Borders, Spaces and Brown Eyes
Davalos Dance Company
October 5, 2019
Shawl-Anderson Dance Center
By Bhumi B. Patel
I have brown eyes and am taller than the average Gujurati woman. My relationship to brown is knowing it to be the way I was born, like my mother, and her mother. And that feels acutely relevant to writing about Davalos Dance Company’s 25th Anniversary Season at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center October 5th and 6th. Borders, Spaces and Brown Eyes is a reimagining, a reiteration, a revival of a work presented 25 years ago. In the 90s, there was a widespread belief that assimilation was the answer to being embraced by white culture. (This is astutely pointed out in the 1997 hit film Selena when Abraham Quintenilla says “We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans, more American than the Americans. Both at the same time. It’s exhausting.”)
Today, our attention turns to the ways in which our differences today define, strengthen, and afford us an unapologetic authenticity to challenge the racist hegemony of our contemporary cultural moment. And certainly, this work made me see each performer on stage, and made me continue to dream of the world where we aren’t valued by our ability to assimilate. Set in six sections, the work travels through an emotional landscape examining the breadth and depth of how each member of the company has come to know, understand, and love their brownness.
The first section, titled Borders, tells us the story of one dancer, Rogelio Lopez, and the borders that he faces, both physical and emotional. Touched with humor, I found myself alone in my lack of laughter, having felt the same weight holding shoes in a shoe store waiting for an employee to offer help. Lopez reminds the audience of something he was told, “up here, no one helps Mexicans.” This invisibility felt by most who live near the margins feels hard to laugh at, but if you’ve never experienced that, perhaps humor makes it more palatable.
As the piece continues, the dancers evolve from all black costumes into garments that are colorful, garments that represent their cultures, garments that seem to feel like a lightness, like something of a mask has been shed. The third section saw caution tape spread through the space in a Z creating narrow triangles of space for two dancers, Edgar Mendez and Felicia Cazares, to move in and eventually break out of. As I watched the tape unravel across the space I couldn’t help but think of how for so many black and brown folks throughout history being born has been a crime. And, the very act of being born in the borderlands turns your body and your life into the battlefield upon which a myth of a war continues to be fought.
In the fourth section of the work, Leaving, I felt a swell of glee in my heart seeing two performers, Catalina O’Connor and Lopez, upon wooden boxes perform traditional ballet folklorico steps with heeled shoes in percussive polyrhythms. This foreshadowing returns in full force during the last section, Brown Eyes, where dancers perform in front of the Virgen de Guadalupe, a cultural icon representing the Chicano movement. I could have watched the dancers perform folklorico steps in bare feet for the entire evening (which is not to say the other dancing wasn’t beautiful, it was). And to me, the ultimate question I was left with was: why do we need the white (modern) form of movement at all? As I watched these beautiful dancers spiral in and out of the floor, almost touch the ceiling in tour jetes, stretch into deep lunges, this question just kept repeating in my mind. The traditional is enough. The folk is enough. The individual stories accounting their relationships to being invisible juxtaposed against being seen in a form that hasn’t always been accepted is enough. Despite asking myself this question about the place of whiteness, what stood out to me was the tone of celebration and jubilation and the feeling that each dancer had a moment to be seen.
This work isn’t trite. It isn’t the story of the immigrant who found the American dream. It doesn’t insist that we are one humankind. Instead, it honors and holds each individual in the cast, and asks us to look at them, to see them, to use our eyes to hold them in this space where, whether it was last century or last year, they each come from a lineage that gave up everything to travel here and find a home.
Bhumi B. Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist who creates intersectionally feminist, multidisciplinary art to explore the contradictions of her inner landscape where she is brown, queer, working class, and a woman. She works from a trauma informed, social justice oriented perspective. Her work traverses dancing, choreographing, curating, educating, writing, and scholarship. Patel is on faculty at West Valley College, Lone Mountain Children’s Center, and Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. Patel’s work has been presented at SAFEhouse Arts, LEVYsalon, Shawl-Anderson Salon, max10, Studio 200, Molissa Fenley and Friends, Summer Performance Festival, RAWdance's Concept Series, and the first Queering Dance Festival. Patel has curated “fem(me),” a performance of femme-identified, radical queers, for SAFEhouse Arts and the National Queer Arts Festival since 2017 and has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle and Life as a Modern Dancer.
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