Spatial Practice, ed. Alan Ruiz, Movement Research Performance Journal, Spring 2020.
There is a bounty in what is lost
with Julie Tolentino, Movement Research Performance Journal, ed. Alan Ruiz, Spring 2020.
In the permissive, pre-Giuliani 1990s, the Clit Club found itself born into a sturdy corner site called THE BARROOM 432. The two-story space was named after its location, 432 W. 14th Street at Washington, in the meatpacking district. A choreographer friend’s husband, it turns out, took the lease on the space with college buddies who were hell-bent on activating their collective dream of running a jazz bar. Instead, as visions shift with the exigencies of time, unexpected possibilities were rendered from rubble in the slippery stickiness of the western edge of the city, the slowly de-funded, defunct meatpacking district, the street hustling, cruising, and comraderie of that time and place. The street’s shadow-lives carved paths for queer bodies, experiences rife with activism, AIDS, and visibility campaigns. NYC artists’ rigorously repurposed architecture here, remaking the deserted, desiccated structures into embodied spaces already entangled with loss, risk, desire, and unabashed energy. It was at this corner, in this time that the now-infamous club unfolded. A one-off Friday night of queer activists letting off steam plus a few good people and ideas that then extended into a decade of Friday night debauchery, partying, performances, dancing, meetings, breakups, installations, dressing up, dressing down, imaginative sipping, and bathroom, dance floor and pool table sex. Co-conspirators, scene-makers, dark-habits, and desire stain the Clit Club goers’ memories of the two-floor space. This edge of the city and its architecture were a large part of it.
We traveled together to the corner of “14th Street & Washington,” the former haunt of the Clit Club, looking for something in the space’s remains. Neither of us is a believer in recovery, nor did we expect to capture something in returning to the space that hosted the club for its first ten years. We both offered to hold to what darkness covers and is a cover to, and to remain with the irrecoverable, with what exceeds recovery. We knew that re-visiting the space, even with a retelling of some of its stories, could not fully represent the experience of being back there, or back then, in 1990s New York On this visit, we walked through the interior spaces and measured, using the physicality of our bodies—limbs, hands and steps—to feel for those things that evade the capture of representation in the architectural plan. We found instead something that is forever held and resistant, via the tender sharing of bodily recollection. There is a bounty to what is lost, we discovered.
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