This piece is adapted from Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City, by Rennie McDougall. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted with permission of Abrams Press.
American artists faced two waves of suppression—one national and one local—near the end of the 20th century.
Nationally, neoconservatives attacked artists whose provocations, or even simply their identities, threatened their mission to reestablish the predominance of a white, Christian, heteronormative base of the country. American art, they feared, had grown worryingly accommodating (celebratory, even) of queer people, women, artists of color, sexual freedoms, bodily autonomy, criticism of religion. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and his ilk enacted policies to defund and ostracize such expressions from American life.
Locally, waves of gentrification changed the face of American cities. Enclaves of bohemian and punk ferment were infiltrated by designer clothing stores, glistening apartment complexes, and upmarket gyms, making it harder for artists to survive in the cities where they came to find each other. Where difference once abounded came a stunting sameness.
By Rennie McDougall. Abrams.
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These are not unfamiliar threats. Today President Donald Trump has slapped his name on the Kennedy Center. His administration has canceled and withdrawn millions of dollars of already-apportioned NEA funding for artists, as well as attacked federal museums with the goal of erasing the stories of Americans who don’t fit a whitewashed, obedient mold. One of the defining emotional moods of this era of outrage saturation has been exhaustion; I moved to the U.S. from Australia in April 2015, and less than two months later, Trump rode down his golden escalator, launching what would become this decadelong era of enough already. Since then, it has felt increasingly necessary to imagine alternatives to the suppressive forces that, under the vulgar MAGA banner, seem to only be gaining in strength.
It has been helpful and sobering, then, to look to history, where people have weathered greater storms than these and managed to find creativity and community and meaning even when political powers seem to cloud out all hope. People always find methods of resistance, not only through direct political action, but also through the ways they choose to live their lives outside the norm. Since dance is my field of study and practice, that is where I look first for hope.
In New York’s East Village in the 1980s, at the Pyramid Club and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut on Avenue A, or CBGB on the Bowery, or Club 57 on St. Mark’s Place, or WOW Café Theater on East Fourth Street, or the Mudd Club on White Street, performance artists thrashed against societal constraints by remixing dance, drag, live band acts, theater, vaudeville, and stand-up comedy. They allowed the punkish energy of the neighborhood and the people around them to bleed into their works, confronting unprepared but willing audiences with outrageous, irreverent, politically urgent acts.
Take DANCENOISE, the performance art duo of Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton, who made works of gonzo burlesque and slapstick, dressed as robot housewives and blood-lusty bears and gift-wrapped presents all within one four-minute performance. Or Tom Murrin, known as Tom Trash, who collected detritus off the street—cardboard, old umbrellas, sheets of fabric—and used them as makeshift costumes and headdresses, performing oddball monologues cobbled together from the daily news. Or Karen Finley, who enacted grotesque exaggerations of the male gaze’s image of womanhood, smearing her naked body in foodstuffs resembling blood and shit, performing domestic chores with clumsy recklessness, or bathing herself in a suitcase full of dish detergent. “Finley charges through the gross forbidden subtext of everyday life,” wrote Village Voice critic C. Carr, “spewing obscene detail about child molestation, turds, venereal warts, the rapist’s desire. It’s breathtaking, the way a kick to the guts is.”
These artists did not stay confined indoors. David Leslie, nicknamed the “Impact Addict,” attempted to vault over a mountain of watermelons in a homemade rocket on Broome Street. Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh lived for an entire year tied together by an 8-foot rope, without touching, and could be seen riding bikes down Avenue A tethered at the waist. Stelios “Stelarc” Arcadiou, a Cypriot Australian artist who put his body through extreme acts of manipulation, had volunteers thread hooks through his skin, then suspended himself, his flesh stretching like the skin of a heavy water balloon, as he swung out of a window and flew naked and skewered over East 11th Street between Avenues B and C, to the awe of a waiting audience and the horror of innocent bystanders.
