Krissy Keefer's one-woman show "Queen of Sheba" uses the past to fuel the future of fierce feminist dance. By Sima Belmar
In the 1959 King Vidor film "Solomon and Sheba", Gina Lolabrigida plays the Queen of Sheba. She pouts, has a Barbie doll waist, performs really bad choreography, and says things like "The way of woman is simple, my lord. It is always to follow the way of a man." I watched the film recently in the hopes that it would lend insight into Krissy Keefer's one-woman show Queen of Sheba at Dance Mission Theater.
Well, Keefer's Sheba is everything Lollobrigida's is not: articulate, aggressive, feminist, and fierce.
Written and performed by Keefer, Queen of Sheba is a veritable Keefer Chronicles, in which Solomon is noticeably absent. The show dramatizes Keefer's life -- her upbringing in Cincinnati, founding of the first women-identified dance company in the country, interfacing with Tibetan Buddhism and the iconography of early feminist ritual -- through four characters: herself from 16 to the present; Lily, a news-obsessed schizophrenic; Lilith, Adam's banished first wife; and the Queen of Sheba.
The result is an honest, thought provoking, and absolutely sidesplitting merger of the spiritual, the political, and the performative. Keefer is out to deify those on the margin. She's more energized than that bunny and much more entertaining, loudly exploring her sexuality, her politics, and her artistic successes and failures with a healthy dose of irony. Adam may still have the garden, but at least we get truth, hilarity, and the delicate paradox of enthusiasm without hope.
As Executive Artistic Director of Dance Mission, Keefer hopes to bring her curatorial vision -one that is focused on women's work-to the heart of the Mission theater district. Lori Lewis, director of Dance Mission (the space itself), has invited Keefer to make the theater part of the experimental atmosphere fostered by the likes of Theatre Rhinoceros, Artists' Television Access, the Marsh, Dancers' Group, and Intersection for the Arts. Perhaps, if we're lucky we'll get to see her in her vulva suit.
Bay Guardian: Of the four elements explored in your show - prepatriarchal myth, contemporary life, the dharma, and the female prophetic voice -what was your jumping-off point?
Krissy Keefer: I've immersed myself in women's mythology for the last 15 years, and I'm constantly -trying to find ways to tie prepatriarchal mythology with the present. I was particularly attracted to Lilith because she was kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and I tracked that back to my adolescence of growing up during. the '60s and feeling like I was constantly in trouble with myself, my parents, the state, and the school system.
BG: You grew up in Cincinnati . and, in the early '70s, left for the University of Oregon in Eugene, where you and three other women founded the Wal4flower Order in 1975.
KK: Some of us had danced at the University of Oregon and formed the Eugene Dance Collective. Then four of us formed the Wallflower Order. We toured all over the U.S. and Europe and Canada. We were probably the first dance company specifically feminist in intention.
BG: At the risk of betraying my Gen X-ness, what made you a collective, not a company?
KK: A lot of dance and theater companies and food co-ops came off the big collective movement of the '70s, where no one was supposed to be in charge. We were very young -1 think the oldest of us was 26and we worked every day. We had no children, we had free rehearsal space at the university, we paid $50 a month in rent, and we were all on food stamps. We were very lucky to have resources available to create work. Holly Near took us under her wing, which helped stabilize us. And we were produced by women's production companies that had mushroomed up all over the country and Europe. We were recognized by the NEA; we went to DTW [Dance Theater Workshop in NYC].
BG: What did feminism mean then, and how did it influence your dance making?
KK: The feminist movement in the '70s was a fiercely women-identified movement, lesbian-based, and very much about being on the outside and not caring. We created magnificent ghettos of wild, irascible women from here to Lansing to Boston to Florida. Wallflower Order was on the West Coast at a time when ODC was here, Margie [Jenkins], Tumbleweed. Wallflower Order put kung fu into our choreography. Tumbleweed used gymnastics. We were breaking from traditional modem dance and incorporating gymnastics and kung fu and sign language and singing and talking into the work.
BG: With all going well in Eugene, what brought you to San Francisco in 1982?
KK: We wanted to move to a big city so we could perform more. What really happened is we got immersed in a lot of political organizations and disagreements-and the company broke up. So Nina [Fichterl and I formed the Dance Brigade out of that in 1984.
BG: It didn't take long after the founding of Dance Brigade for the funding situation to worsen. How did arts funding cuts alter your creative process?
KK: Wallflower Order had the most support; everybody wanted to fund us. Nina and I really struggled to rebuild with Dance Brigade. We stayed in the Bay Area and worked in the community, doing "The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie", which was an enormous community collaboration that used over 1,000 artists in the 10-year time we did it, and "Furious Feet", which was a political dance festival that shed the spotlight on emerging groups like Contraband, Shakiri, Terry Sendgraff. Then the NEA warned us we should prepare to barely survive. From 1991 to '93 it all started to collapse.
BG: Does Queen of Sheba address this ?
KK: Part of what I tie into the piece is the blowup in the Wallflower Order and the disillusionment I went through at Brady Street Dance Centre, trying to do something heroic when I didn't necessarily have an infrastructure or support. Our [dance] community has been hit hard -we're in the middle of an epidemic of poverty; we just barely got over the AIDS crisis. it's so difficult to make work in these times. There's a call from funders to stabilize, but it's impossible because nobody will guarantee you money every year.
BG: It seems like all along, from leaving Cincinnati to now, you've been trying to distinguish between and merge the personal and the political.
KK: What I've tried to understand is where I need to take responsibility for being kicked out and where I am kicked out as a woman. My favorite statistic right now is that the MacArthur Foundation has given out 550 genius awards and they've only given out 149 to women. So we're tucked from the beginning. There's no way we're ever going to be able to bridge that gap without burning some buildings down. Then there's me as the endless 16-yearold or the dakini lesbian witch or however I want to see myself up against that. So am I a heretic or a brat? I'm trying to find that out.
