“I had sort of a scaffolding of ideas, little sketches. I was thinking about a lot of different tableaus and gestural movements that I wanted to include.”
Musical artist serpentwithfeet’s latest project Heart of Brick is a stage work dreamt by serpent himself, a theatrical dance work set to his catalogue of hopelessly romantic songs. serpent is a self-proclaimed longtime admirer of dance, but if you’ve seen him move, you know he’s a dancer in his own right. As he wrote this latest project, it seemed only natural that he would bring the sound to visual life with movement, enlisting a team of collaborators in choreographer/dramaturg Raja Feather Kelly, writer Donte Collins, and more. Tickets are on sale now.
“I had clear images, or scenes in my mind that I wanted to activate and animate. Raja helped me to develop that, and then also brought in his own brilliant ideas,” serpent told me earlier this week. “And so did Wu Tsang, our director.”
serpentwithfeet – “Heart of Brick” – Photo by Fabian Hammerl
If you’re not familiar with serpent’s music, it’s tough to ascribe a genre to, but easy to feel deeply. The sketchbook was drafted out of his resonant relationship to the club, to black queer nightlife and the ways it shaped him.
“Nightlife spaces, particularly nightlife spaces that cater to black gay and queer people, raised me a second time and transformed me. So I wanted to document that wonder as best as I could,” he says.
The feeling of wonder rests well in the earnest romance of his lyrics, poignant and soft. The care that he and Kelly have taken to exchange stories with cast and collaborators has a similar feeling, and comes through in the work, which premiered in New York and comes to Los Angeles this Saturday for one night at The Ford.
serpentwithfeet – “Heart of Brick” – Photo by Fabian Hammerl
“Each of us have our own experiences as well, of going out to the club and what we feel and how that affects us,” Kelly explains. “And so serpent then created a sort of mythology that could hold all of that experience as one narrative.”
serpent is interested in the construction and whimsy of fables and folklore. He loves a good story and is quite the romantic. Mythological archetypes come through in Heart of Brick — the sage, for example, is also a trickster, and takes the stage opposite him in reference to an amalgamation of elders. serpent’s character has his own dynamic arc, which leads to a climactic confrontation:
“I was interested in the idea of the chasm, which my character has to jump…and in the non-physical chasms that exist within the show, and also within real life, whether that be generational chasms, or chasms that are that are caused by trust,” he tells me. “There are moments where the club patrons don’t trust me. The work that we all have to do is try to build trust with each other.”
There’s a parallel in the way serpent, Kelly, and Tsang facilitated the creation process: they took time to build trust, and serpent approached the process with vulnerability.
“I went into rehearsals…just being clear about what my intentions were, where my heart and my spirit was. And I also asked them what the club or partying or dancing outside of the stage, what does that mean for them? The intention was to make something that felt heartfelt and felt spirit-filled,” he says.
The club experience among the queer community is both individual and universal, and Kelly took each dancer into account when making the movement and fine-tuning the story. A lot of the work, they explained, was cultivating the right feeling for rehearsal and making space for everyone to be.
serpentwithfeet – “Heart of Brick” – Photo by Fabian Hammerl
“The cast identifies in the same way: they’re all people of color, black people, and people who are queer, gay or somewhere on the, on the spectrum of, of queerness or gayness. My job was to make space for everybody,” Kelly shares. “And if I made space for everybody in the room, then their stories would somehow be told. And that that part seemed the easiest, because you just let people exist.”
In that space, the story could flow and bloom. As dramaturg and choreographer, Kelly is invested in the way the movement drives the narrative forward, and vice versa.
serpentwithfeet – “Heart of Brick” – Photo by Fabian Hammerl
For him, “our goal was to really take the concept and the plot points that serpent, wanted to create, and find a narrative that can house all of that, and then find — within serpent’s music — a kind of bed for everything to lay in.”
For Kelly, a lot of that bed is tone. She was thoughtful about cultivating a rehearsal vibe that matched that of the show: it helped the pieces fit together more easily.
“If I put people in a state of joy, and a state of bliss, and a state of curiosity, and a state of flirtation, and a state of nuance, then it’s then easier to craft the work,” she said. “And it’s impulsive, sometimes it just comes from the music.”
serpentwithfeet – “Heart of Brick” – Photo by Fabian Hammerl
This attention to nuance comes up several times in my conversation with Kelly. They are intentional about directing the viewer’s eye, knowing how to guide audience focus.
“People are really excited by this kind of story. And I think they’re excited by this idea of the nuance. We’re actually trying to make it more quotidian, so that people really lean into understanding the small details about performance and about intimacy, and not hiding that stuff behind too much spectacle,” they said. “And not letting the intimacy be about sex, but letting it be about relationships.”
serpent understands subtlety similarly, in his own work and in his influences.
serpentwithfeet – “Heart of Brick” – Photo by Fabian Hammerl
“The text that I love is incredibly detailed. I just wanted to make sure that as we talk about the club, we don’t fall into the temptation of just doing big, loud, and fast,” he explained. “Because the club is that, but the club is also small, quiet, tender, you know?”
He cites the in-betweens as some of the most meaningful, in a way that makes me look forward to witnessing eye contact, pauses, simplicity, all onstage and set to a serenade.
“I love the minutiae. I’m here for the big bombastic moments, and the virtuosic eight counts —like, I love witnessing that…but I’m also interested in the moments when we see the tips of the fingers flick a certain way, or everybody moves their chin on the same downbeat; those little things that I think can really say a lot.”
Heart of Brick plays at The Ford on Saturday, October 21 before going to San Diego next week and Seattle next month; don’t miss the minutiae.
To learn more about serpentwithfeet, please visit his website.
Written by Celine Kiner for LA Dance Chronicle.
Featured image: serpentwithfeet – “Heart of Brick” – Photo by Fabian Hammerl
