“I’m such a Cancer,” said Brontez Purnell. “Double Sagittarius too. Just so pointlessly optimistic.”
With so many projects at once, Purnell, 40, has no reason not to be. Though he’s been making music, films, dance pieces and written works for years, it was his 2021 book, “100 Boyfriends,” that gave him heightened cultural visibility. Part memoir, part novel, part ethnographic study, the book creates an impressive, limitless map of his sexual adventures and misadventures in Northern California and earned him a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, awarded this week. He brings those experiences back to his body, a place of his art, as evidenced by his stunning array of tattoos.
With Purnell, who was born in Alabama and now lives in the Bay Area, there is practically no distinction between body, mind and spirit, one unity that inspires his dance. Like his writing, his stage presence is so liberated it’s almost confrontational. And while he can be uninhibited, he is always accurately informed. He worked as a go-go dancer while studying contemporary dance with modern dance pioneer Anna Halprin and other Bay Area choreographers; in 2010 he founded the Brontez Purnell Dance Company.
During the pandemic, his dance practice took a back seat to writing projects. But now he’s back with his first full-length solo dance piece, “Invisible Trial,” which premieres this week at Performance Space New York in Manhattan. Based on a paranoid short story by Sylvia Plath, the 40-minute dance loosely follows the nervous receptionist of a psychiatric clinic, who works under the watchful eye of the God of Fear.
The work, which Purnell describes as “an intense densification of structure, sculpture and text,” features a soundscape of original music and spoken passages from Plath’s story. On a minimalist set – with rope, bed linen, a reception desk – the performance sees him cycling from tinsel-covered headgear to office wear to completely naked.
Purnell has enlisted dramaturgical help from playwright Jeremy O. Harris. Purnell’s longtime collaborator, Larry Arrington, a dancer and astrologer, did the choreography.
“My role was more to support Brontez as he fleshed out his ideas and constantly shower him with as much love and care as possible,” Arrington said in a Zoom interview, a framed photo of Purnell in blurry motion behind her. “You look at what he brings out and wonder how he uses all these different parts to create something beautiful and epic. How can one person contain so much kinetic spark?”
In a quiet room at Performance Space New York, Purnell spoke about his relationship with Plath, dance and the artist’s eternal martyrdom. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What was it like going back to dancing?
I spent quarantine finishing my new sci-fi novel and my new poetry collection, forgetting that dance is essentially language, just like any other form of writing. It was time for me to put my body back on stage, to remind myself that I live in a body. The whole point of the performance is to bring the body back to life. It is a very important spiritual practice.
Tell me about you and Sylvia Plath.
I started reading to her in sixth grade. I had a teacher give me books, and they didn’t know what to give this little gay boy, you know, so they just gave me Sylvia Plath. She has this poem called ‘Mushrooms’. I don’t know, I had a difficult childhood and I only remember the last line that stayed with me: “We will inherit by morning / The earth / Our foot in the door.”
What about Plath’s story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” that grabs your attention?
It’s smart and beatnik-y, and I think Plath’s voice is really cemented. It seems very autobiographical as she received electroshock therapy, and the story ends with the narrator getting it after her boss finds her in the clinic’s files. It’s very tense, and she kind of sets herself up like a Christ figure, with the crown of thorns as an electroshock thing.
Are you a martyr?
Yes, but a very lazy one.
You have all this amazing body art, and so much of your writing is about using your body as a reminder. I have a feeling that’s a martyr?
I do it so no one else has to. I’m going to do the dirty work and report back, you don’t have to worry about this. Someone once said that about me in a review, and I thought it was really funny. It was like, “Brontez is on all your drugs; smoking crack; [expletive] your boyfriend and your boyfriend’s boyfriend; drinking your vodka – all so you don’t have to.
You’ve been trying to do this piece for 10 years. What stopped it?
I never had time or allowed myself to do a solo, and this was something I always wanted to do well, and with support. The dance scene in San Francisco is okay, but I’ve never gotten much financial support from that scene.
What do you think gave you that permission? Performance space? The success of “100 Boyfriends”?
It had been so long since I had actually danced because of the quarantine. Most of my performance art stuff got me doing this humanitarian thing, giving free sex shows online to men in closed countries.
How did it go?
It was great because, you know, men in homophobic countries have so much more appreciation for you and your body. It gave me a new perspective on achievement, on how much of your soul you share.
Why did ‘Johnny’ want to make a dance of it?
I’ve always liked Plath’s nervous tension; she essentially always writes about fear. Here she writes about the futility of an office worker with other dreams. Many of the books I’ve written were created in conjunction with a terrible job I had. I think the piece is a strange allegory for someone who has other, bigger dreams in life, but is kind of earthbound by their 9-to-5.
What did the collaborations for this look like?
The dramaturgy, with Jeremy, was just a series of overnight phone calls about the structure I wanted to do and how I want to execute it. With Larry, I gave her certain parameters.
But I don’t like to burden my employees too much. I prefer to just set coordinates and then go in and deal with it, with their voices in the back of my mind. I’m a bit anti-authoritarian, so you can tell me what to do, but not too much. Once you ask someone to choreograph and you ask someone to be a dramaturg, you are basically asking someone to change your diaper and spank you.
Why the new title, “Invisible Trial”?
It’s about the idea that there are unforeseen actions all around you that dictate your behavior. For example, if a shadow campaign is running against you, do you actively deal with it? Or will you just continue living your normal life and let the universe figure it out? Every time you bring it up, do you bring something to the attention of people who had no idea? Now you’ve really put yourself in the spotlight.
