Back to the ’70s :: Michael Biello and Dan Martin revisit ’Two Men Dancing’
In 1980 Michael Biello and Dan Martin had been together for five years onstage and off creating dance, theater and music.
The couple formed the gay male dance collective Two Men Dancing telling the stories of their identities as gay men in song, dance and text in all its naked truth. In fact, they went the full Monty then, as they will now, in What We’re Made of, as a statement of gay identity.
Flash forward to 2009 when Philadelphia Dance Projects director Terry Fox asked the couple to reconstruct the work for the series past + forward, that brings Philadelphia dance artists from the independent dance community of the 60 and 70s with dancers working today.
Then and now
Earlier this week, Biello and Martin sat in their studio and talked about the work then and now. "We did it at the Harold Prince Theater in the Annenberg. Then we were invited to do it at what was called the first gay American Arts festival in NY. But the first festival was actually in Philly," Michael recalled.
"We knew Terry from the early 70s, we met her from Group Motion," he continued. "When we got together in 75, she opened a loft space and she taught improvisation. This series is so great that she is now documenting pieces that were done for the love of it and trying new things. It was so free then."
They were shocked that she remembered their piece. "To go back 30 years, even to reconstruct it... we didn’t know how much we could recover. We located a video through Ishmael Houston-Jones (from the original troupe) that he had placed in the Jerome Robbins library in New York." Houston-Jones is co-directing the revival with Biello.
Martin, who will perform his own music in the revival, had to reconstruct the music from memory. "Then we found notebooks that Michael kept. I didn’t write down all my music then, but I found lyric sheets and chord notes."
Exploring gay male sexuality onstage was much more controversial then, but the couple says there are vestiges of the closet that still exist on the dance stage. "We thought about that. We’re setting the piece on four 20 something dancers."
The 2010 cast of What We’re Made Of includes Philly dancers Gregory Holt, John Luna, Scott McPheeters and William Robinson. "They grew up in a culture that is more out. One grew up with a gay-bi-lesbian-trans group straight alliance in his high school. But in many ways it is a similar time because some of the issues remain. Coming out still takes courage, personally to your family and publicly onstage," Martin said.
"Putting the piece on them it has our story to be in that time, working with them we just gave the piece to them. It’s using the structure from then, but it is their images, their moving within the structure of the piece. But at then end it’s the same place in the queer community," Biello said.
The gay mens’ collective Men Dancing, was all gay men. With this production we auditioned many people, including straight men. We even thought they would use transgender dancers and women, but ultimately decided to keep it a mens’ piece." Martin added.
"Terry gave us the freedom to re-envision the work, but we decided to keep what we did. part of our mission was to reflect the time. Relationship with fathers, becoming a man, coming into your sexual power and finding your female self and finding community, some of details are different," he explained.
"There is a cruising dance for instance that we based on a trip Michael and I took to San Francisco. We also told the dancers about the cruising scene in Philly and they were surprised at some of those rituals," Dan said. "In dance, there is that stylized level, of intimacy, that we had to still break through. Then as now, they had to trust each other and us."
