Movement artist Jimmy Joyner evokes lives lost to AIDS

“Red Tethers,” a series of solo dances created by multidisciplinary artist Jimmy Joyner that premieres Friday through Sunday, May 17-19, in Woodruff Park, draws on the red ribbon as a cultural symbol and builds on a four-decade legacy of artists responding to the devastating scourge of the disease.

Credit: Photo by Christina Massad

Credit: Photo by Christina Massad

A textile artist, costumer designer, choreographer and Fly on a Wall team member, Joyner draws on a range of interests and skills to bring attention to the lives and stories of queer Atlantans lost to HIV/AIDS.

With a 10-foot by 10-foot swath of sheer white fabric, six paracords, six pulleys, some carabiners and a red laser, Joyner will enact and build a “temporary monument” to the city’s queer ancestors through improvisational movement and material manipulation. The installation will then remain in the park, a public art piece and performance archive.

Joyner designed and constructed a disco ball dress which he will wear throughout “Red Tethers.” “If queerness was to manifest itself, it’s a disco ball on a dance floor,” he says. Or, rather, queerness is the effect disco balls create where “light and sweat and spirit and joy and sorrow come together in this temporary space. And who doesn’t like something sparkly and flashy?” Joyner wanted to be that disco ball, the source of an outward trajectory of energy and love directed to all those who join him in the park.

Yet the disco ball, Joyner says, is also “the eye that oversaw the site of infection.”

A native of West Tennessee, Joyner came out in high school and moved to New York City in 2003, a time when gay men, he says, “weren’t necessarily out of the woods.”

Despite the largely contained AIDS epidemic, he recalls that claiming a gay identity was synonymous with sickness and death. What should have been celebratory instead felt ominous. The number one narrative, he says, was: “Why come out as gay? You’re just going to be lonely, and you’re going to die.”

A recorded interview with fellow Fly on a Wall team member and collaborator Nicholas Goodly will serve as the work’s sound score. In their conversation, Goodley and Joyner talk extensively about shame, control and self-compassion, “things that are indescribable and understandable” and resonate heavily with his queer identity.

Initially, Joyner grappled with “the idea of making another AIDS dance.” It has been done so many times and with such emotional impact, especially during the height of the crisis when almost everyone in the New York City and San Francisco dance scenes knew someone who had died of the disease. “I can’t make an AIDS dance in 2024 that looks like an AIDS dance made in 1986 by Keith Hennessy [the San-Francisco-based choreographer/performance artist famous for his queer activist dances],” says Joyner.

Credit: Photo by Christina Massad

Credit: Photo by Christina Massad

As part of the research process for “Red Tethers,” Joyner traveled to the Slippage Lab at Northwestern University to work with his mentor and “thinking partner” Thomas F. DeFrantz, an esteemed dance scholar and visiting professor at University of the Arts, where Joyner recently earned a master of fine arts in dance.

Joyner credits DeFrantz with helping to unpack an uncomfortable sense of responsibility to “pay honor” to queer Atlantans lost to HIV/AIDS. Somehow, honoring them felt inauthentic and too prescriptive. A sense that “you need to do something in a certain way for someone else” closed doors that Joyner wanted to open. Initially, he intended to center “Red Tethers” on the stories of a few Atlantans who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS, but how does one tell or embody a story that is not their own?

“Let’s shift the phrase telling a story to living a story,” he says. Instead of telling someone else’s story, an impossible task Joyner says, through performance, research and what he describes as spiritual practices, he can “be with these people” and open a portal, a tether and a connection to their presence. The tether — perhaps an extension of the red ribbon — reaches out, “it connects and signals, I’m here,” Joyner says. The tether also ties him to “queer ghosts … I’m haunted but I’m also trying to haunt.”

Through spontaneous movement, Joyner will tie himself to trees, move through and around the swath of fabric and hand cords to audience members. He intends to create “an affirmation of belonging and aliveness” felt by all who witness it. “It’s so important for queerness to have an aliveness and a visibility. And also for queer folks to affirm other queer folks and say that you’re not alone.”

For Joyner, “Red Tethers” is a public ritual that allows him — allows us — to be with our queer ancestors and “that’s enough. The tether is a bloodline and a lifeline that holds us together.”

DANCE PREVIEW

“Red Tethers”

8:30 p.m. Friday-Sunday, May 17-19. Woodruff Park, 91 Peachtree St., Atlanta. Free. jimmyjoyner.com

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Kathleen Wessel is a movement artist, choreographer, educator and writer who has been covering dance for ArtsATL since 2012. She is on the faculty in the Department of Dance Performance & Choreography at Spelman College.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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