian Spring. Next to Graham, Miguel Gutierrez, 43, is barely ripening. Yet his concerns about the brevity of the life of the dancer seem more relevant than ever in a time when we all accelerate to obsolescence before we're done obsessing over what it all means. In Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/, originally commissioned for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Gutierrez dances a duet with Mickey Mahar, 24. Baring his ponderous brown body next to Mahar's lithe white one generates questions about the performance of gender, the value of age, the fetishization of youth, and being a gay man amid the inevitable confusion of aging.
CounterPulse and Gravity present Miguel Gutierrez's Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ at 8 p.m. through Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at CounterPulse, 1310 Mission St., S.F. $20-$30; counterpulse.org.
Comments are closed.
