In 2015, Theatre Askew premiered Horseplay by Trav S.D. at La MaMa, about the life and times of the nineteenth-century celebrity Adah Isaacs Menken. While most famous for starring in the melodrama Mazeppa (in which she played a Ukrainian freedom fighter), Menken was a published poet who counted Walt Whitman among her colleagues. Her success as a stage performer intersected with her literary ambitions at Pfaff’s Tavern on the corner of Bleecker and Broadway, one of the earliest “queer-friendly” establishments in New York City. Its location just north of what was then the Theatre District and nearby the offices of several prominent newspapers and magazines made it a meeting ground for actors and writers alike. 

It’s there that Menken first encountered Whitman and learned from him the importance of crafting a visible public persona via the new medium of photography. In the scene from the show where we re-created the 1860s Manhattan demimonde, I played Whitman. To research this chapter of the poet’s life, I signed up for a walking tour of the original site of Pfaff’s with NYU professor and Walt Whitman Initiative (WWI) founder, Karen Karbinier. We became friendly, and later that year, she invited me to take part in their annual Song of Myself Marathon, something I have done every year since.

My experiences with WWI led me to explore turning Whitman’s poetry into a solo dance/performance piece. My first attempt was on the beach at Coney Island with Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.” (You can view a YouTube video of the performance here, Can you spot the point where I completely forget the text? Sorry, Walt!) This didn’t seem like the right direction to go in, however, and during COVID lockdown I came up with the idea of adapting Whitman’s epic “I Sing the Body Electric” from the point-of-view of a contemporary gay man. I set myself the task of meticulously adhering to the syllabic count for each of Whitman’s original poetic lines. In Whitman’s day, men interested in same-sex behavior met “cruising” on the street. Nowadays it’s all about electronic representations of bodies pinging each other on hookup apps, such as Grindr.

Director/choreographer Patrice Miller came onboard as my collaborator, and in May 2021 the piece premiered on the corner of Washington and 14th Streets as part of Art in Odd Places. We chose this site because it was directly in front of the location of the former Mother nightclub, a legendary queer social space. The piece, either in whole or in part, has subsequently been performed at the New York Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island, at Le Petit Versailles community garden and performance space as part of the Losaida United Neighborhood Gardens (LUNGS) Harvest Festival, and at the Producers Club.

Premiere: May 2021

Venue: Art in Odd Places on the corner of 14th and Washington Streets (in front of the former Mother nightclub)

Written, performed, and co-choreography: Tim Cusack

Direction and co-choreography: Patrice Miller