Aiano Nakagawa. Photo by Lydia Daniller.
In Review: Queering Dance Festival, Program A
By Todd Courage
Frolic, the 1st annual Queering Dance Festival, conceived of and presented by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center’s ever-expanding support of dance everywhere and for all people, kicked off at the Waterfront Playhouse on Thursday, September 19th and ran through the 22nd. Two programs featured eleven visions by Bay Area dance makers. I felt exceedingly lucky to have been there opening night for Program A.
Peekaboo and jose e abad. Photo by Lydia Daniller.
The inaugural piece of the festival was an excerpt from a longer work titled “to become other than dust” performed by artists jose e abad and Peekaboo. In the upstage right corner, bathed in a “moonlight in the graveyard” illumination, two people provided a strange sound experience. Peekaboo was on cello while abad, armed with a mic and a laptop, created a haunting collage of captured vocal fragments. This type of invocation set a solemn and ceremonial tone that largely permeated the evening. Peekaboo sat in a chair, dressed in black, and pulled sad droning tones from their strings. Their low bellowing notes were reminiscent of Arvo Part’s Fratres but were slathered with abad’s oral pleas – some words intelligible, some merely pieces of words whose messages echoed something more primal. Soon a single mantra looped clearly and earnestly: Trying to find my way back to you. In my attempt to cull meaning from their symbology, I imagined a mystical portal, an entry point, through which all souls regress toward a source of ethereal origin; somewhere untouchable; an immaterial middle space.
When abad deserted their fabricated wizardry of sound tech to an upright movement exploration, heaven split open. Like some kind of spiritual visitation, their movement quality transcended all predictable patterns and crossed over into an immediate enactment of the extra-mundane, supported by animated flesh, but borrowed only as a vehicle to access this other place. This kind of dancing is rare, queer even, as it requires the dancer to reject performative conventions for something more insular. Less “look at me” than “look into me.” Public solitude.
abad’s quiet movement picked up speed and assumed the frenetic tone of a sort of exorcism as they thrashed and jerked and spilled and convulsed. Resolve was inevitable, and just like that, they were writhing poetically centerstage, soft and submissive, as their words faded to a whispering incantation, “Trying to find my way back to you. Trying to find my way back to you. Trying to find …”
The second piece on the program, although equally sobering, was made up of more disparate sections, a pastiche of loosely related parts autobiographically addressing choreographer Jesselito Bie’s multi-layered challenge of living with AIDS. He named the piece "D-Man Redux," a blatant reference to Bill T. Jones’ 1989 work titled "D-Man in the Waters" that was created partially in honor of his company member Demian Acquavella who, like so many at that time, was quickly deteriorating from the disease. Bie’s dance opened with himself and two additional dancers behind a microphone gleefully sing-songing Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-Flat Major, the very same opus used by Jones. Overlaying phrases, the likes of “Bill T. Jones is SOOOO pretentious,” accompanied this bit. A spoken litany of other famous gay male artists who passed as a result of AIDS followed: Keith Haring, Alvin Ailey. A short section of cinematographic poses for the trio who illuminated each other with lighters followed, strangely beautiful and somber.
Soon, in conjunction with readings of short narratives written by strangers recounting how and when their AIDS diagnosis was revealed to them, Bie spun his own account. “I have AIDS,” he said. “There’s no cure. I take meds. I don’t work. I depend on the government.” What made all of this interesting was not so much the loaded topic, or even the candid way with which the dance-maker disclosed his hardship. It was fascinating because, like any redux, he brought back a genre that, for the most part, hasn’t been seen since the steep decline in AIDS-related deaths as the result of the many effective medical advancements made that treat HIV infection.
Another bittersweet imperative was the tone in which all of this was presented; a sort of “Why him and not me?” note permeated the satirical nature of the piece. Jones has risen to super-stardom (involving both fame and, I suspect, fortune) while publicly owning his own diagnosis, whereas a coast away, Bie suffers separate indignities meted out by a suspicious and callous government. Both make solid dances.
Almost out of nowhere, a sweeping “modern” variation emerged, replete with the Jones-esque signatures of inventive lifts and atypical partnering. While I watched this, I was trying to find the relationship between the callow facial expressions of dancers Rhea Speights and Kevin Wong, and the more pained countenance of Bie. After conducting some cursory research into the creation of Jones’ D-Man, I came to understand that, as a result of the debilitating character of AIDS in the 80s, Acquavella could no longer walk by opening night but was integrated into the dance anyway. Knowing this helped me organize, in retrospect, some of these outward interpretations.
There were some gaffes too. A la Jones, the trio incorporated copious belly slides, one that included a collision between one dancer’s nose and another dancer’s ass.
Did the piece work? I guess that the bigger questions are “Does that matter?” and “According to whom?” Collage is every bit as legitimate as any other visual genre and, in spite of the uneven composition, we recognized structure, bravery, and defiance.
