I have always been bothered by the notion that “the trouble with utopia is that it doesn’t exist,”11Herbert Gold, “Walt Disney Presents: Adventures in Collegeland!” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1972, 52. claimed by Robert Fitzpatrick, president of the California Institute of Arts (CalArts) from 1975 to 1987, regarding the institution’s founding vision. I read “A Community of Artists: Radical Pedagogy at CalArts, 1969–72,” an essay by Janet Sarbanes, during my first week of graduate school on that very campus and decided I would insist upon utopia. It was that same week that I met Logan Wolfe. Over the coming years, Wolfe and I would orbit each other in our intellectual gazes toward utopia, understanding that perhaps it transcends a physical place and instead is found within others. In a society that increasingly discourages curious and open exploration of one another and instead favors algorithmic connections designed to keep romantic prospects at arm’s length, Wolfe’s practice has pressed upon yearning akin to performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s “not-yet-conscious,” a realm of a we that desires and “is knowable, to some extent, as a utopian feeling.”22José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009), 3.

Wolfe endeavored to build intimacy through a collective language in preparation for the performance that would become where are you going? (looking for you, where are you going?) looking for you. The inspiration that catalyzed the artist’s work was the necessary experience of the human condition: heartbreak. Wolfe resolved to process pain by preserving its memory and transmuting it into performance. In assembling the performers, Wolfe asked, “Are they a yearner?” as an initial litmus test. Once the ensemble members (Paula Ayotte, Miles Brenninkmeijer, Nidhi Chari, Lake Dorn, Sarah Florez, Leanna Fodor, Margaux ‘Mo’ Gibson, Robert Huerta, Sandra Lopez, Kathleen MacKay, Mia Moraru, Chantel Murphy, Hope Ngozi Okere, Toria Kahni Shi, Chakra Sokhamsan, Bethlehem Tsehai, Noelani Van Loon, Paula Venise, Anthea Young, respectively) passed the test of yearning, Wolfe presented a line of inquiry and prompts that would be integral to building intimacy among the performers, and in due time, the audience. Examples include: I kiss you good morning; can you make me feel hunted?; what do our bodies remember?; trying to make my side of the bed nice for you; what does it mean to leave someone and then come back?; repeating someone’s name; hand on his back; brushing shoulders with someone in the club; something that would make your mother upset if she saw you do it; you’ve forgotten the words I love you; the list effortlessly goes on. Each question would then be answered in a physical manner, and the responses were slowly assembled into the choreographic language needed to build a “realm of we” a la Muñoz.

This past June, Wolfe finally built that realm of ethereal intimacy, gazing toward that utopian feeling. A striking tableau welcomed viewers as we entered the building lobby at Dari in Hollywood: An accordion player and violinist serenaded a performer sitting opposite them who was languidly picking the petals off of a single pink rose and adding them to her collection of thousands sprawled across the concrete floor. A cream-colored taper candle sat next to her, emitting a single, brilliant flame. Audience members ascended a grand staircase to enter a vast room and sat themselves around the perimeter of a stage in the round. Musicians flanked the stage, which consisted of various string players, percussionists, a harpist, a vocalist, and a piano player. The murmur among the crowd emanated a warm hum, mimetic of the dusk light that poured in through the tall church-like window panes. This world we had entered would ask its dancers as well as its audience members to be truly present in their bodies, and, most importantly, in their hearts.

At the beginning, dancers entered the room one by one in a line, stoically, stepping into the center stage and encircling the perimeter. When the stage reached critical mass, the performers suddenly became cognizant of one another, and each one ran at high speed towards another before swinging into mutual embrace, quietly twisting each other into pirouettes. This pattern continued as the orchestra droned from crescendo to decrescendo with a single minor note, almost foreboding. A lone performer trailed behind the others, in her own world, attempting to sustain a flame from a lighter with little success amid the chaos of other dancers. A cry was heard from one of the performers: “Where are you going?” with an urgent reply of “Looking for you!” The space became an echo chamber of this call and response. Each utterance experimented with the delivery of tone and volume, mimetic of the sporadic movements the dancers enacted. The audience bore witness to this familiar question and answer as the first of many moments during the performance where they saw and heard themselves, dissolving the barrier between viewer and performer.

As where are you going? progressed throughout the evening, the performance ebbed and flowed with narrative and conceptual sequences that were meant to answer the preparatory prompts written by Wolfe. Movements included portraying stolen and secret kisses; a slice of birthday cake stepped on with the heel becoming stuck while a single candle flame persisted in its glow; movements between performers that imitated cruising; frequent gestures that opened the body and quickly closed in on itself; performers pinned against walls; performers lying still on the floor, holding a wine glass upright using only their teeth; and so on. Wolfe and the ensemble presented choreographed vignettes that, although metaphorically intimate in nature, could be conceptualized as ubiquitous experiences. If we understand utopia from its Greek roots of no place—no physical place that is—this performance bears witness to Wolfe’s pursuit of utopia within one another.

Utopia is not the final destination, though. Wolfe favors a meditation through the body’s memory and resurrects this archive as performance. By using his own heartache as a catalyst to build a collective realm of intimacy, where are you going? (looking for you, where are you going?) looking for you mirrors the ethos of Muñoz, utopia as a “backward glance that enacts a future vision.”33Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 4.