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?