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IMPRESSIONS: Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers in "CEREMONIA" at Abrons Arts Center
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on November 1, 2023
Photo by Maria Baranova
Choreographer and performer: Antonio Ramos
Performers: Paul Hamilton, Sarah White-Ayón, Rebecca Wender, Saúl Ulerio, Molly Lieber, Adele Loux-Turner
Music, Sculpture, Robotics: Efraín Rozas
Costumes: Claire Fleury
Lighting: Amanda K. Ringger
Commissioned by Abrons Arts Center and The Chocolate Factory Theater, presented in partnership with The Clemente
Where is the line between performance and ceremony? Ceremonial enactments of ritual often form part of a performer’s private practice, from small habitual gestures to the intentional grounding of self and community in the vulnerable and electric space of performance. Performance is a ceremony for and about the present moment in the fullness of its ephemerality. In its continual state of arising and passing, the liveness of performance becomes a conduit to conjure and channel simultaneous histories and futurities. Performance is ceremony, as Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers share in their riotous, intimate, generous “CEREMONIA” as part of Abrons Arts Center’s Fall 2023 curatorial focus on artists of the Puerto Rican diaspora.
Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers in Ceremonia. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of Abrons Arts Center
Ramos is a notoriously unorthodox artist whose work celebrates the complexities of queerness in all its possible identitarian dimensions — gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, and more — by exploding all of them in the most extravagant fashion. “CEREMONIA” performs reverence through irreverence, achieving climax in the fertile space between performer and spectator — a space the Gangbangers dissolve as they overspill the boundaries of traditional performance to embrace us, their audience, as ceremonial celebrants.
“CEREMONIA” begins before we know it: clustered on Grand Street outside the doors to the Abrons Playhouse Theater, we the audience are seemingly outside the ceremony, privy only to the sounds and smells emanating from the warmly-lit interior lobby. But there is community here: friends who watch dance together, friends who run into friends watching dance together, strangers who might become friends through a shared experience of watching dance together. Little do we know that we will soon be doing much more than watching dance together.
Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers in Ceremonia. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of Abrons Arts Center
As the lobby doors open, the crowd still lively with conversation spills into the welcoming, cozy space for an offering and grounding with Ramos. The touchpoints of Ramos’s ceremonial practice stem from his Puerto Rican heritage and research in broader Indigenous and Latinx cultures, evidenced in the burning of sage and tobacco, the offering of cacao beverage, and ritual chants and percussion. Within these traditions there are departures: along with cacao, each audience member is given a disembodied piece of a plastic doll’s body as an offering; along with Efraín Rozas’s live percussion, an array of cowbells and cajones are rigged to a robotic, computerized mechanism on a fixed, repeating cycle of rhythmic patterns (also designed by Rozas). These contemporary pop culture and technological interventions situate our ceremony at the nexus of ancestry and futurism—otherwise known as the present moment.
As the next set of doors opens to the formalized theater space, we are directed to sit anywhere, leaving no seat unoccupied; the chatter continues as we drink our cacao and idly squeeze our soft, hollow plastic doll parts (I got a leg). Performers are scattered throughout the house, stretched on the floor or climbing on seats in various states of undress and meditative preparation for what has already begun. The stage is bare and undressed, open like a mouth. Sitting near the front, I have to turn around to see the performers as they slither and pump through the space, up the aisles and back into the lobby where we, now trapped in our seats, catch mere glimpses of their revelry.
Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers in Ceremonia. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of Abrons Arts Center
In a mix of Spanglish and untranslated Spanish, Ramos as emcee (quite literally master of our ceremonies) invokes the ancestors and calls us to go together into this ceremony. The cast of seven promptly barrells headlong down the aisle on a rolling platform, landing to hold us in thrall through bouts of formalism and parody, harmony and distortion, devotion and absurdity, elation and grief. The stage is a mere formality, one of many spaces in which they are equally empowered and revealed. Their breath, their flesh, their gazes vibrate amid a shifting palette of sound and light, drawn together by ecstatic swirls of unison, powerful pairings, and multivocal phrasework that highlight the beauties of commonality in difference.
Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers in Ceremonia. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of Abrons Arts Center
At one point Ramos directs us to hold our offerings together, to search and find a way to make the doll whole, to gather up her component parts and make her something intelligible, something beautiful, something that might pass for human. A fun game, yes, but more—a symbolic questioning and material offering of what it is that makes us whole, intelligible, beautiful, human. In this ceremony, it takes us all.
And so we dive back in again, united in a new way, vibrating perhaps a bit closer to the frequencies on display before and among us. We are met with flashing lights, prancing ponies, pumping pelvises, spiraling spines, and an exquisite chorus of flesh exploring pain and pleasure, grace and awkwardness, restriction and freedom. The sheen of their sweat glows in the lurid blue-greens, purples, and warm ambers of Amanda K. Ringger’s lightscape, set off against contrasting colors cast on the raw brick and fixtures of the theater’s bones. Like most things psychedelic, it is strange yet somehow not unfamiliar.
Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers in Ceremonia. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy of Abrons Arts Center
The performers move with forceful assurance as they push their bodies to their visceral limits, yet when they touch they do so with breathtaking gentleness. They are alive from the slapping soles of their feet to the summoning tips of their fingers as they converge in lock step and break away entranced. Anointed in a pool of blue paint — its shine and drip uncannily reminiscent of blood — they imprint themselves on the stage, on each other, and on each of us: an offering, a blessing, una ceremonia.
