June 24, 2019

A White Dude Explores Supremacist Ideologies Through Dance and Aerosmith

by Jasmyne Keimig

Mid-performance shot of Matthew Offenbacher (seated) and his dance crew at “Feelings,” his show at Oxbow. All photos by the author.

Last Saturday, I arrived at Oxbow during the intermission of Matthew Offenbacher’s “Feelings (a work in progress)” performance. I was ill. Positively congested beyond (almost) all reasonable means. I hadn’t wanted to leave my house on that bright sunny day but I felt compelled and deeply attracted to the brightness of Offenbacher’s paintings. So much so I needed to see them in person.

While I knew a performance was going to happen, I wasn’t quite sure what it entailed. In the space, around 30 people were milling about, sitting down, chatting—most were white (the performers and the audience members), because, in this context, I do think it matters.

Eventually, a man in cowboy boots, jeans, cut-off flannel shirt, and a cowboy hat sat down in a chair close to the audience, his acoustic guitar in hand. Five dancers (Elby Brosch, Alex Leydon, South, Jeremy Steward, and Offenbacher himself) shuffled into the space in front of the audience that’s lined ceiling to floor with the colorful figurative paintings. Milky Burgess, the man with the guitar, strummed the opening chords of “Creep” by Radiohead. And then the performers were off.

For the next half hour or so, the five white performers did a series of very carefully constructed dances that call on classical Greek poses and myth to the tune of classic rock. The audience was treated to a survey of the best in white dad rock courtesy of our troubadour and master of ceremonies—“Fat Bottomed Girls,” “Sweet Emotion,” “Freefalling” were welcomed equally.

The performance comes after a month-long residency Offenbacher had at Oxbow, exploring the link between “ancient Greek iconography and supremacist ideologies” and “the strangeness of whiteness and maleness.” The backdrop to this dance was composed of 80 to 90 large vertical paintings based on the ancient Greek romance novel Daphnis and Chloe, which is about a naive shepherd and goatherd who fall in love and live in boundless happiness.

I went for the paintings but ended up being treated to a meditation on whiteness by white people. There were lots of reserved smiles to go around.

A painting from the wall.

Let’s first start with the artwork. I was drawn to the lush, vibrant colors of the large paintings. Offenbacher told me he painted them using cheap acrylic paint that’s sold by the gallon and cut with chalk, which gives the colors this tangible, flaky quality. They have an energy that is playful and sensual, depicting dreamy scenes from Daphnis and Chloe. Their curation warmed up the rather cold space (think high windows, concrete floors, metal beams)—my mind flashed to the rugs hanging from the walls in The Favourite, like if I leaned on the paintings, they'd feel soft.

But back to the dancing.

A stack of paper available at the entrance had basic information about the performance. At the top, a question: “What does it feel like to have power that’s taken for granted, and then to lose some of that power (both by giving it away and having it taken)?”

I was confused by this question—when posed to me (holding down all the identities I do), it lands differently. It seemed to attempt to address white people, white history, and white supremacy. I sat with this thought while watching the rolling, the posing, the deconstructing.

Two dancers posing.

I wouldn’t call what the group did on stage a cohesive, structured “dance.” It was closer to a series of movements—sometimes playful, sometimes serious—generally split into three different movements. The first consisted of each dancer doing a solo pose that was inspired by the figures in the paintings they were surrounded by. The second movement was identical to the first, but done in groups.

The third was the most complex. One dancer would assume a pose from a pile of pictures of classical Greek statues and stand on a podium. The other dancers would sit and admire, then one would stand up, prompting everyone else to, and together they’d awkwardly take down the living “statue,” high-fiving in a way that seemed to rejoice this toppling over.

“This last movement came from videos and images of crowds pulling down Confederate statues. In rehearsal we ended up watching a lot of different statue-toppling videos from all over the world,” Offenbacher wrote to me in an email recently. “The ritual we did afterward (the rushing out and in, waiting for the statue to relax, then high-fiving twice) came from abstracting celebrations we saw in these videos.”

Offenbacher posing on a pedestal

So, while watching the performance, this knotty (and kind of shaky) connective tissue between classic rock, classical Greek iconography, and their relationship to whiteness began to emerge. Both bear the name “classic.” Both have been used as a way to exclude and support supremacist ideologies: from mythologizing whiteness to alienating the black community (and women) from a genre of music they created.

By using only white performers, Offenbacher said that he hoped to signal “the idea that anti-racist work needs to be done within white communities, especially around building knowledge about white culture.”

Despite the seriousness of the language surrounding the performance, it was actually quite playful. Most of the poses were silly. Sweat was shed. Offenbacher often had a giant grin on his face. We had a troubadour. There was an offhandedness to it that drew me in, attempting to figure out exactly what the performers were trying to achieve.

And that question! Offenbacher told me that the desire to do this project came from him recognizing that as a white cis man, he’s had more resources to draw on because of his identity.

My predecessor Jen Graves wrote in 2015 about how Offenbacher took $25,000 in art prize money and bought work from queer/women artists. He then donated these works to the Seattle Art Museum, citing the lack of art in their permanent collection done by artists with queer and women artists.

“In this project, a moment of clarity came for me in watching the horror show that was the Kavanaugh hearings, and especially witnessing his anguish at having his power challenged, even just for a moment, and ultimately without consequence,” he wrote to me.

Continuing, “The feelings that he embodied in the hearing with his crying and belligerence are the feelings that my title is referring to. If we are ever going to move beyond white male supremacy, white men have to start examining and dealing with these feelings in honest ways that don’t cause harm.”

This is all well and good. There was nothing offensive about the performance at all, but I questioned my place there. While the rise of Tr*mpism illuminated a lot of the injustices and violence of whiteness for white people, this isn’t new knowledge to queer communities and communities of color. The system isn’t broken, but working as it should. And while Offenbacher’s careful and purposeful examination of whiteness is interesting, I’m not sure if it was for me (literally!).

I left Oxbow thinking about those paintings though. They kept me company on the long bus ride home.