Some who emerged from this scene became major artists. When RuPaul Charles first came to New York in 1984, he kept his belongings in the basement of the Pyramid Club, where he was a go-go dancer. Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi both appeared in experimental works of performance art theater, or paratheater—Dafoe as a founding member of the Wooster Group, an experimental theater group formally established in 1980 at a garage on Wooster Street in Soho. They actively blurred the lines dividing art forms; they could be poets, dancers, filmmakers, actors, and clowns all at once. Their interdisciplinary approach was rebellious and antagonistic, with performers often drawing from and enacting rage toward systems of oppression and control. The mashing up and tearing down of the established principles and rules of art was an extension of that rage, that need to see the established burned down to make room for something new.
“Performance art seems to defy definition,” wrote Sally Banes, the performance critic who covered the B-boys in the Village Voice and also wrote for the Soho Weekly News, two local papers that dedicated serious coverage to the downtown performance art scene of the late ’70s and ’80s, “not so much because it comes in so many forms and styles but because it stakes out its territory, as performer and theater historian Michael Kirby has put it, ‘at the limits of performance.’ ”
P.S. 122, a redbrick school building on First Avenue and Ninth Street that ceased to operate as a public school in 1976, became home to a number of artist-run groups working across disciplines. (It still operates today as Performance Space New York.) Three dance and performance artists—Charles Moulton, Charles Dennis, and Tim Miller—took over the school’s auditorium and ran it as Performance Space 122. They began regular programming in 1980. Yvonne Meier created brash, funny, extreme works like Pomme Frites, in which she placed thousands of dishes on a collapsible shelf and littered the stage with the shattering avalanche of dinnerware; or Mad Heidi, a work about her native Switzerland in which she threw shoes and hard walnuts at the audience. Jennifer Monson performed group improvisations, often with Meier, shaping her experiments with ideas like “Could we dance hard enough to break our bones?” into performances. “It was very much about being queer,” Monson said of the work at that time. “There was always blood. There was always something that was pushing boundaries—that was demanding some deep kind of humanity be recognized.”
These artists embodied queer politics before the language became codified. Not having the language was, in fact, part of the politics. “Judith Butler doesn’t write Gender Trouble until [1990],” said John Jasperse, a dancer and choreographer who worked with Meier and Monson and whose own work similarly slipped between an overt and ambiguous relationship to queerness. “Judith Butler is giving words to it, but it’s not like we had to wait and read Judith Butler to suddenly figure out and be doing this.”
The artists working across these venues collapsed the distinction between aesthetic concerns in their art and political, real-world activism, moving back and forth between the two. The neoconservative politics arising in the 1980s, to which most of New York was not immune, ignited a radical reorganization of the systems and structures that supported artists. David White, the executive director of Dance Theater Workshop from 1975, recognized the shift in American cultural funding and support early, and he helped create alternative modes of artmaking, networking, and funding. White founded the National Performance Network, a collective of artists, presenters, and producers to share knowledge and resources and create opportunities for each other.
The NPN was based in New York out of DTW but expanded across the U.S. and eventually grew so big it contained its own subgroups. People of color within NPN created the People of Color Caucus, which was eventually splintered again into a Latino Caucus and an African American Caucus. The same thing occurred with the queer factions of the network. “Progressives of all stripes are not immune from the same kind of behavior that we criticize in others, but you only know that by hearing it,” White said, “which is why I’m a big fan of anecdotal documentation, of storytelling.” Connecting people in a room was really at the heart of the NPN. “Nothing replaces sitting down at the table over time, having to listen over time to the stories that everyone has, and telling your own,” White said.
On June 8, 1981, Ishmael Houston-Jones performed a solo in his friend’s loft apartment called DEAD, in which he played a tape of himself speaking the names of everyone he remembered from his life who had died, while he stood and fell repeatedly. “I made it for my 30th birthday,” he said. “It was just a random list I did the night before that included movie stars and politicians and relatives and pets.” Three days earlier, on June 5, the Centers for Disease Control had published its first report on the five gay men being treated for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, but Jones had no knowledge of that at the time. Within a few years, HIV and AIDS was an overwhelming aspect of American life, although the crisis was ignored by the mainstream for years, given that the highest numbers of sufferers were among gay men and people of color. President Ronald Reagan didn’t mention the word AIDS publicly until 1985, four years into the epidemic. During the prolonged nightmare, venues like the Pyramid Club and La Mama hosted countless memorials for members of the community who were rapidly dying.
