five: meet me on the dance floor
Sweet friends,
Everything is fragile, on the precipice of falling to pieces. Or maybe we’ve already fallen, and what I’m feeling is the limbo, suspended in the slow drop to nowhere. It’s like Wonderland, as described by Parul Seghal: “its eeriness of time and scale — the hours move unpredictably, time itself can be threatened with murder or cajoled to speed up.” Time is choked by the usual culprits: white supremacy, capitalism, police brutality. My days are loose and ignitable, punctured by social media accounts of death and murder and illness and looting by the rich and denial and terror and lies. The cycles of trauma and unaccountability are infuriating and depressing. I have to walk myself to sleep, looping around the neighborhood three, four, six times, in an attempt to quiet the rants swelling my head.
Danger lurks in the mundane: jogging, sitting at home, driving, wearing a hoodie, barbecuing in a park, bird watching, playing with a toy gun, napping, asking for directions, listening to music, existing. Two nights ago, while Minneapolis’s Third Precinct rightfully burned, the President called for the shooting of “THUGS,” a dog whistle to his white supremacist base. And the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” cites racist Miami police chief Walter Headley, who said the very same thing to announce his aggressive “get tough” policy targeted at Black neighborhoods: shotguns, dogs, stop and frisk, war. The historical returns make me nauseous. I need to step away from the news, but a shock keeps me glued to the ever-updating timeline.
Ahmaud Arbery. Nina Pop. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. Tony McDade. These murders aren’t freak accidents but systematic genocide. 100,000+ American lives lost to coronavirus in three months, with high numbers in Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. I keep returning to this question from Teju Cole: “Where is the grief?” You see the grief in the noise of the street, the fires, in the exhaustion at having to explain over and again blatant acts of anti-Blackness and murder and oppression. You don’t see the grief from the police or the government or institutions or corporations or most white people. Instead you see a demand to get back to “business as usual,” petty outrage over property damage, armed white people storming the MN state house for their right to go to the beach and salons. The mismanagement and selfishness reveal a calculated disregard for life, a willful (and gleeful) inability to acknowledge the magnitude of preventable loss, the lives stolen and disrupted. And as others have pointed out, the reopening calls seemed to have gained steam after data revealed Black, brown, and low-income folks are dying at alarming rates. (In a dystopic twist, MIT Technology Review reported that almost half of the Twitter accounts insisting on the US reopening may be bots.)
Most days I am nothing but thoughts, a floppy doll laid out on our tangerine rug. Where to send your despair? Your anger? Your uncertainty? I have a tendency to stew in muteness. Shut down. But I don’t want the silence to callous. I’m taking the time to learn about, and eventually join, local mutual aid projects and community organizations that have been doing the work to abolish police and ICE, redistribute wealth, end mass incarceration, demand universal healthcare, and more. This tweet by Mariame Kaba is a helpful reminder whenever at a loss for what to do next.
I’ve also been trying to find small moments of solace in other things: the reverential and uproarious Verzuz nights, zoom meditations with gentle angels, the writings of Safiya Umoja Noble and Renee Gladman, rambling phone dates with pals, this poem by Rita Dove, watching the mockingbirds zip around carrying worms in their beaks, blasting WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD, Nick Hakim’s latest album, at fullest volume. And, of course, movies. Recent balms include works by Sarah Maldoror and Agnès Varda, mixed in with nostalgic favorites: scrappy film noirs (i.e. Pushover) and campy melodramas (Written on the Wind).
Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown has been another antidote. Steaming on the Criterion Channel, one stop on its whirlwind digital tour, the nonfiction film chronicles Shakedown, the roving early aughts underground strip club created by and for Black lesbians in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Mid-City. It’s a syrupy kaleidoscope of performance footage, backstage antics, interviews, archival flyers, photos, and unfiltered sexuality. You can call it a documentary, but that word doesn’t capture the lascivious, throbbing energy of Weinraub’s debut. Her film confuses the line between subject and audience, narration and participation, access and privacy, voyeurism and attraction. I watch it whenever I need to be transported to a dream-like state. Whenever I miss the joyful heat of meeting my friends under the shuddering disco lights, desperate to dance out our fury and confusion and sadness.
In 2002, Weinraub was hanging out at Jewel’s Catch One (one of the longest running Black gay dance bars in LA; you can watch a documentary about the club and owner Jewel Thais-Williams directed by C. Fitz on Netflix) when a party promoter slipped her a Shakedown flyer. She went with a friend and was immediately entranced by the raunchy freedom of the Shakedown Angels, the all-Black roster of dancers featuring femmes and studs, and their fans. “I just never really saw anything like that for women. It was very exciting to me,” she shares with Vanity Fair. That night Weinraub asked club owners Ronnie Ron and Ms. Teresa for a job as their event photographer. They agreed and Weinraub got to work, documenting the biweekly club as it roamed from location to location. Dissatisfied with the clinical aesthetic of the stills, she decided video would better capture the sinuous, hedonistic atmosphere. She swapped her photo camera for an SD prosumer camcorder, shooting the sessions until Shakedown’s premature closure in 2004. The resulting 85-minute film whittles down over 400 hours of footage shot over fifteen years.
