Why do I dance like Bill Cosby?

 

The family dance scenes that opened the Cosby Show are being recreated as performance art. Season Butler opens up about the black body, sexuality, the accusations — and what it’s like to stand in Bill’s shoes

“Last winter, I felt sad,” American performance artist Season Butler told me over a drink. “The kind of blues that makes you go to bed and watch TV. I was looking for something comforting and non-threatening – so I started binge-watching The Cosby Show, from season one, episode one. It was the wrong choice.”

Certainly so. Since the first allegations of sexual assault were made against Bill Cosby in the early 2000s, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to watch The Cosby Show the same way many of us do. did when I was a child.

Now, Butler is addressing the social structure that could allow a powerful man in public to allegedly sexually assault a large number of women without facing prosecution or even is public defamation – by dancing.
For his latest project, Forgotten Happiness, Butler will personally reenact the opening dances from all eight seasons of The Cosby Show. Do you remember the top hats and the twirls? Those slow shuffles and turns? Between each dance, she will recount her personal and creative experiences of race, gender, sexuality and class.

“Bill was in my blind spot,” Butler said. “I’m like a lot of people — it’s stuck in my head, but I think of it more as a he-said-she-said thing. I think it’s a gray area.” So she started reading the story to find out why certain characters disappeared from the series.

“Unlike Rolf Harris or Jimmy Savile or even Woody Allen, the issue of race makes it complicated for me,” Butler said. “There is a feeling of betrayal. This tarnishes one of the pivotal moments in black culture.” Butler grew up not wanting Cosby to be her father – her father was a comedian and actor involved in the US civil rights movement.

But she liked the show, and she liked that a sitcom about a middle-class black family existed. “In a funny way, it seems apolitical,” she said. “It’s this gentle world. That is, politically, what makes it problematic – this needs to be seen as white and bourgeois.”

 

Butler has faced trouble before. While her writing is primarily concerned with interrelated issues – how race, age, gender, ability status and sexuality intersect – she has also produced work in which she gutted, plucked, and cut off the legs of a chicken before serving it to the audience. . She performed under a piano at the BFI in London and wrote about falling in love with a stranger on the bus. But this project is her most controversial, as it deals with the terrifying trinity of sex, power and race. “It has no end or resolution,” Butler warns. “The only character in the play is me, but I’m not trying to speak for all women, or all black people, or all people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Although Happiness Forget involves dancing, Butler claims not to be a dancer. “I just had a hunch that redoing these dance scenes would be necessary,” she said. “There was something about black dance and all the questionable politics surrounding it that I wanted to explore. Who are these people dancing for? I couldn’t separate Mr. Bojangles’s jolly dance from the Huxtables’ gentle dancing. With its references to jazz and hip-hop, The Cosby Show’s credits appear to be an attempt to reclaim ownership of black dance.

Butler worked with choreographer Jamila Johnson-Small to create a dance in which she performed the moves of the entire cast. How does it feel to live in Bill Cosby’s body?

She added: “Bill has a really strange way of moving with a really low center of gravity. “And during most of the credits, there’s the final shot where he turns toward the camera and there’s a close-up of his face.” Butler made a move toward me, across our table, standing still in front of the camera before grimacing and resting his head in his hands. “That close-up used to be very benign,” she said. “Now it’s a snapshot.”

Butler pulls out specific moments from The Cosby Show to discuss her own experiences. Complete blackouts in the theater explore the themes of drugs and date rape, while she uses her hair to open up discussions about race. “There was some controversy about hairstyles on The Cosby Show,” she explained. “Someone who played Theo’s best friend ended up disappearing, apparently because of him