Ride 'em, cowboy

Four years before Brokeback Mountain hit the big screen, choreographer-scholar Peter Carpenter was up to his brim in the gay-cowboy subculture. While a student in the department of world arts and cultures at UCLA, Carpenter spent numerous evenings at Oil Can Harry’s Dance Club in L.A., observing the habits of the men who arrived on Tuesday and Thursday nights to do country-western–style two-stepping and line dances. Some of Carpenter’s research findings appear in his evening-length dance-theater work, Bareback into the Sunset, which is in performance at the Dance Center of Columbia College this weekend.

Carpenter explains that at Oil Can Harry’s, he saw “this negotiation of identifying with, and acting out against, the hypermasculine stereotype of the cowboy.” In dance terms, there’s a lot of interest there in stances and styles of movement and physicality. But Carpenter’s range as an artist encompasses theater as well as dance. With speaking and dancing parts for the six performers, Bareback goes beyond the dance floor, where queer men exchange their Aldos for pointy-toed boots and play cowboy with each other for a few hours. The piece gets under the denim to look at the sexual habits of some of these erstwhile buckaroos.

Yes, the “bareback” of the title refers to the cowboylike activity of riding a horse without a saddle. But it also means having unprotected anal sex—a controversial matter in the gay community and among those concerned about HIV transmission and the ongoing AIDS epidemic. “One of the key monologues in the piece is based on an experience I had in ’96 in a back room [of a club] in Chicago,” Carpenter says. “There was barebacking going on, and I had to deal with my own attraction and ambivalence about that.”

Carpenter can be seen as part of a lineage of choreographers who have addressed AIDS in their work. “There’s a whole genre of AIDS dances [from the 1990s] that show corruption of the body but a spiritual transcendence, trying to gain sympathy for the patient who is stigmatized,” says Carpenter. He refers to works such as HIV-positive artist Bill T. Jones’s 1994 Still/Here, and Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance (which premiered the same year)—both cited by many as important milestones in contemporary dance history.

Carpenter’s work reflects the advent of new drugs that lower mortality rates among those who are HIV-positive. “In Bareback, there’s the sick body, the ill body—but there’s also the body dancing furiously through the space,” he explains. “The AIDS body is capable of a lot of kinds of incarnations.” Bareback premiered at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California, in 2003. We saw an excerpt of the work back in May at Links Hall: The performers enact scenes named as numbered “Options.” At one point you’re looking at a hospital scene, then a performer calls out “Option 19,” and after a brief blackout you’re looking at the whole picture from a different angle, both physically and metaphorically. “We count down the ‘options’ as the piece goes on,” Carpenter says. The structure of the piece is a meta-comment on Carpenter’s thoughts on the AIDS epidemic: “Options get more limited; time is running out.”

Carpenter says that Bareback goes beyond issues of disease. “We all have to deal with our sexuality,” he says. “Seems like sex these days is all about marketing. It’s all about that attractive surface. But behind that sexy image we are people, and we have to negotiate our own paths in terms of pleasure and responsibility.”

Bareback into the Sunset is at the Dance Center Thursday 14 to Saturday 16.