Al Blackstone -- an Emmy-winning choreographer, and a fan of the band -- approached me with the idea of collaborating on something, and a music video (which the band had never done) seemed fun and timely with the release of the new album. I'd seen a locker room cruising dance he'd choreographed for the Fire Island Dance Festival in 2015, so "At the Bathhouse" felt like the right song for us to work on together. We tossed around a few ideas, but everything really came together after Al found the space we used: an abandoned Boys' Club in the East Village (Manhattan) that's now a dance studio. Gay bathhouses are politically charged spaces for a number of reasons: their role in gay liberation, their stigmatization in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis, their promise as a kind of utopian space, but also their reality as a hierarchical space where societal norms of sexiness and attractiveness operate. This political charge can make it hard to raise the topic in a public way without taking some kind of stand: for or against, celebratory or critical. It was important to me to suspend judgement in order to approach the bathhouse with curiosity, excitement, anticipation, ambivalence, and humor -- which, for me, evokes what it feels like to be in a bathhouse. All the posing and non-verbal communication and the chasing or being chased, it can feel serious but also playful and, when you step back, quite funny. Al translated this approach into dance and a kind of narrative where we follow this group as it flows, assembles, and disassembles through the space. Bathhouses can seem hive-like, where everyone is doing their own little bee dance but when you zoom out it feels like one big coordinated organism, and I think Al captured that beautifully.
- Greg Goldberg, The Ballet
At The Bathhouse is taken from the album Daddy Issues, out now on 12” vinyl and digitally.
