Vanessa Kamp’s Houndstooth has the rare quality of being extremely articulate yet enigmatically cryptic. Enveloped in a surreal prologue and a poetic epilogue, the main corpus of the solo performance unfolds as a sly parody of the shapes of masculinity. In three parts, Kamp embodies various personas with a combination of sympathy, mockery, and uncanny indifference. Equally rooted in experimental dance and drag king performance, Houndstooth unleashes the subversive power of parody with a bewildering sense of precision that does not represent but glows.
The slow and contemplative introduction unfolds as Kamp emerges from the dark, attaches a microphone and its stand to their chest, and moves around the space while carefully guiding a flashlight that is fastened to the microphone. With Kamp’s controlled movements, the volume of the light fills half of the room at one time and converges to near extinction at another. Distorted sounds vibrate as the microphone bumps into air and ground. A body of light and sound touches the bodies of the audience as it touches the entire space; exact yet evasive, and industriously human.
The prologue introduces the language that the rest of the performance speaks. Houndstooth is less drawn to caricatures of masculine figures and more to the peculiar atmosphere—the light and sound—that emanates from the personas who are, in very precise ways, masculine: the elegantly whimsical, the menacingly hectic, and the performatively vulnerable. The references behind the personas are beyond immediate recognition (a legendary clown, a backwoodsman, and a queer film character). In place of the economy of throwing and catching familiar citations is an imageless transmission of imprints, breathing through the links and arriving as a touch. As hinted by the witty pun in the program notes, “it will be touching.” Touching knows no boundaries by becoming boundary, and it is in this sense that parody remains at the exact edge where impersonation becomes impersonal. Before long, the “originals” fades into oblivion, as one becomes obsessed with the mesmerizing precision of Kamp’s meticulous movements themselves: a repeated stylized walk with raised knees across the stage, a delicate play with air, color, and sound while dancing with cellophane, a self-absorbed elongation with an arm reaching out and abruptly retrieved…
One cannot help but be pleasantly perplexed by the strange sense of precision throughout the performance, a precision whose subject remains ambiguous. As one leaves the performance, what lingers is the distinct tactility of Kamp’s movements that also ceases to be Kamp’s. A sense of precision at the exhaustion of mimesis, an enigmatic literalness in spite of the letter. Is the glimmering poetic play with the cellophane in the wind a parody? Is it alluding to something? Or, perhaps, it is what parody itself proves to be, that which in its evanescent plastic glimmer utters a cryptic language that speaks in the same way warmth announces the presence of touch.
Houndstooth, Vanessa Kamp, Icebox Project Space, Sep 17, 20, 26.
