Rainbow Riots and Coded Messages: Conversations You Need to Hear

“CODED: Conversations You Didn’t Know We Were Having”, an “evening of dance, drag, and drama” by show creator Travis Propkop, was a collaborative and interdisciplinary event, clearly community-driven and filled with love. I can say with certainty that my investment in this work is because of just how good this show really was. I wish I could have seen it twice. It is safe to say that this premier production from Prokop_Theory Dance, self-identified as “…a group dedicated to integrating 2SLGBTQI+ culture and history into concert dance”, was a touching success.

In binding themselves to their integral belief in free access to public art, the artists of this production chose not to charge admission; instead, all donations made benefit the Rainbow Railroad, an international nonprofit organization that aids at-risk LGBTQI+ individuals in attaining security and safety worldwide. Prokop’s show is dedicated to the memory of Jonathan Charles (1949-2013), a beloved teacher, mentor, and legend of the Sam Houston State University Department of Theatre and Dance, as well as a friend to many beyond the university walls. 

Prokop, wearing his Jonathan Charles “Keep Calm and Shi-Shi Fon-Fon” in memoriam tank top, introduced the show, beaming with pride, joy, a touch of bewilderment, and passion for this work. He emphasized the importance of public art, supporting drag queens, and making visible the secret and coded ways in which we, within the queer community, have engaged with one another generation after generation. Prokop escorted Houston native Miss Violet S’Arbleu, known as “The Thinking Man’s Drag Queen,” onto the stage with care and attentiveness, a precious gesture that marked the start of the show. Just in Prokop’s walk, we could see the devotion and care he put into every detail of the concert he prepared for us. 

Each section of dance works, choreographed by Travis Prokop, was bookmarked with a performance by Drag Queen Miss Violet S’Arbleu. Every costume was designed to perfection, every look meticulously detailed to connect us to a different era and persona. Her first performance was “For the Gaze”, from the original Broadway musical “Death Becomes Her.” Miss Violet, gliding around the room in a gorgeously fitted and shimmering jeweled gown, matching earrings, heels, and a fabulous pink feather boa, delivering to us the lyrics, “it’s pure ecstasy to be seen the way I see me / everything I do is for the ga(y)ze”, opened the show with just the right amount of campy authenticity I was hoping to see. 

Upon the exit of Miss Violet S’Arbleu from the space, the next piece, “Rainbow Riot”, begins as dancer LaRodney Freeman enters the stage, carrying a red umbrella and wearing a red poncho and red rainboots, while holding a beige suitcase in his downstage hand. He begins slowly shedding his layers, dancing casually as he strips along to “The Hustle” by Van McCoy. Every color of the rainbow is shown in costuming, including an orange rip-away track suit, a mustard turtleneck and yellow pants, green pants paired with a vintage green threaded polo, blue coveralls, a purple crop top with “Gay.”, printed on the front, and short purple beach shorts. A spotlight appears, and Freeman takes off the shirt, hesitates about the shorts, and removes them to reveal the final bare image of himself in nothing but white socks and a white thong. The music stops. He walks around the stage and exits as others enter to clear the area of the discarded clothing. A voice is heard, that of actor Fabian Cortina, performing a monologue from the 1980 film “FAME” about growing up gay, being told over and over how “it’s just a phase”. The costuming choices shared here between the actor and the other performers onstage made me think of the queer experience of second adolescence — the pains, struggles, and euphoria of properly representing oneself after a denied youth — and the liberation of self-expression in adulthood. 

The way the stage was set up for this performance at Sanman Studios’ pop-up space was clearly intentional. The square room was uniquely utilized, where the room was divided in half diagonally, with the audience in one triangular half and the performance in the other half, the two inverted triangles facing each other to create something whole. No section was elevated above the other. It was a brilliant use of the space, symbolically and physically bringing the performers and audience together, creating a community that could be witnessed and experienced, not just watched. The pink inverted triangle, derived from badges assigned to homosexuals and she/her transgender prisoners in concentration camps of Nazi Germany, have been reclaimed by the gay community and the broader LGBTQI+ community at large as a symbol of protest against the bigotry, hate, intolerance, and ignorance that endangers our lives and the lives of the people we love. 

In the next work, “Square Peg; Round Hole”, performed by Dwain Travis, shadows from the spotlight on the dancer create seven separate figures along the white wall, so that you can see a figure moving throughout the space even when you can’t see the dancer. This work felt like metafiction—a conversation framed inside another conversation, held within a memory that those of us in the know have all lived, and one that all those like us who came before have lived. Their memory was honored in shadow and light upon the wall, the dancer a vehicle for translating the title of this concert into distinct and unforgettable imagery. 

