Sheena McGrandles
Portrait
Contextualize Sheena McGrandles however you like: the rigor of her ruptured and fragmented choreographic material, the political compass that is her working class background, the splash of her big genre series, or the dyke-camp undertones across all her works. Valid as these things undoubtedly are, desire lies beneath. Sheena is hungry for the thickest, most embodied, maximized version of all of her pursuits. One wonders where she finds the energy.
In a matter-of-fact, glint-in-the-eye, light-footed kind of way, Sheena is a dancer. She grew up in Northern Ireland, where she attended céilís with her mother and learned ballet from a book. After completing the LABAN bachelor’s in London, she moved to Berlin in 2010 and dived straight from the SODA master’s at UdK/HZT to the k3 residency in Hamburg. As anyone who has encountered the silly juiciness of her presence on the dance floor will know, her embodiment is non-negotiable.
Sheena’s commitment to the Berlin dance scene, politically speaking, is equally so. She believes that she shapes the scene as much as the scene shapes her. The time and energy Sheena pours into her work with collectives like PSR and neuehäute/agora is for the development of practices and social choreographies that strengthen the community by making it more democratic and inclusive.
Works like “FLUSH” (2020) and “FIGURED” (2018) have come to critical acclaim for, among other things, their devotion to formal principles. Yet Sheena is the kind of performer who can keep a straight face while you roll on the floor laughing. In a duet with Anna Nowicka entitled “true balls” (2013), a giant meatball slowly cooks under the heat of a stage lamp as two performers with stockings over their shoes and wigs for heads wrestle until they become one. In “Steve and Sam” (2014), a duet with Zinzi Buchanan, Sheena, in drag as Sam, gently performs a sexual sort of destruction on the leeks and heads of cabbage that seem to crave it. Even in “FLUSH,” Sheena finds a way to be a ham. She can’t help but connect with an audience that already finds itself in her hands.
The big genre series blends the effusive energy of her early works with the tidier later ones. It takes the eponymous big genre as a container for something even more uncontainable as the genre itself: reproduction in “DAWN” (2021), and money in “MINT” (2024). If the formality and the big genres we’ve seen since 2018 sound serious – that’s because they are. And some part of that seriousness came out of trepidation about being pigeonholed as a lesbian choreographer.
What is exiting about “as long as you want,” (2024) a duet with Eli Cohen, is that it is, simply said, a one-hour dance show about lesbian desire. Cue sigh of relief. From Sappho to Sara Torres, an anachronistic cohort of authors, making up the lesbian dinner party that dreams are made of, contribute erotic texts to the work. Sheena and visual artist Anna Mirkin have insisted on lesbian imagery throughout the stage design process, while giving space for all that gets released when the only things on stage are two bodies, some denim, and a rug.
When one imagines lesbian sexuality, it is often a hushed landscape of stolen glances, goosebumps and caresses, soft sad romances, and waterfalls. Sheena’s take on lesbian desire is much more #metal. It stings, it longs, it is intense. It’s a desire based on impact, and how it lingers. It is visceral, about how we offer our bodies to each other as playgrounds, as extensions of our own desires. Lesbian temporalities of desire, for Sheena and her work, are now, and for “as long as you want.”
Louise Trueheart