Sunday, November 23, 2008

Urban Bush Women/Jant Bi: Les écailles de la memoire

November 19, 2008
BAM Next Wave
Compagnie Jant-Bi, Urban Bush Women
Les écailes de la memoire/The Scales of Memory

I was really excited to see last night’s performance – a collaboration between Jant-Bi (Senegal) and Urban Bush Women (Brooklyn). The dancers began with movement that reminded me of Butoh – walking in slow motion in diagonal lines toward the audience, guided by a woman white who yelled, ‘And one!’ They spoke in different languages: some in English, some in French, and others in a language I didn’t recognize, but I could tell they were saying their names and the names of their parents, grandparents, and ancestors. Through names, we write our genealogies. We state our provenance, our heritage, our history – positive and negative. Things happen—names get changed, chosen for us, mis-translated, mis-pronounced, and misunderstood, in an ever-evolving process of revision.

Through the course of the evening, the question of inheritance percolated. How do we, as movers, encode our histories and the histories of those that came before us? How can movement be recycled, co-opted, and re-contextualized? How can a violent event be reclaimed as an affirmation of self-possession? Can we see our bodies and our culture as blueprints for our past? What happens to bodies as they move across the borders of space and time? To what degree does the past stick to the bodies as a trace? What should our relationship be to that trace?

One of the best parts about Les écailles for me was the music that accompanied it. The overwhelming majority was composed of montages of different sounds (djembe, kora, talking drum, water, voice, human sounds of exertion, club music) over which the breath of the dancers was amplified and layered, adding a striking reminder of the liveness of the here and now despite engagement with the past. The movement was composed in a similar way. Salsa steps wove between traditional West African dance, club dance, modern dance, and movements that didn’t seem to fit into a category. Through this pastiche the audience travelled from slave ship to independent postcolonial nation, from auction block to jogging on the freeway.

At one point in the second half of the piece, a dancer in white stood on a long bench, clawing open her mouth with her own hands as if displaying her body for its appraisal and sale. A group of men and women stood under a spotlight with their mouths wide open – an island in the darkness – an image of yearning and extreme suffering. The woman on the bench raised her hand up, first displaying her strong arms, removing layer after layer of clothing to show her neck and back. Over time, dancers returned to the block with their left arms extended in the same way, but this time fists were closed, recycling the previous gesture but changing the meaning. Religion? Oppression? Power and hope? In the same way the abrupt change in dance and costume that followed also displayed rupture and continuity. Shortly after the scene on the bench, the dancers reappeared in party clothes and danced courtship rituals, strutting down what looked like a catwalk of light, displaying their different assets, challenging each other. I couldn’t help but think of this as reappropriation—a triumph in self-possession in which bodies were inhabited by their rightful owners in the fullest way possible.

In closing, the dancers found themselves again in diagonal formations, walking slowly forward, but this time dressed in modern clothing. They initiated the same slow movements, motivated by ‘And one!’ They repeated their names but instead of speaking one at a time, they layered their names and families over one another in a wash of sound.

“J’accept.”

“I accept.”

They closed with a suggestion for the future.

What does it mean to have a company of African men from Senegal collaborate with a company of women from Brooklyn with a mixed heritage and history? What does it say about moving forward mindfully?

Monday, November 17, 2008

Inbal-Pinto, Shaker

First we hear sound. A man in a striped suit plays a wind machine as a woman in a blue nightie/evening gown twirls a ribbon. The scene is part Narnia, part North Pole, part Peter Pan.

Snow on the ground.

The whistling wind machine stops but the sound continues.

Shaker transports the viewer to an uncannily familiar yet simultaneously strange world where limbs move in sleepy, fluid motion and then crumple to the ground, as if asleep.

Gender – women and their hair. Women spun by their hair. Women with their hair covered up.

While watching I had visions of dead bodies in the desert sand, unconscious stirrings and outbursts, and a sleepy return to life with eyes closed.

At the end the dancers were in body suits of different colors, sleeping in a row. One would get up and repeat quotidian but very gendered gestures. Despite being de-sexed by their covering costumes the women sewed, the men rode machines and checked their watches.

Where does life begin and dreaming end?

Are we waking or sleeping?

The piece was visually stunning. The entire performance took place in the snow – little Styrofoam pellets that looked like sand (time) or snow. Snow flew out as they walked, made a sshhhing sound with every motion, followed the dancers in arcs as movement’s residue. It left a visible trace of the space they created with their bodies, and at other times threatened to cover them up, erase them. I worried that it would get caught in their noses, throats, underwear – that they would slip – but they didn’t.

They moved according to collisions, gentle and more intense, and according to lines, planes, and momentum, swinging in arcs, bouncing off one and other, and falling quickly after hanging suspended at the top or bottom of a circle.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Check it out!

Yaa Samar! Dance Theater

Friday 11/14 and Saturday 11/15, 8PM
LaGuardia Performing Art Center
http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/lpac/entire_season.aspx

The Swan Lake Matrix Effect

November 12, 2008
BAM Next Wave Festival
La La La Human Steps: Amjad




Cello music.