The lighting elements of this piece were demonstrably effective in reminding us of all who walked this journey before us. Dwain Travis continues to perform gestural phrasing, appearing to sort through information. He sheds the rainbow shirt, and the music changes as the lighting transitions into a triangle projection. We are now dancing inside our symbols. The motifs of the choreography here are those of the cycle of accepting and rejecting yourself, shown in the rolling over and returning, turning yourself upside down, and standing on your head, like trying to force a new perspective on who you are. The dancer models the thought process: “If I look at the situation like this, then maybe I’ll finally find a way to be who they want me to be.” I was affected by the repeated hand gestures that indicated the cycle of speaking it (the undeniable) out loud and of taking it back, of trying to swallow the whole of yourself. Still, it will always be too big to contain, and it will spill out of your mouth, regardless, dribbling down your shirt, evidence of the way our identities sometimes feel like stains on other people. He dances and traces the walls of his cage as he tiptoes around the boundaries, seeing if it is safe to step out. As he paces the boundaries of his cage, the music transitions into Queen’s “I Want to Break Free”, and Miss Violet S’Arbleu enters the triangle, freeing the dancer from his cell. This choreographed transition was subtle and beautifully clever. It represented the historical and continuing work done by drag queens in giving us our liberation — such an extraordinary detail. 

The following work, “No Homo”, performed by Jesus Acosta and LaRodney Freeman, is set in a typical locker room: bench, boys, towels, and all. The sport is wrestling, but the competition is passion. A single-leg takedown, a headlock, prolonged eye contact…a fireman’s carry, a Russian tie, and a bold and suggestive caress…they grasp at any excuse for connection, desperate for the other’s touch. “Careless Whisper” by George Michael trickles in through the locker room speakers. The tension builds; wrestling maneuvers duel stolen moments of intimacy. They struggle to resist their desire through displays of hypermasculinity, which result in mutual isolation and heartache; “Never gonna dance again / the way I danced with you” is elevated in definition. We were witness to something profound and vulnerable, and something private: a testimony to the old familiar pain of a secret and unfulfilled love.

My own heart ached as I lived inside this memory with them. Watching, I relived my own experience, transported to that exhilarating moment of seductive authenticity, that magnetic pull of reciprocal perception delivering me into the arms of what I knew could not last. “There is no comfort in the truth..”, but unlike the words of George Michael’s iconic song, pain is not all I found here. The chemistry between these dancers was so intense that at times you wanted to give them their privacy, but you couldn’t look away. Witnessing the battle was to ease unhealed wounds; it created a sense of solidarity and connection among those of us who could relate. The choice of wrestling here was not merely a convenient choreographic tool used to tell yet another stereotypical tale about homo-eroticism in sports: it was a strategy, heavy with the weight of experience in an impossible intimacy. This work revealed the sincere depth of the coded conversations endured by our community, as our relationships have never had the heteronormative privileges of an assumed safety in public expression.  What is considered acceptable by heterosexual norms can feel like an indulgence to us, because the stakes of following your heart are just not the same. That struggle was perfectly, endearingly, and woefully shown. The duet ends in a “good game” gesture and a final tender embrace. The tenderness is dropped at the approaching sound of voices, and they return to their act as strangers in a pre-stretch routine, their relationship fated to a halflife lived between the opening and closing sounds of a locker room door.

Miss Violet S’Arbleu enters the stage again, to Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind”. She wears a kaleidoscope gown and performs with the subtle and quiet confidence of Judy Garland as she walks the stage, lamenting, “You say you love me / or were you just being kind? / Or am I losing my mind?” She is beautiful. 

The voice of Fabian Cortina returns, acting as what I assume is our own personal guide through the show; not necessarily a narrator, but something closer to the role of Puck from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, yet more subversive. Instead of asking us to distinguish between reality and fantasy, Cortina implores us to challenge and expand our own understanding of existing systems of communication to encompass the contexts of the LGBTQI+ community. He begins to quote the poem, “Two Loves”, by Lord Alfred Douglas. Cortina is holding what looks like a corsage of grass blades, likely a reference to the poem: “Of one brief moment in a sunset; blades / Of grass that in a hundred springs had been / Slowly but exquisitely nurtured by the stars, / And watered with the scented dew long cupped / In Lilies, that for rays of sun had seen / Only God’s glory, for never a sunrise mars / That luminous air of Heaven.” As he continues quoting “Two Loves,” other dancers move into the space, holding their own grass corsages, their shadows moving like ghosts upon the wall, dismissed from the stage by the ending line, “I am the love that dare not speak its name.”  

