This past spring, dancer and drag artist Tyler Ashley mounted an ensemble performance, “Don’t Kidnap Us,” at Brooklyn’s Queer Nightlife Community Center. The performance revisited and expanded Ashley’s 2014 and 2025 performances, “Kidnap Me” and “Kidnap Me Again.” All three performances are set to the gutting minimalist compositions of Julius Eastman. Ashley performed alongside Paris Alexander, Aeon Andreas, Arantxa Araujo, Shane O’Neill, Rakia Seaborn and Brandon Washington. “Don’t Kidnap Us” features a chosen family at the barycenter of escapist “anywhere-but-here” desire and their will to stay and fight. Rakia Seaborn, who appeared in all three performances, engages Ashley in conversation on the remount production’s themes and variations, Eastman, “being more woman,” queer ancestry, fugitivity, transition and dancing at 40.

Tyler Ashley: I was so excited to sit and do this with you specifically, Rakia, because not only have you been part of this piece from its inception, conception, creation, but you and I also have a long friendship, and it started within the world of dance and performance. We met in 2008.

Rakia Seaborn: You were 22, 23 years old. I’m so glad we get to have this conversation. I’m so glad that we still get to work with each other. I’m so glad and grateful that I got to grow up with you. Because that’s what that really is. When you meet someone when you’re 22, you are literally figuring out how to become an adult and how to become an artist together. That is miraculous and beautiful.

TA: Obviously it goes without saying, I feel the same way and just cherish our adventures that we’ve had since day one and just what I’ve learned from both working with you in a setting like Streb, which is how we met when you brought me on as an intern with Elizabeth Streb, who I would later dance for.

RS: Because I was responsible enough to have an intern.

TA: And then shortly thereafter, some of my earliest performances after moving to New York were in your dance theater pieces. And so we were working with each other closely, both as young dance makers, as young arts admin people. And I think that that’s just a lovely contextual note for where we were coming from—hungry, young, fresh, crazed, young artists living in Brooklyn.

RS: Making it up as we go along.
Tell me about the original “Kidnap Me” performance.

TA: In 2014, I started making some new dance work. I applied to the Hot Festival at Dixon Place for their summer festival, which was paused for a minute, I’m not sure why, but it’s back, which is really exciting.

So I applied with this work, and it got in. From the jump, it was a medium-ensemble-size durational performance. At that time I was a wannabe superstar young artist who wanted to “make it big.” Probably leftover adolescent dreams of being famous. I had just moved from Boston, where I was studying marketing at Emerson College with two minors. One was in photography, and the other was a dance minor. It’s really where I discovered dance. And then, I’m moving to New York to start a dance and performance career. So this was my second group ensemble work that spoke to the hunger and the drive to want to make something of myself.

One creative inspiration that was part of my life at that time was Julius Eastman’s music, which I had just discovered. And this film called “The Turin Horse,” which was speaking to the hunger and the pressure I was putting on myself to make something of myself and provide for myself and hopefully provide for a group of performers with a successful show and an interesting one. I was having these daydreams of, like, get me out of here with my can of tuna and barely making rent; get me on a bigger stage, make me a star. And then the body comes into play there, obviously we’re dancing, we’re using our body in the performance, and then also we’re in New York City, and the body is put through it. That’s how you get around, and sustain yourself in this crazy, rat race web.

RS: It’s like a body that’s always vibrating really high and a body that never really relaxes; a body that’s kind of in its constant state of go. I feel like so much of that era, it was not about stillness. I don’t think we knew how to be still yet.

TA: And particularly being young queer people. Our society is obsessed with how to categorize you based on your race and gender. Slowly but surely you want to challenge and confront those demands for categorization and expectation, which is where the idea popped into my head of bodies being drawn in the performance, and then those documents being used against us. Used against me…

The queer experience is that we offer so much wisdom with our body and mind and soul, and we share that with the world, and then it’s turned against us, and used to scapegoat us, silence us.

Hence the climax part of the performance when my castmates draw my naked body on wooden boards and then hit me with them. An amplified offstage voice, a “voice of God,” directs me through various positions and movements. Every direction is followed by a correction, which signals the performers to hit a part of my body involved in the position.

In many ways, the new version is very similar to the original. It had back-to-back musical excerpts and selections from Julius Eastman’s various pieces.