Three circular screens descend from the ceiling and on them are projected a video-art series of white silk, white spherical orbs, yellowish lineaments and fibers, and dark red craggy folds.

I know I’m here to see an adaptation of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty by Canadian ballet company, La La La Human Steps, so I am already prepped with image associations; through the yellow lines I can see the outline of birdlike feet, the inside of an egg, and in the crimson, the bloody mass that also signifies new life. There is something erotic to the spinning white orb-egg and the way in which they multiply, forming chains, forming pearls, forming circles. Spliced in between the images of potency—nourishing blood and food—a piece of white silk, impossibly clean washes over the outside of the shell. Strength, femininity, pain, multiplicity, violence. They begin as images and are repeated through movement.

La La La Human Steps is known for its virtuosic attack-style dancing. They dance at warp speed and execute horizontal pirouettes; they seem to nearly miss dealing each other lethal blows as their arms and legs fly out and are drawn back in just in time to miss a head, a neck, a groin. Despite astonishing physical capacity and coordination, I found myself falling asleep in my chair as even the most frenzied movement became monotone. The music, scores from two ballet classics, is made strange by reorganization, and by the minimalist performance of the results onstage by a pianist and group of four string musicians. Likewise, the costumes, spidery black sheer tights under too-high-cut leotards, strip the dancing bare of previous expectations of romantic ballet.

Over the course of the 1 hour and 45 minute performance, I found myself alternately bored, outraged, but sometimes also impressed with the dancers as they flew through a series of solos, duets, and group numbers. They danced like robots dramatically undermining the humanity they advertise in their name, and with it, dampening my sense of admiration for the dancers’ skill. They mimicked stylized ballet runs with their bony arms held rigidly behind their backs until they found their next coordinates on the stage and proceeded to pop, snap, and bend like anorexic goth Barbies in fast-forward motion…then they skittered to their next coordinate. Through these crossings they blended in with one another. Aside from the fact that one dancer was frighteningly thin and one was a head taller than everyone else, they seemed identical in appearance and function in the choreography for the majority of the piece and in addition to being interchangeable, exhibited very little agency in their duets with the male dancers. As their male partners spun the girls’ hips around, their bodies followed like finely-tuned machines but nothing more. I saw no soul and sorely longed for the dancers to show me something real.

Disillusioned and unable to keep my eyes open, I took deep breaths to reanimate myself and finally reached for the second half of an enormous cookie I was going to save for later. Craving the sugar buzz to get through the rest of the performance, I chomped into it and irrationally told myself that I was affirming my own realness, joy de vivre and giving the rhetorical finger to the oppression, maniacism and starvation I saw happening in front of me…so there!

The middle section of Amjad departed from what I found to be a discordant beginning. Rather than clipping along at a breakneck but predictably even double-time speed, the movement in the second part of the piece was peppered with haunting stills, with dancers moving in contracting opposition to another couple that continued on the previous frequency. The music changed to washy, watery, electronically mixed sounds that hearkened to nature but remained abstract. I understood none of the narrative that was being constructed by the woman in the white dress, and her pas de trios with a slender shirtless man on pointe shoes, but I appreciated finally having something besides a blur of limbs to contemplate.

Unfortunately, in many senses, the concluding section was much like the first, recycling costumes, movement (oh the incessant flapping of Swan Lake arms…taken to an absurd degree) and music. More flurried of two-footed spins, more snapping and rebounding of ballerinas from their pelvises, more spidery anorexic goth alien Barbies posing in what should have been come-hither positions in egg shaped pools of light on the ground. It ended with booming eggs and a dead alien Barbie swan…and darkness.

Oh La La. (La Human Steps)

I thank Édouard Lock for his minimalism, for this feat of athleticism, and for pushing the envelope in terms of speed, agility, and bodily extremes of all kinds. He succeeded in transforming his female dancers into birds—fragile, skittish, and flickering, as well as challenged the audience’s perception of time both in the speed of the movement (did I see an 105 minute ballet or one four times as long which I fast-forwarded in my mind?) and the duration of the work without intermission. He has also provided me with an unexpected reaffirmation of why I love dance and what dance I love. I was saddened by the strictures put on the dancers’ bodies, by the premiums placed on speed and accuracy over affect and meaning. I felt that the dancers were moving so fast that I could scarcely see them move at all. I could scarcely see them.

Armed with very little previous knowledge of the company or the recent developments in contemporary ballet, I can only offer my subjective experience. I welcome opinions, experiences, and feedback from anyone interested.

Good Night!

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Toumani Diabate at NYU Skirball Center

When Toumani plays he begins in meditation—listening to the kora and waiting for inspiration to come through him, as if the expectant audience were not actually in front of him…waiting…He plays simply at first and then ever-more complexly until he is weaving a tapestry of sound, echoes, base, high notes and low ones; a music of humans and gods, of gods through this human.