“Put Away the Fire, dear” Puts Time Aslant
Brontez Purnell
Anachronism: meaning against time or an error in chronology. especially : a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other. found several anachronisms in the movie. 2. : a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place.
Usually it’s meant to describe like where there’s a grandfather clock a century before it’s invented, or in the Martin Scorsese film The Aviator the main character ordering chocolate chip cookies some 10 years before they existed.
Something about this word feels close to what was being executed in Kayla Farrish’s Put Away the Fire, dear, described as “an evening-length premiere that uproots power and history across generations of the American cultural landscape. Remixing Old Hollywood cinematic frameworks of the 1930s-60s…maps the journey of six BIPOC and marginalized characters as they take the reins of their identity archetypes, disrupt oppressive tropes, and invite audiences to witness them in their full humanity.”
All dance theater roughly translates to “the body in time” but the scope here seemed ambitious. I was winded just reading 30–60’s; a single decade alone is a pretty substantial chunk of film language. How was this to be imagined? Furthermore, I’m always curious about pieces meant to mend, make hyper-transparent, or laboriously set to examine the past. Especially that charge having to be taken on by those already set in the margins — it is bloody work indeed. But in order to get funding too often we must present as saving the world with our art; I worried immediately if this piece had bitten more off than either the participants or the audience could chew.
“Americana” is a hard sell for me: at this point its tantamount to putting Greek antiquity on stage, plus, America is fucking exhausting. I immediately went through the rolodex of my gay male camp-loving old movie standbys: A Street Car Named Desire, Anna Lucasta, This Property is Condemned, A Raisin In The Sun, and then, even in this fucked up abstract way, like what if all the Sam Sheppard plays had been written by a woman (if that makes any sense) — already one gets the dizzying sense of the almost black hole this could become.
But, as is the magic, what I loved automatically was there was no actual film element, an expectation set by the description. Put Away the Fire, dear was going to be an old school piece that relied solely on bodies and sound. The effect was dazzling of course.
The movement economy was so beautiful. Kayla herself, having that kind goofy glamor of someone forcing the contortion of line in her body, but is so obviously a murderously trained dancer who is more than proficient at perfect line of limb and torso (or maybe the correct term is refusing perfect line?) Either way the piece had that old school dance theater language of coming together and falling apart, building, and distorting. I will say, it stayed in a pretty beautiful lyrical language, nothing was ever thrown off a cliff, which I think in such a racialized piece, throwing something off the cliff would have helped.
I wondered which BIPOC bodies were doing work and why — and then I was left to question the burden of the white passing person in the dance (or sorry, these days we say “white presumed”), in my head I was like “they must be a they/them.” Speaking of which, every time Kayla lifted that one light skinned they/them in the air — and it happened like FIVE TIMES, orrrrrrrrrrrr maybe it happened once and felt like five times? Ion know…but either way, my thoughts would race internally, like, “why doesn’t anyone ever lift my fat ass in dance pieces? Is it cause I’m “too black”? — but then I realized that anything inspiring this level of intersectional discourse had to be good art, so I was taken with this piece anew.
I do think that it was one of those performances that should have either been like 40 mins or five hours. The 45 minute, then intermission, then another 45 min felt a little stop-start, but, ultimately when covering this much ground, I do understand why the choice was made.
The last image that stuck with me was when the dancers formed a circle in the end and it seemed that there was about to be a long song moment, but the circle immediately evaporated as soon as it started and the dancers went their separate ways. I have no real thing to say besides that for some reason, this refusal was my favorite part.
Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, and 100 Boyfriends, a collection of stories. Purnell is also the front man for the band The Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company.