RS: Tell us about Julius Eastman. Everyone that came to see the show, like either iteration of the show, I think especially this latest version, were so fascinated and enthralled by the music. And then I explained to them that there’s a Black contemporary composer. Like yes, the person that made this music that you’re listening to, that lives in this realm, is by a Black queer man. They didn’t know that. They didn’t know who he was. I don’t know if it settled in that Black people also do this! And you can hear the blackness inside of his music.

TA: I really should look back at early notes and try to find out where and when and how I first came across his music. I think it was maybe just naturally. I tend to like the challenge that is minimalist composition, obviously. And it’s a shame. Because obviously that’s been a problem since he got started. Directly relating to the same thing I was just saying. Ostracized and not given his proper credit and flowers because of his race and sexuality and gender nonconformity. That unfortunately was used against him. The titles of his work were often very political and spoke exactly to being oppressed and ostracized. And I just fell in love with the music and it spoke to me. I had a physical reaction to it, and also an emotional and intellectual one, especially after doing more research and learning more about him. Now, looking at this whole process all these years later, it's like, oh, wow, it really was some queer ancestry transmission. That came through the music and was resonating with me in 2014 and still does to this day. He once said, “what I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest. Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.”

RS: God, yes.

TA: Knowing yourself and supporting that knowledge.

RS: The refusal to run away from yourself. Running towards yourself. His music is a motor to me. It's a motor in my ear. It's a motor in my body. We were talking about the difference between escape and escapism. I was thinking about this notion of fugitivity. Academically, when people use that term, a lot of the times they're referring to a state of Blackness and a state of running away from enslavement, but also when you think about it philosophically or artistically, it's this notion of running, but of running towards yourself. It's this notion of refusing to conform. It's this evasion of dominating forces. It is liberation. It is escape, but it is not escapism.

Which songs were we using in the original iteration? What songs did we add?

TA: In the original version: “Stay On It,” “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc,” and “The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc.” Those are the ones that we ended up using in the final performance. In various iterations, we also used, “If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?”

RS: Oop! Love! Ha ha!

TA: We did keep those in spring of 2025 for LaMaMa Squirts Festival, curated by Paris Alexander and then again at QNCC. For some reason, it just exploded open as far as who could kind of tap into what the piece means and what it can mean for them as far as that fugitivity that you were saying. And then the new sections pulled from a work called “Feminine.” Open and communal and femme and cunty and flirty energy. Everyone should really listen to the whole thing top to bottom. But we ran out of time at QNCC, right?

RS: Literally. I think of the show now through the lens of an adult. When we were younger, I think there was this willingness, ability to engage with that type of repetitive movement, that motor, I think that sense of brutality and the violence of it all. It was a very different experience for me to engage with that in a younger body and a younger mind. Who in some ways hadn’t fully been able to tap in and fully understand and articulate. I didn’t know the brutality of the world in a way, there's some wonderful naïveté that comes with being younger. Access to that violence in your body comes easier when you’re naive. I could totally hit you with the board when I was a baby. Having lived in more, watching BLM, watching people being thrown into trucks by ICE, watching the emergence of concentration camps, watching Black people be murdered in the streets, violence just everywhere and in some ways being made ordinary in that time period between when we did it as children to when we did it as now. The violence is so prevalent in my body all the time that I really want to move beyond that and live inside of that feminine, live inside of that softness. It was the life that I’ve been trying to build for myself, a life of softness despite that. I like that fuel inside of the piece, and it really resonates so I’m so glad we built it in. That part of the piece where we're just like really laying in the grass. By the pond with our besties, and frolicking in the sun.

TA: And in the same trajectory, I was making a work that was talking about wanting something that I wasn’t. Chipping away at the denial of being trans, and how that’s really what I was probably expressing back then and didn't even “know it.” Paris Alexander saw the original work as a 17-year-old. It inspired them and they met people during that first show that they still have connections to. When they took over curation for Squirts, they asked, “Hey, would you want to bring ‘Kidnap Me’ back”? That brings me back to the magic of our queer ancestry, and just being artists, and how artists think in community, and think in uplifting each other through opportunity, sharing space. Simultaneously I'm an artist on the hustle, so I’m willing to do anything. The desperation and wanting to be an artist in a place like New York.

RS: It’s hunger.

TA: Yes, it was totally hunger. That was like the whole “Turin Horse” thing, the hunger to achieve and to become something. The hunger to become something. And so, looking back at it now, I think you’re totally right, I have a better understanding of myself and the world now. What the piece represented through its movement and intensity and violence…still exists and will always exist, unfortunately. I mean, hopefully someday that's the idea that it doesn’t, right? But we’re literally living in a history repeating itself on a very large scale right now. So the piece is in part about standing up against that and saying, like, actually, the violence doesn't have to continue.

