Looking as Discourse: Generosity, Resistance, and Bently Spang's "Tekcno Powwow"

Image by Angelo Maneage

The theme of the 2022 Cleveland Humanities Festival is “Discourse.” Zach Savich, a Cleveland Review of Books board member and associate professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, asked a group of artists, writers, and scholars from Cleveland and beyond to address the topic, “How is looking a form of discourse? Or: how does looking become discourse?” Their responses explore some of the ways in which private and shared experiences of vision contribute to culture, conversation, identity, and collective exchange.

Tekcno Powwow II: The Return of the Funk

Chest forward, he strides on stage with an Elvis-inflected, hip-swaying, rolling cowboy-amble, wearing a severe expression beneath his blue face paint. In a silent striptease, he unzips his coveralls, revealing a shiny gold-lamé jumpsuit. He pauses in front of the slightly stunned crowd for one breath, then two. Then, breaking the tension with a sly grin, he sweeps the microphone off its stand and begins the welcome patter, generating smiles and laughter. It’s been less than two minutes since the Tekcno Powwow started, and we are all in.

A pounding electro-beat steals into the room. Slight and teasing at first, the layers of sound accumulate until our heartbeats and feet synchronize with the DJ-driven pulse. We are happily captive in the heart of the beat. Now, the computer-generated rhythm fades slowly as the sound of live drums and the voices of the powwow singers rise. Song and rhythm weave together, enveloping us in a sonic fusion of warp and weft. 

Powwow dancers enter now, so light on their feet they seem to defy gravity. A woman takes center stage, her beaded shawl catching and refracting the disco light with each soaring, whirling movement. Skipping across the floor’s surface, she traces delicate butterfly patterns in space. 

The music shifts again, and the electro pulse re-emerges as Soul Mechanics take the stage. Jumping and gliding and spinning, at first vertical, then suddenly slamming onto the floor, they punch every beat. Their bodies move like muscular silk through a pulsing sonic space, forming patterns of opposing angles and sinuous curves.

Back-slapping and grinning, the Bboys move to the edges of the circle, and the powwow singers’ voices and drums fill the space once more. A fancy dancer takes center stage. With feet flying and arms akimbo, he moves with and against the beat, pushing and pulling until sound and space seem to merge within his body. My breath quickens in time with the incantation performed by his precise footwork. The dancer nods an invitation, and a Bboy steps into the ring. Slowly at first, and then with growing delight, they gyrate and flow in time with the escalating rhythm. Generating a wave of energy that slams into the unsuspecting audience with palpable force, the fancy dancer begins to break. He is lightning; he is rhythm; he is the beat. Someone whoops with joy. It might have been me. Clapping and swaying, we all accept the invitation to become part of the space of generosity created by the dancers’ exchanges. 

I never want to go home.

Photo by Cathy Moen

Conceived and presided over by artist, curator, and writer Bently Spang, Tekcno Powwow II is part of an ongoing series of exuberant mashups of music, dance, and cultural exchange. The performances feature powwow dancers and singers representing several Native American nations exchanging dance moves, beats, and stories with dancers representing different cultural traditions: breakdance, ballet, and traditional Maori dance have made appearances at Tekno Powwow events. Positioning Tekcno Powwow as a series of multicultural fusions, Bently taps into the spirit of collaboration and generosity that characterizes the traditional powwow while remaining sensitive to the potential pitfalls of pushing the boundaries of a significant cultural structure. In a 2021 interview I conducted with Bently, he elaborated: 

Taking this already evolved form and putting it into an even more contemporary structure was certainly a challenge for me. Even just to think about a name: Is what I’m doing a powwow? What is it? It definitely came out of the similarity between my experiences with raves and the powwows I grew up with, and I wanted to explore that. Once I called it TekcnoPowwow, I wondered how the Native community would respond. The powwow is not a ceremony, but it contains spiritual markers, and it is important to me to let people know that I respect the form of powwow that exists today; I don’t want to tamper with it. Ultimately, the name reflects the combining of multiple worldviews, multiple ways of thinking about and framing the world.

The spelling of tekcno reflects the events’ multicultural roots. In our interview, Bently remarked that the name originates “from conversations I had with people in Germany who claim they invented techno music, and that’s how they spell it.”

Photo by Cathy Moen

Simultaneously rooted in tradition and future-oriented, Tekcno Powwow performances demonstrate this kind of adaptability while challenging the notion that Native American cultures exist solely within a distant, tragic past. In an earlier interview with Larry Abbott, Bently commented, “I think it is essential that we speak out and start defining ourselves to ourselves. I want people to know that I’m part of a living culture.” As a performance artist, Bently has felt the pressure to put his “Indian-ness” on display in a form that aligns with a romantic and historicized idea of Native life. From our conversation in 2021: “There is an unspoken pressure to accept that this inaccurate perspective is the overarching definition of our world. That’s the tough pill that I won’t swallow.”  