The lights dim, and a projection shows the next work, “Carnations”, a dance film featuring Dwain Travis and Ruben Trevino. The film has a distinct vintage setting, made evident by early 1900s costuming and telephones hanging off the hooks. Both men secure their grass corsages to their own suit jackets. One removes his wedding ring, and another reads the book, “Modern Ballroom Dancing”. The setting moves from their individual homes, and they meet at the scene of a ballroom dance class. As the two lovers-to-be coyly find the courage to dance hand in hand, dancing in a style reminiscent of any Hollywood golden-age musical, the piece is made even more precious and bittersweet in its inclusion of the song, “We Kiss In A Shadow”, performed by Perry Como. The lyrics, “We kiss in a shadow / We hide from the moon, / Our meetings are few / And over too soon. / We speak in a whisper, / Afraid to be heard. / When people are near / We speak not a word”, serve as poignant and melancholic accompaniment to the dancing lovers, who in this sublime moment are allowed to live inside the world they created, alone and undisturbed. As they hold each other, more grass corsages appear at their feet, representative of all shared and hidden moments such as these, evidence of our deepest confessions and most secret coded messages, the heart of the conversations you didn’t know we were having: “I love them, and no one knows. I love them, and there is no one I can tell.”

Miss Violet S’Arbleu enters the stage, wearing a blonde bob and a sparkling fringe dress. She performs to Edith Piaf’s “La Foule”. Once again, she is mesmerizing.

The lighting changes as Miss Violet concludes her performance, and the two dancers of the next piece, “afTer parTy”,  wander their way through the crowd and onto the stage. The lighting design by Kali Vlahos casts a profile shadow of Dwain Travis, whose character, messily dressed in a black suit and a white button-up, leans against the stage-right wall and sits, looking detached and strung out. Jesus Acosta follows, wearing a simple black dress, and puts his hand on Dwain’s face, but he does not respond.  Jesus moves alone in the center of the room, emoting anxiety and loneliness and isolation; as he faces away from his partner, it looks as if the large growing shadow behind him is coming from inside his own body, like his soul stretching out beyond the confines of his ribcage. 

The image is burned in my brain, yet the closest comparison I can make is to an abstraction of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”,  something credited to the magic of theatre alone that can communicate a devotion so fiercely given that it leaves you emptied, out of breath, and collapsing into abject horror. This image is even more haunted and compelling once we understand that the shadow escaping his body is actually that of the strung-out partner, reaching towards and through him. The use of shadow and light here is nothing less than brilliant and exceedingly clever; it easily exhibits the blending and melting and molding of love, how we move in and out of each other to create something new, but it also imitates the terror felt in losing yourself inside a relationship, the dysregulation of blurred identities, and the entropy of codependency. Here, perhaps the codependency is of an unwillingness to exist outside of each other, but having no choice, as demonstrated by the toxic visual aesthetics and the cyclical nature of the choreography in this work. The fire and connection in the relationship between these two has died, but not for lack of effort and love on the part of Jesus’ character. I saw him make himself repeatedly vulnerable to rejection, even as it hurt to watch someone submit themselves to such indifferent and neglectful treatment. This work highlighted the complexities and intensities of not only queer love but of all romantic love, and the desire to not remain in the shadows, regardless of one’s reason for being there.

However, as for the coded message in this piece, I am sorry to say that I was unable to find it, and struggled to integrate this dance into the work as a whole in terms of its relation to the thesis of generational messages of queerness. It is possible that the coded message is lost only to me, while it is obvious to others in the audience, and perhaps I am missing the forest for the trees. I am not suggesting that this piece does not belong in the work, because it absolutely does; it has a secure spot in relation to the other pieces, both in terms of emotional complexity and thematic richness. Some details can be adjusted here to make the coded conversation in this dance more conspicuous. 