For the new second half of the work, I consciously made an effort for it to be more of a resolution, and a spell, and an invocation, and a welcoming of change through physical experience, through intention, through sound, through touch, through improvisation. It felt important and just naturally where I went as an artist, and I think where we went as a group.

We all felt the way that you were saying. I didn’t want to get hit anymore either. In 2014 I was like, Yeah, hit me. My friend Jennifer Kjos, a dance mentor and friend of mine recently suggested, “Maybe you cherish and value yourself and your body a little more now too.” And I was like, oh shit, I’m trans. I’m trans, I’m making things happen. And that’s also why the “drawing and the hitting” turned into something that was hopeful as well, which was actually using the boards as systems of support the second time they were used on my body. And again, community, community-building, quite literally. Some type of sculptural thing that can move through space and respond in real time to each other softly. And honestly and openly and leading from a place of care and curiosity versus judgment and fear and violence.

RS: Yeah, that last image is gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. For readers who didn’t get to see the show, there is a moment at the end of the first section, where Brandon Washington is the unseen voice of god over the loud speaker, directing and correcting Tyler through a series of balletic and modern dance movements and positions. With each correction, the dancers literally hit Tyler with a wooden board. The end of the second section ends not in judgement and punishment, but in support. Tyler is moving her body in through a series of sculptural movements and the dancers holding the board become support, scaffolding. We’re lifting limbs, holding arms, creating this sense of weightlessness. In the final image, Tyler is fully off the ground, lying atop the boards. The dancers, carrying Tyler, make a procession to the stairs and gently stand Tyler up at the bottom of the staircase. As a family, underneath heavenly lights, we ascend into the unknown. We’re not afraid. Talk about things that resonate. That is the most lovely thing to end on. It’s literally this wonderful ascension to gay heaven.

RA: Yeah, and it’s worth noting that we came up with that as a group. I was partly out of practice self-producing and choreographing and making a group dance. The question came up of do we do the drawing and the hitting again, and the answer resonating throughout the group was we don’t want to do that again.

RS: Please, no, can we not? Like, I don’t, I don’t want to do this.

TA: Including me being like, I agree. And so that coming together as this…

RS: Let’s not do this.

TA: And so that coming together led to collaboration during the final pieces coming together during rehearsal and tech before the show, resulting in that collective creation, both in process and in presentation. I’m getting goosebumps. That’s how the creative process works. And I had never remounted anything. This was like my first experience remounting an old work.

RS: Remounting in and of itself is the most luxurious thing. It shouldn’t be luxurious to get out of something, go live, and then come back into that something changed. But it is.

TA: People weren’t reading their news on social media when this piece came out in 2014. The information-sharing processes that people are using now didn’t exist at the time. But there is more of an understanding these days, obviously, particularly around trans people and queer people, but also around racism and anti-racism.

RS: The veil was lifted somewhere in between when we started and now. The veil was lifted and I think we're all just able to see more and understand more with what we see. We can see the systemic inside of everything. We’re living in a time of backlash to that veil being lifted. It felt like there was so much progress. And now we're making things inside of the backlash.

TA: The sound engineer, Nick, was being given directions and info from Brandon about the part when directions and corrections are given to me over the mic and he told Brandon, Oh, you’re the establishment. And I was like, Wow, no one, not me, not the cast, not the production team in 2014 was identifying that tool so accurately. No one had the wherewithal back then to label that so on the nose. That was a nice confirmation that it is resonating in a different way now. More people can kind of tap into what it is representing for us as the performers and the family on stage, but also what it can represent for themselves, their communities, our country.

RS: Also, being able to do that at QNCC, as opposed to inside of a traditional dance theater, also felt incredibly important. Speaking to who gets to be in the room with you this time versus who was in the room with you the first time. Doing it in a space that is all about nightlife and throws awesome parties and maybe some people that haven’t had access to ivory towers of concert dance. Being in the room with us and getting to experience it, and hopefully walk away with “I understand myself inside of this world. I am an important person inside of this world. This world really can’t exist without me.” That part.

TA: Particularly in a space that does service programming for nightlife workers and gig labor workforce. And not really having a strict “capacity.” The beauty of doing it in a warehouse space like that is it felt fantastic with less than 100 people, and it felt fabulous with over 150 people because of the open seating plan and because people could move around and come and go as they please. That helped crack it open for an additional audience to reflect and share a sense of camaraderie and understanding. Let’s continue to tranifest and put one step in front of the other and be out there being softer and being kinder and being more feminine and being more woman.

