Defying Narrative Containment, for E.L. and Others

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Maya Gurantz rehearsing Elisa movement in an elevator set in her studio, Los Angeles, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Christopher Bordeaux.

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
—Kenneth Koch¹

Usually when I write, and often when I make work, I know where I’m going. That’s not the case as I’m writing this. It was also most emphatically not the case in 2015 when I decided to go to Pieter, an East Los Angeles dance space, twice a week for the foreseeable future, compelled by the following task: I would learn the last known physical movements of a dead woman.

Those movements had already become a global spectacle, public property. In January 2013, Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Chinese Canadian woman on a trip up the West Coast, went missing in Los Angeles. To locate her, the LAPD publicly released video of her last known sighting, captured by elevator surveillance. Six days later, her naked body was found in the rooftop water tank of the Cecil Hotel, a Downtown L.A. flophouse. The footage then went viral—irresistible because of both the mysterious circumstances of her death and the uncanniness of her documented movement.

She enters and exits the elevator seemingly without purpose. Pushes the buttons all in a row. She’s still, then lunges wildly. Appears shocked. Relaxes. Holds both hands at her temples, draws her fingers through her hair. Gesticulates to someone who may or may not be there.

Watching the footage feels both unnerving and weirdly tantalizing. As soon as you begin to think you understand what her movement signifies, it changes. She resists narrative containment.

That did not keep people from trying to contain her, narratively. Thousands of online viewers reposted the video, inventing conspiracy theories: she was possessed by ghosts; pursued and murdered by felons living at the Cecil; schizophrenic; high; having a psychotic break. As soon as October 2015, an iteration of Elisa appeared in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Hotel. Hollywood trade magazines reported stories of screenwriters with development deals to write scripts inspired by the footage.² In 2021, Netflix released the wildly popular Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, a four-part true crime documentary series. Clickbait abounded.

Mystery, horror, and true-crime procedural—the narrative genres imposed on Elisa’s story—all deploy the same structure: Patriarchal order, briefly threatened by monstrous chaos, ultimately gets restored. We are allowed to experience visual and visceral pleasure-in-horror only because power (usually in the form of a male hero—the detective, doctor, policeman, or exorcist) prevails. It’s deeply reactionary.

Elisa’s cause of death remains inconclusive. Void of resolution, the world frantically keeps trying to dominate her body into coherence through genre storytelling. At present, Listen Notes, an online podcast directory, lists over 1,900 separate Elisa Lam podcast episodes in multiple languages worldwide.³ She’s become our generation’s Elizabeth Short —our Black Dahlia, another legend of a woman coming to a violent, enigmatic end in Los Angeles.

When I began learning the movements in the surveillance video, I really didn’t know why I was doing it, only that there had to be another way of knowing. Over eight years, this practice evolved into a series of videos and dance works, Poem of E.L.,⁴ which critiques the capitalist, misogynist media machine that so entirely exploited and digested these original images. More poetically and personally, it suggests that Elisa had knowledge in her body, and that such knowledge, even if inchoate, remains real and important.

§

Around the time Elisa’s story first hit the news, our cat Lou abandoned us for a personal trainer who lived around the corner.

We learned that Mandy was a celebrity fitness personality, both in that she trained celebrities, and that she also kind of was one. A gifted natural athlete, she’d been a competitive gymnast, dancer, and majorette as a child. As an adult, she’d won international bodybuilding competitions and been on dozens of magazine covers. She trained movie stars and porn stars and everyday schmucks like us. No wonder Lou left.

Mandy felt guilty about the cat and offered us her friends and family rate to train with her. My husband and I figured, why the hell not? It would be our L.A. story.

We quickly realized that Mandy was extraordinary, a master of her craft. Deep in my thirties and after my first child, I’d surrendered my body to an inevitable slow slide but was suddenly finding myself doing things of which I’d never imagined being capable.

