The Creative Process behind PLEASUREHOOD by Dance Artist Eric Geiger

You may also enjoy my Interview with Eric Geiger from 2022 (Episode 3): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-the-creative-process/id1600742208?i=1000550669672

Eric Geiger's writing about the work:

"PLEASUREHOOD is a dance directed and performed by Eric Geiger with collaborators and performers Jordan Daley and Nick McGhee. Through PLEASUREHOOD I have been asking myself- how can I create more space for what I don’t know, don’t understand, or have not yet experienced? How does the work, the choreography, the “what” and the “how,” create more space for otherness, more space for sensing through my moving self, our moving selves? How can we sense more through the work? What if the choreography holds the question- how can we create the conditions in order to sense more, feel more, drop into pleasure more?

Radical Tenderness
Radical Intimacy
Radical Sensuousness

The dance and the dancing is tender, intimate and sensuous. As Jose Esteban Munoz talks about in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, PLEASUREHOOD offers us an opportunity to find ecstasy together. Can how we are with each other be the material of the work? Can tenderness be the choreography? Can intimacy be the material we’re tending to?

What have we been doing in the process of PLEASUREHOOD? We’ve been organizing, reorganizing, and disorganizing ourselves in order to arrive in our dancing?  We’ve been wildly moving through space, messing with time, destabilizing our habitual patterns and making room for risk taking and aliveness. We’ve been shaking and shaking it up.  We’ve been finding value in being in it together while simultaneously listening to our responsive/responsible selves. We've been making something and giving it away simultaneously. We’ve been experimenting like children playing scientist, who mix ingredients together just to see what will happen. Or, like alchemists, making something common into something magnificent. We’ve been practicing generosity together. We’ve been falling in love.

PLEASUREHOOD is “of” our queerness which is different from “about” our queerness. And, our queerness informs all aspects of this dance. We are Queer and the three of us, together, exist in multiple intersections of identity, race, age, and privilege. My desire is that through the ongoing practice, through the dancing, through this kind of  togetherness, we transcend who we might believe we are.  And it’s different each time we are together, in each moment, in each place, with each witness, each time. PLEASUREHOOD offers us an opportunity to question and transform who we are rather than expressing who we are. Through the performance of PLEASUREHOOD we are continuing to figure it out.

With PLEASUREHOOD I’m interested in attempting to create an arena of thought. With each attempt at dancing PLEASUREHOOD Jordan, Nick, and I step into uncertainty and vulnerability. It is inevitable for compassion and empathy, through this vulnerability, to become part of the work’s lineage. Paying attention to the process changes the process. The work does not attempt to be representational. It does not depict compassion or empathy but generates a context in which the value system of the process and its lineage is the actual desired change. Through PLEASUREHOOD we become permeable to the world. That which increases our capacity as artists also increases our capacities as human beings."

Find Eric Geiger on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericandrewgeiger/

Work with Alicia in the Creative Chrysalis: https://mailchi.mp/c56f8e7440c5/creative-chrysalis