RS: Wommmaaaaannn!!! And for us, there was a major difference being 40 and doing the show versus being 29 for the original performance. Baby me with disregard for my own body in some ways. My willingness to throw myself on the floor and against the wall and being completely driven by physical maniac energy. That whole “building a softer life for myself” also means building a softer relationship to my own body. Young me was muscling through the piece with no regard for technique. Always trying to do the very cool thing and make it look really good, regardless of whatever that was doing to my ankles and knees. This time around, I just physically couldn't do that anymore. Now an older and wiser person, so to physically be able to do this piece with all the running and the horse jumping and the ice skating jumps and the endurance of it all, required me to tap back into technical dance and technique in a way that was interesting for me. Because I was also a super athlete, as were you, just doing the things. We could just do the hard thing and push ourselves to the limit to be able to do that hard thing. To not do that anymore was a smack in the face. So it required me to tap into all the things that lived in my body from a really long time ago. Thinking about alignment in a lot of ways. I spent a lot of time carefully thinking about where my weight was like in my knees. The classical ballet bar for warm up, prances across the floor, yoga, digging into proper technique and alignment. I could ignore and not do that for most of my career. I can still do the hard thing. It’s just gonna require a different way in, and it's gonna require a level of patience that did not exist previously at all.

TA: Which is so beautiful, because it’s kind of a representation of the piece thematically. There’s a way to get some results—there’s not one way to the result. It was very noticeable between when I had a real intentional, focused, solitary warm-up and and when I didn’t…

RS: Huh? Woo! The difference!

TA: Sometimes that even wasn’t enough. I have not been making or performing work like this in a very long time. Just to say and acknowledge that it was about a month that we rebuilt this dance and made and added new sections.

RS: Which is… insane, by the way. I think people really need to know how insane that actually is.

TA: It is. For everyone out there who doesn't know how making a group dance in a concrete warehouse goes, that timeline is not ideal. But this was the last thing I revisited and the response was so warm at LaMaMa. I wanted to push it further. And we wouldn’t have had that beautiful resolution if we didn’t go back to the work. I can’t speak highly enough of you and share my thanks with you, and the whole cast and team. It taught me that being an artist is not something you do. It really is something, someone you are. And revisiting this work and rebuilding it in that amount of time under these conditions, the whole experience really kind of saved me, got me back on track in a way of recognizing that for my physical and mental well-being, I need to have an artistic practice. One that I’m doing regularly, and that involves my body, my mind, and my heart…so that I’m not only a happier person, and more proud, and capable physically, emotionally, mentally, but also keeps something ready to offer the world and my community without starting from scratch and finishing it in a month!

RS: I’m at this strange place in my life, where I keep trying to decide whether or not I’m retired from performing because I don’t know if I had the same hunger to do it. But then also, immediately when you’re like, do you want to do this thing? I’m a yes, immediately. I don’t know, I think when the right people ask you to do a thing, that hunger and drive comes back.

TA: Well, I’m honored.

RS: Yeah, I will keep coming out of “retirement” for you. Yeah, put that word in quotes.

TA: It’s not even so much what the practice is, but like a practice. So if certain projects come up that align with whatever your practice is at that moment and it brings value so then fine, you say yes and do it. And also that whatever that is, is also something that’s going to be developing, constantly evolving, and transitioning. It’s good to hear that even though you aren’t performing as much these days, that you were open for it, and maybe potentially will remain open to it if this piece, you know, were to tour or be done again in New York.

RS: I think this piece is vital. It speaks to the moment. There’s something heroic about it. There’s something bold about it. There’s something tender about it. There’s a sense of community that’s just swimming throughout it. It feels like an embodiment of what we need. More people should see this work. We should do it 100 million more times. Pick this piece up, curate it somewhere. It's important. You made an incredibly important piece of art.

TA: Well, you were incredibly important in the development from day one of said piece of work. I think so too. I wanna get to a point where I can do it again without getting injured, and continue to expand the framework and the kind of supportive scaffolding around it that can make it more sustainable physically for the people in it, but also make it more widely available for people to use and experience as a sort of therapeutic space, a magical, theatrical space that… that exists within the kind of collective agreement to step into something together; that really simply just physically is being in space together and being in practice together, being in community together. Moving together, using our bodies and our minds and our hearts equally together, so from your lips to our queer transcestors ears. Don’t kidnap us!

RS: Don’t kidnap us.

TA: Don’t kidnap us, give us a show.