In 1985, Jones created a work called THEM, in collaboration with the writer Dennis Cooper and musician Chris Cochrane. “We were just responding to Dennis’ words, which were not AIDS-specific at all, and Chris’ music.” When Jones decided to expand the piece the following year, he said, “We thought in ’86, living in the East Village at that time, it would be totally disingenuous to have a piece with all male-identified dancers with no reference to HIV/AIDS. But at the same time, we didn’t want to make an ‘AIDS piece.’ ” As part of the expanded version of THEM, Jones wanted to create an image of wrestling with death (he had always harbored a fear of dead things) and decided to wrestle with a goat carcass onstage. He went to a butcher in the Meatpacking District, bought an unskinned goat, wrapped it in garbage bags, and took it home to his apartment on Suffolk Street. It was a particularly hot summer, so Jones hung the goat out the window to keep it from rotting in his overheated apartment. During the season at P.S. 122, Jones kept the goat on ice in a beer cooler at a Japanese restaurant on Avenue A.
Audience members complained to the ASPCA about the performance, but the animal had been bought from a butcher shop, so there were no grounds for animal cruelty. Somebody alerted the board of health, which got the impression that Jones was throwing goat meat at the audience. Jones called the Department of Health to explain his performance and defend himself. “I started explaining Christian mythology and signifiers and AIDS and things that [he] was really not that interested in hearing about,” Jones said. The Department of Health’s response, according to Jones, was: “I’m going to let you slide this time. But Mr. Jones, take my advice: Find another act.”
Offense and outrage seemed the only appropriate responses in the face of the indifference and apathy the government expressed about the AIDS epidemic. “This was during the period when The Normal Heart [the play by Larry Kramer] was coming out,” Jones said. “It was when there were these heartfelt, hallmark pieces around AIDS. That wasn’t our world. Our friends were going to hospitals and changing our friends’ diapers.” Jones remembered visible markers of this turnaround present on the neighborhood’s sidewalks. “You would see some muscle magazines in a pile outside and you would know a gay man died there. And then renovation and rents would go up and new people would move in.”
In 1981, John Bernd, an artist from P.S. 122, came to an Open Movement class complaining that he’d just been to the dentist and his gums would not stop bleeding. Bernd was one of the first men in the P.S. 122 collective to get sick. The community rallied around him—including Jones, and Iobst and Sexton of DANCENOISE—acting as caretakers, creating schedules to share duties like doing laundry, cooking dinner, and taking Bernd to doctor’s appointments.
In 1982, a year after he got sick, Bernd performed a solo at P.S. 122 called Surviving Love and Death, one of the first performances in which someone addressed their status autobiographically onstage. Bernd spoke in the piece of his concern about having “the new gay cancer,” while manically and exhaustedly filling a blender with foodstuffs and mixing it into a mad health smoothie. From 1982 to 1985, Bernd presented a three-part work called Lost and Found, Scenes From a Life, marking through performance his body’s slow deterioration. In Part 1, he appeared physically healthy aside from some breakout psoriasis. For Part 3, in 1985, he performed only six days after having left the hospital, his body noticeably thinner and weaker, his dancing softer.
In 1988, he presented Two on the Loose, his final work, performed with Jennifer Monson, who remembered performing in the work, washing Bernd’s back with a washcloth from a white basin, “his bony back against the nubbily, dripping cloth and my hot hand. It was so life and death. I could never really deal with it, and then there I was onstage, running a circle for his life—finding a few of his gestures and rhythms to resurrect him in the space.” Bernd died on August 28, 1988, at age 35.
The community these artists created meant as much to them as their art; community and art were, in fact, inseparable. When faced with true apathy in the face of their annihilation, they already had each other. They had established the foundations of sharing and communicating and supporting each other outside traditional systems. For many, it saved their lives.
Today, as the 21st century is marked by an increase in online communities and disembodied practices, I am reminded that our bodies, coming together, are powerful entities capable of communication, protest, and pleasure. We can combat the exhaustion of the Trump era in the alternatives we make to the imposing and deadening lies we are fed—the creative ways in which we say fuck off. The election in New York of Mayor Zohran Mamdani just proved how possible real alternatives can be. Let’s carry that energy—with the inspiration of those artists who fought earlier battles—forward as we undertake the urgent work of imagining something unfamiliar: something that actually works for us.
