AUTOMORPHS IMAGINES NEW WORLDS

The pungent smell of tire rubber permeates the Cascade Bicycle Club. I settle into a folding chair and watch kelly langeslay pushing a bike and slowly circling the room while talking with an audience member. Langeslay is performing Untitled as a special guest of Kara Beadle and Andy Zacek, who created the larger show, Automorphs, an experimental dance performance about bicycle rebels who defy a world subjugated to automobiles. 

Langeslay’s murmured conversation continues with other selected audience members. I only hear the occasional word, like “fall” and “first time.” When the house lights dim, langeslay positions a bicycle in the aisle next to the first row of the audience and turns on the headlight, illuminating a platform where they lift another bike and climb up next to it. Langeslay tears their T-shirt as they talk, eventually cutting a strip with a knife. Using the rag to clean the bike wheel, they describe a recurring nightmare. Something about riding a bike off a plywood ramp, a broken collar bone and how they had never seen you cry. I begin to wonder if langeslay is incorporating some of the pre-performance interview material into their poetic monologue. Meanwhile they pass a small delicate item covered in bike grease over their eyelashes. The fact that I can’t tell if it’s a mascara brush or a bicycle tool signals the beginning of a blurring of worlds that this show is about. Machine/human, human/technology…how do the ways we move through the world affect how we show up in society?   

When langeslay says, “You put the flying machine back in the shed and I had perfect faith in you,” I think of how the Wright brothers used bicycles and the principles of riding them to create the first airplane. They knew that a bike, like life, is inherently unstable and that it is the rider’s responsibility to keep their machine balanced amongst constantly changing conditions. A rider has to be able to flow and adapt.

According to their bio, Langeslay’s performance philosophy imagines “alternative ways of being” and “investigates queer time” as described by the writing of José Muñoz. Muñoz describes queerness as a rejection of “straight time” and the insistence on the here and now.  

Knowing this when langeslay says, “We knew we were from another world,” I start to appreciate that queer storytelling allows access to new “ways of being” that I hadn’t considered before. They strip off their pants and reveal they are wearing a blue evening gown the precise color of their hair. They rear the bike up onto one tire and dance with it, strangely reminding me of a gliding Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers ballroom number. 

As langeslay twirls off the stage, they turn on music and my focus shifts to Beadle standing atop two bicycle helmets. Zacek, covered in helmets so that he looks like an alien bunch of grapes, pedals a pink ten-speed on a trainer, which holds the bike stationary. Zacek peddles faster and faster and the trainer hums loudly. Meanwhile Beadle descends off the helmets, picks them up, drops them loudly to the floor and tap dances with abandon. After removing their tap shoes, Beadle dons a helmet so that it obscures their face, the normally protective helmet becomes something that separates them from reality, an unusual filter through which to see the world. Zacek is completely ensconced in helmets like alien spoor pods about to burst. Zacek’s costume seems to embody the sentiment in his bio that says “He believes in the empowerment that comes from cycling, and the potential for alternate, parallel worlds that become possible through self-empowerment.”  

Amidst loud clacking and cracking sounds, Zacek sheds the helmets. Pacing like animals, he and Beadle put on leather harnesses spiked with protruding metal rods. They take turns using a power drill to affix bicycle parts to the harnesses. These ingenious morphing-before-our-eyes costumes are Zacek’s brainchild, inspired by his work as a professional bicycle mechanic. Although Zacek is not a dancer, I do not notice this fact until reading the program later. Frankly, the novelty of transformer-like costumes and the totality of the bicycle world overshadow my perception of the dance movement itself. I am reminded of the 1982 science fiction film, “Tron” where characters are transported into a videogame where they become one with their sleek motorcycles. One of the earliest CGI films, the film succeeded in the suspension of disbelief and sucked me into an all-consuming, mind-bending world. 

As Beadle and Zacek work, the song “Here in my Car” is playing and keeps speeding up. Soon Beadle has gear and pedal assemblies on their chest mimicking robot breasts and Zacek has curved handlebars like ram horns on his forehead. The program defines this transformational process as “automorphosis”— the physical manifestation of “the twisting adaptations of [the bicycle rebels’] psyche, the dysphoric creeping of their identities.” 

Beadle and Zacek shift weight together as if they are trying to synchronize their new identities, but their movement is awkward. They silently mouth, “Fuck you!” to the delight of the audience. A sort of reverse road rage, cyclist to driver that seems like a metaphor for rejecting our energy-hungry, planet-destroying culture. 

For a while, leaning on their bikes, they make intersecting swooping circles. Strobe lights flash and Zaceck starts winging helmets at Beadle as if trying to break a spell or in frustration with what he has become. He disappears for a brief time, and when he reappears, he has a bicycle wheel attached to his back. Slowly, he bends until the wheel touches the ground. Beadle leans over him and unhurriedly takes hold of the handlebars on his head. They have become a new creature. As the program says, “one’s defiance becomes what defines them.” Slowly pedaling toward an unknown future and destination, the show ends.

Beadle and Zacek, avid cyclists, partnered with Cascade Bicycle Club to present Automorphs as part of a series that will be performed during bike rides designed to encourage people to navigate Seattle by pedal power instead of fossil-fueled machines. As queer dance makers, Beadle and langeslay amplify the partnership with the Club which is actively developing events to draw non-binary and women cyclists. 

I happen to be reading Ways of Being by James Bridle which references artist Zach Blas’s work. Blas’ Queer Technologies includes a set of gender changing computer cables that allow ‘male’ cables to be transformed into ‘female’ ones. “Crucially,” writes Bridle “by actually building the tools it imagines, it makes possible different ways of doing technology and thus of understanding the world the technology is part of.” 

I feel like I witnessed a metamorphosis of sorts into a reimagined existence. A line that langeslay said earlier captures the transformative spirit of the show, “You’re constantly redoing yourself. The version of you in my head is the only version I have access to.” 

Automorphs was performed at the Cascade Bicycle Club on November 9th and 10th.