Bently hosts the Tekcno Powwow in the guise of “The Blue Guy,” a performance character he describes as an “exaggerated techno-Indian” meant to replace the icon of the Indian Chief found on sports team logos. Bently says, “He is now turning into this kind of superhero character. I want to show that the Indian of the Future is cool and sexy.” In a review of Tekcno Powwow III at the University of Wyoming, Cecelia Aragón describes how Bently offered audiences “ways of performing Indigeneity that were campy, weird, bizarre, queer, erotic, amusing, and fluid.” Bently extends the same exploratory freedom to play with images and forms to his performance collaborators. When a fancy dancer at Colorado College’s Tekcno Powwow spontaneously starts incorporating breakdance moves, we witness a moment that combines personal and cultural creativity and histories with electrifying results. 

The Blue Guy. Photo by Bently Spang

We tend to conceive of art’s communicative power as a one-way transmission from maker to receiver. Artists create, art audiences receive. We all have our roles. But, as projects like Tekcno Powwow indicate, it is more complicated than that. A creative process does not begin or end with an artist’s singular vision. Instead, it extends in rippling concentric circles to envelop and engage those who influenced it and those who interact with it, including direct collaborators, critics, interlocutors, and viewers. In their article “Primary and Secondary Creativity,” Ronald Beghetto and Mark Runco describe this kind of interaction between an artist’s creative expression and the inventiveness involved in its interpretation:

Personal creativity involves a creator who interacts with a problem, gap, or even a medium (e.g., sculptors who discover meaning inherent in a particular stone) whereas secondary and social creativity require that some audience construct original interpretations of the product that resulted from the primary individual’s creative efforts. And just as the primary creator was in a kind of dialogue with a gap, problem, or medium, so too does the audience have  a dialogue when it constructs creative interpretations.

In “Creativity as Cultural Participation,” Vlad Glăveanu makes a similar argument, contending that we extend the creative life of a work of art by engaging with it as audience members, interpreters, or fellow artists. He explains, “To participate in culture means both to engage with existing cultural elements and to contribute to their transformation, both key processes of creative expression… culture is vital for the existence of creativity and creativity is vital for the existence of culture.” In a sense, when we consider an artist’s work deeply (even if we are separated by time, geography, language, or culture), we become creative collaborators with them. In this way, in addition to telling us stories about specific events, cultural practices, and individual worldviews, art can also catalyze our creative thoughts and actions. Further, the notion that the experience of art constitutes temporally elongated and socially inclusive dialog between creators and audiences offers an alternative definition of art that foregrounds the cultural aspects of artistic expression. Questions of individual genius take a backseat when we expand the definition of creativity to include engaging with cultural artifacts, in addition to producing them.

Soul Mechanics. Photo by Cathy Moen

Creative reciprocity with traditions, collaborators, and viewers comprises an essential component of Tekcno Powwow. An open-ended, collaborative, and audience-responsive endeavor, Tekcno Powwow creates a physical and conceptual space where personal, cultural, and historical elements combine to enable our experience as viewers. How we make sense of what we see and feel depends on what we bring into each encounter—what we expect, what we accept, what we believe, and what we are willing to risk. Is Tekcno Powwow a social sculpture? An improvisational educational experience? A multicultural rave? Or a technology-inflected iteration of the traditional powwow structure? Instead of identifying one overarching focus, it encourages multiple and varied readings. There is no specific understanding that we are supposed to “get,” nor a single experience we should have. Instead, its structure recognizes that positionality conditions viewers’ experiences. Native and non-Native audiences may have different understandings of the traditional powwow form and the significance of Bently’s reclaiming of the “Indian Chief” to signify futurity. By creating a space of intersectionality, Tekcno Powwow acknowledges that diverse experiences are an essential part of collaborative knowledge construction. 

Photo by Cathy Moen

Tekcno Powwow relies on the dynamic exchange between Bently as emcee, his multicultural and multigenerational performers, and the audience members who reflect and amplify the performance’s burgeoning energy. The synergy between these elements impels each performance to take on a life of its own. Bently says: “It’s not scripted; I have a basic structure to it, I know what I want to say at different moments, but I allow for that uncertainty, for the mystery of the piece.” If we conceive of mystery as the possibility for joy projected into the future, Tekcno Powwow’s instance on ambiguity constitutes an act of resistance against historicized ideas about Native lives. By inviting us to co-create diverse meanings within its physical, historical, and social space and seducing us into the mystery of how it unfolds, Tekcno Powwow creates a space of extended generosity. Here, artists and audiences collaboratively explore new ways of thinking and being in the present while simultaneously envisioning possible futures.