The start of any arduous physical discipline invites a deep spiritual reckoning. After the initial thrill of possibility, you’ll encounter your deep internal resistance to change. Push past that, and old anxieties about your body will surface as your new limits loom. It’s a destabilizing long dark night of the soul, but if you keep going, it’s possible to be transformed, to enter a new physical and psychic reality.

That was my experience, anyway. I doubt I could have been brave enough to hold space in the studio, alone and choreographing movement, without meeting Mandy. We became close. She was the first person at the hospital when our second child was born. She had a key to our house and came over every morning for coffee and to snuggle with our kids.

She also became my portal into an L.A. I’d never otherwise encounter: weekends at the Roosevelt Hotel pool and dinners at Craig’s; industry people whose jobs you’ve never heard of but whose anonymous labor powers Hollywood; small business owners keeping the beautiful people beautiful with spray tans and lingerie and facials. Mandy’s flamboyant charisma, cartoonishly muscled body—the otherworldly way the camera loved her—also drew in an alarming collection of vampires. Stalkers of every gender and sexuality. Women clients trying to win the social media serotonin sweepstakes. And of course, an endless parade of men who seemed to want to possess her without really knowing her. Unlike many of the starlets she’d come up with, Mandy refused to be devoured. This was her world, she was insightful about it without becoming hard or cynical, or letting it repress her essential joy and strength.

In October 2018, almost four years after I began going to the studio to learn Elisa’s movement, Mandy’s dead body was found in her bathtub.

The Los Altos, where she lived, is one of those glamorous old-fashioned Hollywood buildings with neon letters on the roof and a swank lobby full of dark leather chairs and carved stone fireplaces. We crowded there in shock, nervously waiting for the EMTs to bring her body downstairs.

The investigators from the coroner’s office said that Mandy did not seem like she knew she would die. Her home was freshly tidied. No drugs or paraphernalia. To-do lists on her desk, nice candles burning. She was ready for tomorrow. They reassured us that it all looked like a good death —in the absence of further detail, this reassurance pointed grimly to the many bad death scenes they had witnessed.

But Mandy was only 42 and a perfect physical specimen— professionally perfect. And she was somehow, improbably, gone. In the nightmarish weeks that followed, people from Mandy’s life—friends, lovers, clients, neighbors—found one another, often for the first time. She’d kept us separate. Did becoming a different person in different contexts allow her to manage the tension between her outsized public persona and her everyday self? Our disoriented new little community watched in horror as her death ripped across the tabloids—TMZ, People, Daily Mail. Her status as a niche sex symbol and the mystery of her dead body in a bathtub made for a tawdry, titillating story.

What quickly seemed most urgent—even more so than organizing her memorial—was influencing the press. We pooled our information. The initial autopsy revealed no clear cause, and we were terrified she had overdosed. Not because she was a user, but because she wasn’t, and it felt like fentanyl was suddenly everywhere. Word around the Los Altos was that another resident had died from it the week before. In my own extended circle of middle-class, middle-aged parents, a dad at a party had recently taken what he thought was a Xanax and OD’d.

Mandy carried chronic pain from years of extreme fitness, and she carried the burdens of a lifetime of hardships alone. It was very easy to imagine she’d been randomly handed a spare Vicodin from someone who’d gotten it from the wrong place.

But we all knew that wouldn’t be the story should the toxicology report come back positive. We released a quote to the tabloids to try and preempt any ugly “model overdose” clichés. We stressed how hard she worked, the demands on her body, her herniated discs—trying to shift the subtext from one archetype (sexy drug-user) to another (exhausted entrepreneur).

I still feel regret about our panic because the toxicology report found nothing in her system, of course. No drugs or alcohol. No supplements. A good death. A mystery.

I think about Mandy every day. People still write me to ask, do you know what happened? I have my theories. I keep them to myself.

Maya Gurantz, Elisa Extractions (video still) (2016). Video, 11 minutes and 24 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist.

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In 2021, artist and curator Jane O’Neill asked me to perform at the Other Places Art Fair (OPaF) around the theme of “parasocial,” a psychological term used to describe the one-sided emotional relationships audience members have with public figures.