My second recommendation for this section of the work is to separate the timing of Fabian Cortina’s reading of the screenplay “Fawns” by Thanasis Tsimpinis from the ending of the “afTer parTy” number. It busied the scene and made it difficult to focus on either event. Invested in the dancing, I admit I tried to ignore the reading, but still couldn’t help but feel it detracted from the dramatic story the two dancers were trying to tell. Fabian Cortina delivered the screenplay with a charming and commanding interpretation all his own, but it seemed to clash with the ending of the duet. The quote about how the mothers of fawns know that, “…if you love something, sometimes you have to let it go”, timed to the exact moment of the onstage break-up, felt too on the nose for me and took away from both performances. Again, none of these opinions are concerned with talent – this is just an organizational issue. Let each piece have its own moment, as each is worthy of its independence. I applauded the ending of the duet, even amid the distraction. The strung-out partner, Dwain Travis, extended his lit cigarette lighter, and the other dancer, who I suppose is the ‘fawn’ in this relationship (fawning, a trauma response, is a coping mechanism where a person engages in pleasing people to avoid conflict), blew the light out. The partner flicks the lighter on again, and Jesus’s character ignores it and leaves, essentially freeing himself from a neglectful and toxic love. I think by separating “Fawns” from “afTer parTy”, the ending of “Fawns” leaves the conclusion of the duet more ambiguous in interpretation in a way that better serves the work as a whole. 

From here, we are blessed again by the presence of Miss Violet S’Arbleu, this time as disco dame extraordinaire. She is sending in her Diana Ross afro, blue, purple, and pink glitter fringe romper, fishnets, and sensationally fun heels, all set to Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Nightlife (Disco Round)”. Miss Violet works the crowd in pure disco style. As she exits and passes by, I give her my biggest smile and a thumbs up, to which she responds, “It’s so quiet!” If I hadn’t been so starstruck, I would have told her, “Queen, we were transfixed!”  

The final two numbers, “Rainbow Railroad”, performed by LaRodney Freeman, and “I Am What I Am”, with Fabian Cortina, transition seamlessly across a video projection backdrop of all the quintessential histories, persons, and art of the queer movement, spanning a time period of what I estimate to be 128 years, beginning with the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, pioneer of the scientific study of human sexuality. The projections begin with video footage of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” protest marches, police brutality, and the AIDS crisis as dancer LaRodney Freeman enters the space, again carrying the beige suitcase. He is wearing the same mustard-yellow turtle neck over his blue coveralls, along with his white socks. His shadow is cast across the projection as he dances, like a duet between him and our collective history. We see Matthew Shepard on screen, and pink triangles, Marsha P. Johnson, and what I believe to be a scene from the 1919 German silent film “Anders als die Andern” (Different From the Others). As Bert and Ernie take to the screen, the dancer unpacks his suitcase, sorting through all the colors of the rainbow, and finds a gray t-shirt with a pride flag print in the shape of Texas, which he slips on, much to the encouragement and delight of the audience. 

Next, Freeman pulls out several bandanas of every color, all tied together, long enough to extend well into the audience. Bandanas, also known as the “handkerchief code”, are one of the more well-known coded messages in popular media. Seeing them all tied together like that, I thought about the AIDS quilt, each section the size of a human grave connected in memory of those lost; but here, all the colors of the bandanas tied together like a lifeline, was a message of hope, unity, and resistance. Fabian Cortina enters amid the rolling projection of “Heartstoppers” and Bugs Bunny, speaking the lyrics to Jerry Herman’s “I Am What I Am”, elucidating the message sung by Gloria Gaynor: “I am what I am! Your life is a sham until you can shout out, I am what I am…It’s time to open up your closet. Life’s not worth a damn until you can shout out, I am what I am!”, and the entire cast entered the space, joining Fabian Cortina in shouting, one last time, “I am what I am!” in a harmonious and joyful celebration of love, community, and pride. The cast invites the crowd, already on its feet in a standing ovation, to join them in dancing onstage; I document the smiles, hugs, warmth, laughter, joy, and love that fill the room. 

This entire work revolves around the process of coming out, of clawing your way to visibility in the face of rejection, and finding community and self-acceptance along the way. I hope that this work is shared again in a similar venue so that it may reach a wider audience and recreate the immersive, raw, and intimate atmosphere that the audience experienced. This show is going to stay with me, scrapbooked like pressed flower petals to the inside of my heart. That is how “CODED: Conversations You Didn’t Know We Were Having” felt to experience. It was like being given access to a collection of someone’s most private and precious memories, offered as an invitation and a gesture of trust, sincere and never voyeuristic. We watched those memories unfold from a heart big enough, strong enough, and vulnerably bold enough to embrace those experiences and share them with the world, so that even despite the hate, despite the regulations and the rigidity of our state, these messages will live on, and outlive this era of censorship and bigotry. All these coded messages we create, we leave behind for those who need them, so that you know you have existed before, in perpetuity. We fought to make space for you, even before you were here. Just look for the messages.