Initially Weinraub saw herself as the community videographer, gifting edited videos of the sessions for birthdays while also shooting weddings and baby showers. When she decided to make a documentary, one of her central questions revolved around labor and cash. She wanted to follow the dollar from patron to dancer to where the dollar goes from there (One dancer, Slow-Wine, uses her earnings to start a family with her partner Junior via artificial insemination. Their child is celebrated as the first Shakedown baby). “What do you do, and how do you feel about what you do?” were jumping off points. And because the dancer’s performance is predicated on the creation of a larger-than-life persona, identity became integral to the conversations. Rather than rigidly shape her documentary around “answering” these inquiries, Weinraub’s curiosities and thrills spiraled into a stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear odyssey encompassing sexuality, family, desire, utopia, fantasy, policing, collectivity, value. Refreshingly, this film isn’t out to explain or “sanitize” Black queer experience. It captures an utopic moment, a propulsively alive space offering respite from the injustices and violences embedded into everyday living and surviving. As Sarah-Tai Black writes, “It removes the customary directives of time and space and instead sees the power of black queer subjectivity, ever present and ever in flux, as its guiding praxis.”
Shakedown covers a small portion of the club’s eight-year run, bouncing around the years 2002 through 2004. Out of the cast of players (from make-up artists to regulars to girlfriends to security guards), four central stars emerge: Egypt and Jazmine, two notorious Shakedown Angels; Ronnie Ron, the owner/promoter/emcee of the club; and Mahogany, the legendary mother of House of Fish, who encouraged Ronnie to start her own weekly event, eventually acting as a mentor to the Shakedown dancers. They discuss their sexual journeys, philosophies on success, and the quotidian tasks of promotion (In one hilarious scene, while chilling backstage, the dancers roast poorly made flyers filled with typos: “I’m sorry Egypt but this shit right here? No.” Jazmine cracks after seeing her awkward portrait and misspelled name). The lo-fi aesthetic of the DV video enhances the home movie vibe, Weinraub’s woozy love letter to a cherished radical community momentarily thriving in the nocturnal realms of a post-Rodney King, post-OJ, still segregated LA. (Although the city is often reduced to celebrity fluff and edenic escapades, LA’s racial history is gnarled and ugly, from decimating the Indigenous population to sundown towns to the Watts Rebellion to the leveling of Chavez Ravine to redlining to gentrification to the militaristic LAPD and more.)
The camera glides and somersaults during the performance sessions. We are under breasts and popping asses then admiring a dancer flipped over a seated patron then hovering over another Angel as she bends into a delicious split. The Angels wear satin and tuxedos and lace and leather, incorporating tongue-in-cheek props, their skin slick with glitter and perspiration. Appreciative and respectful, the crowd is a smattering of regulars and inquisitive “freaks,” as one customer puts it. When the Angels work the circle their eyes seem to toggle between the eager women waving dollar bills and an ineffable place beyond the four walls. They are here and nowhere, everywhere and above. Their presence overwhelms and collapses the room. It takes my breath away each time. We are on their time now. In reviews, words like “embodied” and “crepuscular” pop up in reference to the moody, soft look of the club sequences. Entering Shakedown is like being thrown into a mythical realm, attended by green strobe lights and seesawing vision, your being tugged and prodded by the ruminative score composed by Dutch E Germ. The camera weaves in and out of the crowd, content to trace the edges and nuclei of the club, careful to remind that what we’re experiencing is a memory, a chopped-and-screwed snapshot, not the definitive story.
One of my favorite scenes is when Egypt, a statuesque Venus, struts out in a blue-toned glossy psychedelic dress lined with fur. A life-long dancer and former cheerleader, her acrobatic krumping sculpts time and space into her own mythical expression. She strips down to a stringy feather violet two piece, her torso rolling while her arms commune with unseen forces. Egypt describes her dance style as “hardcore,” a brazen swagger inspired by mafia movies like The Godfather. She revels in her ability to morph and self-determine: “I can be Barbie. I can be a kitten, I can be S&M, I can beat ya ass. I can do whatever I want to do.” We spend the most time with her, as she shares recollections of her life and the club. Weinraub toys with the vérité and rehearsed when she asks Egypt to read a few scripted lines over and again. She knows she is playing a role, the star looking back at their heyday. We learn of her teen homophobia, her exposure to the gay night club scene thanks to a longtime friend, the growth of her own lesbian identity. She is still fêted at local stripping events, but feels a lack. By the end of the movie, we’re no closer to knowing Egypt or any of the dancers, but we begin to gather the intricacies of having a “person[a] wrapped in economies of pleasures.” As Egypt reveals matter-of-factly, her job boils down to selling a fantasy.