I immediately thought about my Endurance Performance Propositions, performance scores I’d begun in graduate school, where I re-perform a cultural artifact under some condition of stress (duration, repetition) to investigate how the body holds and transmits cultural information. And I thought about Britney Spears on Instagram.

After a year of strange social media silences in 2019—a year in which she apparently refused to work and was, in retaliation, sent by her father to a mental institution⁵—Britney spent all of the Covid quarantine posting videos of herself dancing on social media. She’s always in her giant living room in a sports bra or crop top and short shorts, enthusiastically performing for millions but alone, clearly reduced to being her own clumsily amateur choreographer, cinematographer, dancer, costumer, and editor. Stripped of the production value usually scaffolding her, straining against her aging body, the manicured pop princess is rendered almost hilariously incoherent. Major publications printed article after article about how strange these videos appeared.⁶

Some viewers found them disturbing on another level, seeing a cry for help from a woman who had spent more than a decade held hostage in a conservatorship that made her, for all legal purposes, a child.

Britney’s adult life can be read as a series of punishments for not remaining the childish persona that made her famous: the Sexy Baby, virginal yet erotically available, not a girl but not yet a woman. When she was revealed to be an actual woman—when she quickly had two children with a corny backup dancer, gained weight, shaved her head, exploded in anger at tabloid intrusion—she was deemed incapable of managing her own life. Her father, who’d never previously engaged with his daughter’s career, seemed thrilled to take charge of her chaos, her body, and of course, her money, of which he spent a great deal to maintain his status as conservator and her status as incompetent.⁷

Under her father’s new regime, Britney produced hits, lost weight, toured, made millions. But something changed in her body. Britney had been a preternaturally talented mover. She’d trained as a dancer and participated in Olympic coach Béla Károlyi’s competitive gymnastic camp.⁸ She’d been an undeniable performer, loose and confident at the same time as she hit moves hard. (Search “Britney Boys Dance Break Live” on YouTube. You’re welcome.)

After the conservatorship, she looked increasingly wrong onstage. It wasn’t only that she was tottering clumsily on heels, marking far simpler choreography than what she used to do “full-out.” The shift seemed internal. She used to inhabit every inch of her body—now her essential being appeared deeply bound within herself.

In her Instagram videos, Britney roars back to life. She’s pushing herself wildly, half-naked, hair slipping out of her ponytail, seemingly driven by the propulsive need to express herself, attempting to take back some measure of control over her means of production.

You would think the movement itself would be freer or more interesting. Instead, even at her most improvisatory, Britney’s lifelong training has restricted her to a sadly limited choreographic palette. She twirls compulsively, flips her hair, illustrates lyrics with literal gestures, poses, and pouts in constant eye contact with the camera.

When you watch the movement, it’s one thing. When you do the movement over and over, as I did in multiple performances of Britney’s choreography, it’s different. You experience both the profound technical demands of playing a Sexy Baby, and the ridiculousness of it; you step into the container in which she’s been allowed to move her whole life and it’s tiny. It’s sobering. It can make us think about our own training, our own containers.

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I have to acknowledge that part of what draws me to the Elisa footage—part of what I think draws everyone to it—is her lack of physical inhibition. It’s the polar opposite of Britney. Elisa is captured by surveillance but does not know she is being watched. She’s in the strangeness of pure movement directed by unclear, constantly shifting instincts.

By this time in my life, in general, I have become so well-managed. I sleep and exercise and eat healthy foods. I know when to call my therapist. I self-medicate only with black tea but know what to ask for when my usual strategies aren’t working.

On the one hand, these tools are great because I’m not dead. I am here, generally uncorroded, a stable mother, wife, friend, daughter, teacher, and artist.