BG: Can making art still be a radical activity?
KK: Telling the truth is the most massive act of defiance you can make. Dancers don't usually speak, so maybe it's even harder for us to tell the truth. What all dancers struggle with is to find the truth in their own bodies, and then there's some of us who want to bring words to that.
BG: I'm interested in the idea of how to get the body to speak, especially since the female body has been fetishized and emaciated by the mainstream media and dance world. How does your relationship to your body affect your relationship to dance?
KK: Well, the Queen of Sheba is reputed to be a jinn, which is half-woman, half-beast, and I have very hairy legs, and I both suffered and glorified that throughout my life. Lilith being the first woman in the Garden of Eden and the Queen of Sheba having a domain that extended from Ethiopia to India-these are big women, and big women take up space. The Wallflower Order and Dance Brigade tried to take up space, which is not the image that gets reflected back to us through the dance world, especially when I started. But I think there's a fiercely feminist dance movement going on in this town, from my work to Kim Epifano's to Mim's [Tweksbury, from Knee Jerk] to Shakiri's to Joanna Haigood hanging off of trapezes. I'm just a part of this no-holds-barred, aggressive, women-identified dance scene.
BG: Does that power seem precarious given the pressure from the mainstream to be small and waify?
KK: Why should anybody com-promise since there's no money to compromise around? The patriarchal system at its worst is the relationship of the dance community to the endowment and funders.
BG: What's so threatening about dance?
KK: Sometimes I think modern dance is the most insignificant art form, and sometimes I think it's the art form that everything springs out of and that's why it's threatening. From Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan, modern dance in this country has been a cultural thrust of revolutionary activity, and they hate it.
BG: Any desire to go back to the '60s?
KK: No, I loved being part of the women's movement, but I don't hold any historical time as the model. I do feel the last 10 years is a move away from revolutionary ability into more fascism. So that's dangerous. This piece is about taking all I have gleaned, bringing it to the moment, and trying to reinvent myself.
BG: It sounds rather apocalyptic. A timely millennial piece.
KK: Yeah, sure. Lilith gets kicked out of the Garden of Eden because she refuses to have sex Adam's way. So she's banished and goes through three phases: the banished phase, the revenge phase, and the redemption phase -.- I show Lilith kicked out, coming back to get her revenge, and then being able to be a clear but supportive nurturer for my character, Krissy, as she goes up against the state or funders to try to get support for her work.
BG: And Sheba?
KK: I see her as the woman in her full power. She doesn't capitulate. She runs in a retinue of dancing, witch-like women like the Dance Brigade or the dakinis of Tibetan Buddhism, and she flies through the air and has ecstatic sex and rituals with other women and they're resurrecting the dead and they just have all the power they need. And then there's another character, Lily, who's kind of a schizophrenic, kicked out, manic-obsessive who watches television all the time and can run the details of the Monica Lewinsky case by you with scalding accuracy. I'm a news junkie.
BG: So ... men. What happens to them in your vision?
KK: Ideologically I feel it's time for men to nurture and allow for women's leadership, That was one of the beautiful things about Brady Street, that I collaborated with Joe Williams and Matthew DeGumbia and they supported my vision. We're in a period of tremendous precariousness, and the wisdom of women needs to be in the center. It's not about not having men around or not working with men. It's about trying to let women's vision come in uncompromisingly.
BG: What's the relationship o f text to dance in your work?
KK: Dance Brigade always used text. We used poetry from the women's literary movement. But Queen of Sheba is a piece I wrote, with some poems by other people. There's a lot of dance. I dance as the Queen of Sheba. I have one scene where I'm stalking this woman at the Michigan Woman's Dance Festival and I do a dance about that. I do choreography from 1975 and I have choreography that I made up yesterday.
BG: People who have never seen you before-what would you like them to see?
KK: I want people to be completely inspired to carry On their lives. I think people are very depressed - I know they are; half of my friends are on Prozac or are alcoholics. I want People to figure out a way to be ecstatic within themselves. I can draw from Lilith's power, the Queen of Sheba's power, the dakini's power, myself at 16, my mother, my grandmother, all the struggles I've been through, integrate them, and send myself back out again.
BG: And in spite of Y2K and the environment, you feel hopeful?
KK: No, I don't feel hopeful, and I don't feel that's the point, because I can't sit around and think about how the polar icecaps are melting and there's an enormous hole in the ozone and a third of the world's people don't have drinking water and nobody's doing anything about it. So what I want to think about is how I can blaze with potentiality and tell the truth and create community that is nurturing and ferocious at the same time.
BG: Can you say something about what the future holds for Dance Brigade?
KK: I'm really interested in ecstatic women's sex ritual. I studied the yoginis- the animal-headed women in India- and they sit in circles and have ecstatic sex rituals and dance. The work I did with Kim Epifano moved into ritualizing, and Contraband did rituals. But what if we were just doing ritual dance without the rehearsed part? Some kind of piece throughout the whole studio about women's ritual.
BG: Despite the disappointments around the NEA and Brady Street, it seems like its all working in your favor Do you think you would have come to this point if you had been supported all the way through?
KK: I wonder about that all the time. Would I like to be like Mark Morris? I don't know. I'm sure he's struggling too. I would like not to live with such incredible financial instability. In order to be happy I have to say, Yes, I m glad everything's happened the way it's happened because I learn so much more about myself when it all doesn't work the way I think. Would I like to be down at Brady Street with a $150,000 personal budget? Probably. But do I love that I've been able to hang in here with the voice I've been able to hang in here with? Yes. I'd rather quit the whole thing than try to play the game.