Review: Teo Lin-Bianco’s “Copper P*ss Lasagna” in Tether Dance Project's "Flux and Form"
- Mar 26
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 2
The Limits of Critical Distance and Teo Lin-Bianco’s “Copper P*ss Lasagna” by Marlena Gittleman
I hadn’t planned on writing this. But then I watched Teo—my imprint cohort-mate, my former classmate, my dance pal—get shoved to the ground, hard. I heard the ringing clap of two hands hard on their chest, the thud Teo made after they fell backwards onto the stage.
This piece is, I think, as much about Teo’s dance theater duet as it is about what it means to write closer as a critic. I’ve never been much good at critical distance, anyway, if I’m being honest. When the art is good, or good to me, I find myself getting entangled, even when I don’t know the choreographer or the dancers. But it’s not that Teo and I had talked about the making of this piece or anything that led to it, either. All I knew going into our November Tether Flux & Form multi-bill at the Joe Goode Annex (I was dancing in a different piece) was: this was the latest installment in Teo’s ongoing “Soulmates” duets series, “it’s about my breakup,” and that there would be body paint. Then, as I chatted with fellow dancers before a tech showing, T said Teo had been wanting to make it for a year and a half. Then V said they’d been planning to piss on the stage, but it was too messy. Then E said it was apparently PG-13.
None of that context prepared me, though, for any of it. Two young people start the piece facing each other and swaying in a slow dance, atop a white tarp. A tender look in the eyes as Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs” plays. Soon after, on the floor, a rapid entanglement of limbs, arm under leg, hand around face, grasping and hard to tell who’s where. It seems cute and they spoon, feet all tucked into each others’. Then a jolt in the middle of the night, a head pops up and is pushed back down (something like: “it’s okay, babe, go back to sleep”). But then things take a turn: Tai holds Teo’s undershirt, which had been tenderly removed moments before, and he balls it up, distressed, enraged, those bursts of masculine violence, wall pounding and the like. I’m worried for Teo. I think of my sibling, myself, all the queer kids I’ve never met who realize they’re deep in something different than what they’d thought. Not long after Teo gets shoved, after they attempt tenderness and Tai turns away, Teo dips fingers into a cup of red paint and caresses Tai’s face, his bare back. It’s not exactly blood, but it’s not not blood, right? The red tracks how much the two stain each other as they move, leave marks: on tight white tank tops, on light-wash Levi’s, on skin and faces and throats.
All of this happens on the white tarp, which covers the entire stage. It crinkles as the two move and pick each other up and throw each other around. It makes even the most romantic, hot moments feel sterile and suspect. Are we in a bedroom? An asylum? A hospital? As experimental projections run from trippy images to bodies in contact to text messages that turn from sweet to sour, I think it would be more apt to say we’re in a psychic space, one of memory but also of processing. The two keep trying, Teo especially. (Am I being biased because I know them? I don’t think so.) They kneel at Tai’s feet, take his face in both hands, look deep into his eyes. That longing attempt gets overtaken by something simultaneously less tender and more passionate: acrobatic leans and lifts and jumps and rolls. Two hard metal chairs (like we had in my high school) are stood on, jumped off of, picked up in protection, as things peak and pit, mostly on the decline. Teo and Tai both turn their hands over and over—palms up palms down, palms up palms down—something like “what’s happening what’s happening what can I do what’s happening to me what’s happening to us?” But what can be done, here, with everything like this?
I felt—I feel—haunted. Aesthetic theory and dance critique and everyday conversations all have a million words for how performance can make us feel: affected, moved, transformed, shook. But, namely, what I feel is punctured: I’ve been pierced by the sharpness of someone else’s struggle, and there’s something disconcerting in the way the feeling lingers, in my mind and in my body. All of us watching leaned towards them, couldn’t look away. I think we probably wanted to protect Teo by witnessing it. I teared up again and again, but I was too stunned to cry. Maybe the tarp’s sterility, more than just a safeguard for the floor, allowed a creative-critical distance between trauma and art, a prophylactic to perform it out.
The piece ends in something like a crime scene: red everywhere. Teo tries to wipe paint off of Tai’s face and chest, Tai falls into their arms, inconsolable dead weight. And you realize: he’s sinking Teo with him (something like: “If I’m going down, we both are,” love’s inverse). Teo drags Tai diagonally up the length of the stage, knees bent and chest taut with effort. Tai is hanging from their waist and the whole white tarp gets bunched up underneath them as they move. By the time they’re all the way upstage, Tai’s flat on his back and Teo’s dragging him by the arm. It’s distressing, you wonder if it hurts, if it’s hard. Then a final pull, and Teo darts out the back door. They get away. They had to.
Marlena Gittleman (she/they) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at UC Berkeley. She completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where she taught writing and literature and researched gestures in US and Latin American queer and feminist literature and performance art. Marlena’s writing has been published in Feminist Studies, In Dance, and Life as a Modern Dancer, and their translations have been published in Critical Times, The Common, and Asymptote. Marlena is a dancer and improviser who has performed in NACHMO SF and with 4Fish x RedEye Productions and Tether Dance Project.
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