Her girlfriend, who sits in on one interview, believes she is selling something more than that. She had been a super fan, hanging posters of Egypt in her bedroom, before they became a couple. She admits to being “wrapped up” in the fantasy of Egypt: “I was young. . .I thought if I gave her a lot of money she would notice me, she would like me.” Now she finds the Egypt persona exhausting, comparing it to the Clark Kent/Superman split. In scenes like this one, the movie asks us to consider our own relationship to labor and worth. Within Shakedown, cash money, which confers value and mobility, still reigns as a source of material power. Their alternative reality is grounded in work often dismissed as immoral and illegitimate, work that exposes and complicates the links between privacy, creativity, and labor, as Weinraub tells Cassie da Costa. “Do you have time to live your life, or are you working to live?” She echoed a similar set of questions to Antwaun Sargent the year before: “The whole time I was making the film, I thought, ‘What is work? What is the purpose? How does it sculpt your identity? When does work start working you?’”
For Egypt, the sessions provide space to imagine extensions of herselves and moods, free from surveillance and drudgery and harassment and monolithism. Fantasy can open paths to the future, the fluid, the experimental. We can unmake and remake ourselves, taking pleasure in the malleability of identity and self-expression. The person isn’t found in the frozen image, which has a tendency to flatten and generalize, but in the friction of a subjectivity constantly in flux and dialogue. The rambunctious excess of Shakedown, similar to the ballroom scene, expands the possibilities of attraction and community, making it an ongoing collaborative process rather than a singular goal. This quote from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiment comes to mind: “Each dance was a rehearsal for escape.” Her book examines the lives of ordinary Black women in the early twentieth century—working class, queer, sex workers, polyamorous—and how their “new forms and improvisations” were the true catalyst of American modernism. Amidst white terror and abuse, they “made a way out of no way,” where motion was one form of rebellion:
Like flight from the plantation, the escape from slavery, the migration from the south, the rush into the city, or the stroll down Lennox Avenue, choreography was an art, a practice of moving even when there was nowhere else to go, no place left to run. It was an arrangement of the body to elude capture, an effort to make the uninhabitable livable, to escape confinement of a four cornered world, a tight, airless room. Tumult, upheaval, flight — it was the articulation of living force, or at the very least trying to, it was the way to insist I am unavailable for servitude. I refuse it.
I love reading Hartman’s words against Shakedown’s shimmies. Perhaps that’s one reason why the dance sequences pull me out of my numbness, reignite my taste for hope and metamorphosis. I haven’t experienced a gathering like Shakedown, but I have been to spaces that approximated its sense of wild abandon and cosmic reinvention. Basements, warehouses, dingy clubs. That rush of naughtiness, bumping and grinding while the city sleeps. As I watch I try to catalog all my euphoric moments on the dance floor, friends and strangers and lovers swaying together, transforming into a collective heartbeat, a spell casting away the cruelties of outside. Dancing is a moment to let go. To tease out inchoate thoughts within and through your body. To fall into a soul-shaking rhythm. It’s words and sentences and shouts made up of arms, shins, ass, neck, hips. As someone who has a habit of shrinking and tensing under the gaze of others, I’m envious of and inspired by dancers, those who can contort their bodies into odd shapes and dimensions. Their motions reveal how stilted we are, how we constraint life to the flattest image, one symptom of our arrested imagination.
Shakedown made a vibrant home in the most inhospitable places, catering to the needs of Black women deemed unimportant or “criminal” by society. You see this play out in the movie via the LAPD, who start raiding the parties and ticketing the dancers for solicitation. In one queasy scene, undercover cops arrest Jazmine, Queen of Shakedown, mid-performance. She is completely naked, except for handcuffs, flanked by an unnecessary amount of male officers. The crowd shout their disgust and displeasure as a regular covers Jazmine with a top. The cops look on, unmoving and unfazed. What we’re seeing is an assertion of rotten power, a depressing reminder of the scrambled priorities of the state, their ability to “burst a bubble with one little touch.” The burst ended Shakedown’s triumphant run. Ronnie Ron wished to secure a permanent building, but the plan was never able to materialize. The loss speaks a larger story, one about which neighborhoods and communities are silenced and pilfered, and which ones are provided endless support and resources. One guest, singing the praises of Shakedown, notes the pleasures of having a club in the hood instead of reluctantly traveling to Santa Monica or Hollywood. Shakedown’s closure marked the end of a particular utopia felt by her and other regulars, Weinraub, the Angels, Ronnie Ron, and the entire constellation of family who saw the club as home.
Thankfully utopia doesn’t have to be static. Utopias regenerate. Look at past and present spaces: GHE20GOTH1K, Mustache Mondays, Papi Juice, Gush, Pxssy Palace, Massisi. It is movement. A constant noise. When discussing the need to honor the gaps of the archive, Hartman reminds:
[It] is the imperative to respect Black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excesses of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism.
With love,
Allison
and blessings and safety and gratitude to everyone currently in the streets making noise <3
Resources:
Minnesota Freedom Fund (*Due to the overwhelming support, MFF has asked that donations be sent to other organizations, including Black Visions Collective
Reclaim the Block and Northstar Health Collective [medics] )
Playlist: