Review: Consent Forms by Scott Wells & Dancers
Content warning: sexual assault, sexual harassment
When I first heard that Scott Wells was putting on Consent Forms, a dance show themed around consent, I felt excited. The dance community, and specifically those of us who practice contact improvisation, would have a chance to address long-running tensions around consent using our lingua franca: movement performance. Recent activism has brought to the forefront the way that sexual predation has prevented women and trans dancers from feeling safe at contact improv jams. Our community is just beginning to reckon with these truths that have been spoken in whispers for so many years. Consent Forms seemed like a much-needed moment to share this awareness with the full voice of the body.
Wells commissioned three women to create works for the show, and in addition, showed two works of his own. The show ran for three nights, Dec 7–9, at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco. As the show unfolded, the contrast between the performances made by women and those made by Wells, a man, highlighted how the artists’ different gendered experiences informed different understandings of the core issues of consent. While the women’s performances exposed gendered power imbalances and stood strong in their condemnation of rape culture, Wells’ pieces came across confused and questioning, echoing the gender gap present in many discussions of consent. While Wells is only one person, his work in Consent Forms serves as a useful example to interrogate the role of men in building consent culture within the dance community.
Let’s start with the women’s works:
The first, Miriam Wolodarski’s Men Listening to Women, placed a group of men from the audience on stage facing away from the action with the instruction to listen. The statement was clear: the men would be standing in for those men who fail or refuse to listen to women. As one of the men on stage, I can only speak of my own experience from inside the piece. I didn’t hear much that made an impression on me but was happy to lend my body as a symbol for Wolodarski’s provocation. If anything, I couldn’t help but feel curious about all the noises behind me, and thus a bit frustrated to be excluded. It was the right kind of frustration though — an opportunity for us men to build empathy for the multifarious ways that women are silenced and excluded by patriarchy.
While I sat, I thought about all of the dance classes and contact jams I have attended, and all of the exercises focused on listening — listening to sensation, listening to a partner, listening to a group in composition. It seems surprising for a form focused so deeply on listening to have problems with consent. Yet all of the teaching about listening that I’ve experienced focuses on the physical or the aesthetic, not the social, not the emotional. As Steve Paxton, one of the the initiators of contact improv, once said, “It’s physics, not chemistry.” While witty, this aphorism seems to have sown a seed of social insensitivity into the roots of form. Chemistry — i.e. social dynamics, power, gender, race — is always present when we interact with each other, and especially so when we touch. While we might wish we could ignore it for the sake of artistic exploration or authentic connection, our habits of relating are so deeply ingrained that we enact them without even noticing. Instead of setting aside chemistry, we must actively work to create a safe laboratory environment in which to experiment.
The next piece, a tender, powerful outpouring from dancer and activist Cookie Harrist, spoke to exactly this lack of safety in contact improv spaces. “I’m not going to abstract this,” said Harrist as she began her piece. She delivered a challenging exposition of her experiences battling rape culture at contact jams. Notably, Harrist rejected exhortations from community leaders for her to “be strategic” in her activism (leaving the audience to infer that “be strategic” is really code for “don’t upset the men,” some old school sexism that refuses to die). Instead, she called for space for her and other women, trans, and non-binary dancers to process trauma, a need that has rarely been met, if even acknowledged, in the contact community.
Much of the conversation around consent in contact focuses on where the lines should be drawn. Should sexual energy be expressed in a dance? What’s the right way to deal with these feelings? Is it ok to feel attraction in the first place? When an incident occurs, we look to judge. Did the man (because it is almost always a man) cross the line? What we miss is the reality that so many dancers, especially women and trans folks, enter the room with a history of trauma, often related to touch and sexuality. Contact improv at its least sexually-charged can still trigger trauma responses.
To practice this form safely, to facilitate a space that supports all participants, we must enter with awareness that there is trauma among us. Teaching trauma-awareness could be a path of least resistance to building consent culture. Discussions of consent can trigger defensiveness in men, who fear being seen as a “bad person.” Men might be more open to learning how to offer support for trauma, since it’s very clearly not about them, and let’s be honest, our egos are fragile!
Harrist transitioned out of speaking into a refined, supportive contact duet, which highlighted the incredible possibility for beauty and connection when practicing the form within a safe container. At the same time, the dance evoked a certain melancholy, as we realized we would never dance with these skilled dancers at a contact jam due to their experiences with non-consensual touch.
The third artist, Liz Boubion, closed out the show with a multi-part work. It started with an aching recount of the artist’s rape by an audience member many years ago, then spiraled into a kinky “pussy grabs back” ensemble piece replete with hot pink over-the-head fishnets and unison routines executed in tight formation. All of Boubion’s dancers, which appeared to include the only non-white performers of the evening, brought full commitment to the stage, presumably fueled by rage at the patriarchy. A cathartic end to the evening.
While these three performances thoughtfully explored consent, power, and gender, the two pieces that Wells shared raised questions about how men should take part in this conversation.
In the first piece choreographed by Wells, we watched two dancers (importantly, a man and a woman) as they soared, fell, and cuddled in an exquisitely danced duet. A voiceover granted us insight into their thoughts, which alternated between the descriptive mundane–“Pause for six counts”–and the romantic–“Does she have a boyfriend?” Notably, the woman’s thoughts were all technical, while the man’s focused increasingly on his dance partner and their connection. When the dance ended, Wells initiated a discussion with the audience. He shared that this work had been critiqued for not being “sensitive to consent issues” when it was first shown four years ago, which inspired Wells to organize this show and revisit the piece.
The dance itself didn’t seem inherently insensitive. In fact, when watching the duet, I thought it intended to expose how men at contact jams often take dances into a romantic direction without their partners’ consent. It became clear that what made the dance problematic was that Wells hadn’t choreographed it with this intent–he didn’t realize the power imbalance that the audience would read into the narrative. It wasn’t the dance that was insensitive to consent issues, it was Wells.
Though Wells seemed to be honestly seeking understanding of this critique, this wasn’t an effective way to do it. As one audience member slyly pointed out, starting a discussion on stage wouldn’t create a safe environment for real feedback, especially from women.
Wells retook the stage later in the night with a five-person ensemble. Starting in a circle, they slowly began what appeared to be an idealized version of a contact jam. The dancers frolicked and tumbled, leaping, lifting, and tossing each other with effortlessness, negotiating complex puzzles instantaneously.
Underlying this “jam,” invisible to the audience, was a foundation of attunement and trust that was likely built up by the dancers over countless hours, if not years, of dancing together. Consent is best built over time, which is what makes a contact jam such a sticky environment. This pantomime of a jam reinforced the popular fallacy that at a jam, any dancer can non-verbally initiate a dance, negotiate their boundaries, and keep themselves safe with any other dancer at any time. Rather than exposing the intricate social challenges that contact jams pose to even the most experienced dancers, but especially to neophytes, the piece glazed over the issue completely.
At one point during the dance, Wells shared that when he teaches, he jokes that contact improv is about removing unnecessary politeness, but that now, in light of the conversations about consent, he was reconsidering. In the 1970s, Wells recounted, when contact improv was beginning, it gave men permission to forgo politeness and connect through touch.
But it isn’t politeness that prevents men from physical intimacy, it’s homophobia. Contact improv does have great potential to help men heal by regaining access to nonsexual touch — it’s done exactly that for me. But it’s got nothing to do with politeness. And when I look around a contact jam and see men dancing almost exclusively with women, I have a feeling those men aren’t hard at work on their internalized homophobia.
The contrast between the two pieces choreographed by Wells and the three choreographed by the women left me pondering how men fit into the conversation about consent. We are granted more power, more leeway, and more privilege in pretty much any space, and dance is no exception. I thought about how Wells used his power in this situation. On one hand, he created a platform for women to take the stage and share their experiences. At the same time, he also used that platform to center his own voice without learning enough beforehand to speak thoughtfully.
It seems reasonable that both women and men should have a voice in the conversation about consent. That’s fair and equal, and we’re all participating together in building this community. What’s missing from this analysis, however, is that men already get more space to speak by default. Plus, many of us were raised to speak freely, without checking how our voices might drown out others. When we are speaking, we can’t also be listening (that’s physics, Steve Paxton). And so we haven’t listened deeply to the women, trans and non-binary folks in our community.
This is what Wolodarski’s piece was getting at. Listening isn’t just hearing — taking in the words and understanding them. It’s about changing our orientation to what someone is telling us. When listening to someone’s experience (for instance, about a dance that didn’t feel consensual), instead of our standard orientation of analyzing, critiquing, and comparing to our own experience, deep listening requires shifting to an orientation of complete acceptance and trust. If someone says they had an experience, that’s the experience they had. There’s no disputing it. If they say there was a problem, there was a problem.
If we as men can learn to shift our orientations, to listen deeply in conversations about consent, then we will start to build mutual understanding. And that is a place we can start to speak from. But first, we have to resist our impulse to take center stage. We need to sit in the audience, shut up, and listen.
Thanks to Amy Wasielewski for giving feedback on earlier drafts of this piece.