Late in making Poem of E.L., I went through Elisa’s still-online Tumblr with a fine-toothed comb, sorting her own writing from GIFs and reposts. When I read her direct voice, I am brought back to myself at 21 with a startling immediacy (she describes herself as “so self-confident in my opinions and yet so critical and aware of my own faults”). She does not seem mentally ill, no more so than I am or was at that age. She knows she’s too jangly, too loud, too unwilling to be tactful (“I don’t tone it down when I meet someone new either so it’s just….getting slapped with too much at once”). She’s discovering that so many heroes are fools or monsters (“lost all respect for [Gandhi] after reading how he treated sub-saharan africans [sic]”). She’s angry, horny, sharply observant. She yearns to be seen.

I wonder sometimes, what’s lost in my management? What road to insight gets blocked? Where does my considerable rage go? In attempting to create solid ground for my children in a profoundly horrifying time in this world, what am I avoiding? In my teens and twenties, my struggles often paralyzed my ability to make work. Is that what makes my self-management valuable? That I’m more “productive” now?

Either way, this is the compromise I’ve made—a part of myself missing, forever, in the need to exist within a secure container. Some call this compromise “maturity.” I’m ambivalent about it for myself but every day pray my children will safely cross the Rubicon of the brains they inherited from me to experience such stability.

§

I often feel like the real work of Poem of E.L. was the thing no one could have seen: months by myself, golden light streaming in through Pieter’s industrial windows as I repeated Elisa’s movement second-by-second, as precisely and carefully and directly as I could, with no end goal in sight.

As I learned and re-performed her movement, I tried to be completely present. This notion of presence, a radically heightened now-ness, forms the basis of so many somatic and performance practices—meditation, yoga, dance, music. It’s why I watch sports: Pro athletes operate at such a superior level of fitness that the body strangely ceases to matter and it becomes about witnessing something else—the spirit fully present in a body.

An exercise I think about all the time comes from my directing mentor James Luse. You come to presence by describing physical sensations or emotions as pictures located within your body. Is there a wad of pink flabby gum under your shoulder blade? Do you have a wire brush slowly grinding burnt oil off the internal surface of your stomach? Is there a blue bead vibrating on a string in your right temple?

James would have us describe the image in minute detail, then, in our mind’s eye, walk up to it, reach our hand out, and push through it. He’d tell us that at any point the image would and could change and encouraged us to continue describing what we saw as it shifted from one picture to another, one sensation to another.

Learning the surveillance footage, I would ask—where were the shifts in the center of gravity? What parts of the body initiated every gesture? What pictures revealed themselves? I began playing with dynamics, turning the “volume” up and down on those discoveries. I started finding movement underneath the movement.

Each movement became a container for another movement. Every gesture a world of potential other gestures. As I excavated, re-performance became a ritual of other ways things could have been, unwinding the notion that everything Elisa did was only another step towards the inevitability of her terrible death, elevating the ongoing potential of what she was in every moment, opposing the violence of imposed narratives.

Early on, I knew the final piece of Poem of E.L. would be called Last Walk. In a speculative surrealist film shot entirely in POV (point of view), the viewer would travel from the elevator to the rooftop, cutting associatively between memory, dream, reality, and hallucination—these states of being all existing simultaneously, all equally real. Even though I knew the film’s structure, actual ideas for the scenes refused to come until I went into the dance studio, got present, and started “walking down the hall.” I moved my body, and the pictures poured out.

I was not trying to solve a mystery, but to be inside of it, present, honoring its chaos, open to its discomforts, its dangers, its pain. It is a strange utopia, but it is a utopia nonetheless.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 36.

Maya Gurantz rehearsing Elisa movement at Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.

Maya Gurantz, Endurance Performance Proposition #4 (#FREEBRITNEY) (performance view) (2020–21). Other Places Art Fair, San Pedro, California, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Denise Torres.

Maya Gurantz, Last Walk (video still) (2023). Video, 13 minutes and 48 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist.

Maya Gurantz, Last Walk (video still) (2023). Video, 13 minutes and 48 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist.

Maya Gurantz is an L.A.-based artist. In video, performance, installation, and writing, she interrogates American social imaginaries and how constructions of gender, race, class, and progress operate in our shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. You can learn more about her work at mayagurantz.com.

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