Bhumi Patel’s work, titled "zero," followed. Two dancers (Jordan Wanderer and Katherine House) in black leotards and pants began this sedate undertaking supported by sounds of water and a low drone similar to a fog horn. The night I went, a train blew its whistle. I honestly wasn’t certain if this was part of the track or an isolated coincidence, but its timing was flawless. The aural element complemented a series of deep lunges by the dancers, one toward the other, on a diagonal. A combination of arm-initiated gestures in the vein of post-Judson Church vocabulary intervened.
Both artists were profoundly committed to their physical tasks and also seemed to have had infinite classical ballet training, but I felt that the material slightly under-challenged their palpable promise and kinesthetic expertise.
The proverbial diagonal was revised throughout the piece, a traditional modern throwback where dancers look longingly toward, allude to, or walk that italicized path that often symbolizes a dimension outside of our own. It has always been a dependable choreographic tool and, in this instance, was no less powerful. Because the space was small, it was in fact a judicious way to move bodies and gained ground as a geometric motif.
The lighting design for this work provided a lot of its magic and lent some of the more innocuous passages their attending gravitas. One beautiful moment involved the two dancers recumbent, one sleeping while the other rotated on their side until their feet were slowly trudging over first the legs, and then the hips and rib cage of their motionless counterpart. A simple idea to maximum effect.
To the choreographer’s credit, "zero" did not end with dancers dramatically moving in the direction of a “diagonal somewhere,” but instead coupled them in sweet unity, bathed in golden light, backs to the audience, and slipping upstage toward night.
A solo by choreographer Audrey Johnson, titled "towards is no longer a direction.," was its own condensed gem. Refreshingly, a short jazz riff by Yves Tumor swelled in the darkness before Johnson’s solo body emerged bent over in an orangey-crimson wash. Silence. “The body marks its spiral in space,” she begins by saying as she turns toward us. This already feels like an investigation into a living body perceiving its own animated experience, the miracle and irony of contemplating oneself. Dressed casually and deliberately in an amber camisole and black sweats, she lingeringly feels her responsive body with her hands: the backs of her legs, then her feet and ankles, shins, pelvis, stomach and ribs, upward across her breasts, sternum, and neck, and purposefully across her radiant face and black hair. Her voice supplies the only sound, a spilling chain of statements all commenting on the potentials of a body in space. “It being the spiral,” the artist says, “It being myself,” all the while reaffirming the surfaces of her own body, both front and back, again and again, a kind of Merleau-Ponty-ish theme. Johnson’s text refers to the flesh as the pace of her diving and uncoiling quickens. Over and over, faster and faster, the dancer’s motion reiterates the urgency with which life is lived in these consciousness-carving vessels of experience called bodies as her narration rolls calmly forward. “But I digress,” she says after wandering into a random topic (but not really) about the dynamics of a relationship. Suddenly, as if she were channeling Trisha Brown, Johnson turns her head to the left, breaking from the established pattern while seamlessly introducing another. She undulates backwards. A counter-clockwise running theme unfolds joined with an improv flute jam that took me back to the tracks of French movies in the 70s. Johnson slashed and sewed huge circles with growing speed and intent. Women’s vocals came up as the dancer moved through her explorations unabashedly. As the music faded, she persevered, morphing, breathing; a pace of remembering, the site of return.
Next up was a lighter offering by dance artists Malia Byrne and Melissa Lewis. Their “Tube Top Manifesto” opened with two women shedding their jackets to reveal their upper bodies, each wrapped in a tube top. “Thank you for joining us as we celebrate tube top awareness month,” says Byrne. A tongue-in-cheek spectacle challenging the “hetero patriarchy” by way of a tube top performance convo unfurled. Their gleeful foray into the social impact of the tube top took many turns. A mimed catalogue of spoken absolutes revealed that the tube top is made “for all bodies,” and is “the site of the revolution” … “outside of consumerist, capitalist structures!” “Everyone is hot in a tube top,” Byrne reminds us. I began to wonder if the patriarchy, too, might soften, cooperate, “hotten,” or even surrender swaddled in such a thing. Worth trying out.
With the fade of a light, Byrne finds herself on a stool with a guitar singing an anthem addressing impending change while Lewis, right on cue, swaps one tube top for another, and then another. A spoken word ode, to the tube top of course, fortified their zany thread as Lewis waxed stoically about the freedoms afforded the tube top wearer and the relationship between uncolonization and her bare shoulders and collar bones. A giggling audience was testimony of her spot-on delivery. Stage right, Byrne changed tubes and took selfies, even venturing into the bleachers to enlist the help of a random viewer who also snapped some impromptu photos. A brilliant conceit.
A wonderful section involving a unison, slinky modern dance combination to Nelly Furtado’s I’m Like a Bird was the next surprising ingredient of this fresh mash up. Breathy turns that released to the floor led to knee slides and whiplash spinal pulsings. As one would hope, the tops came down, and by virtue of light and darkness, we were confronted with a horizontally divided space wherein Lewis and Byrne exist tubeless but no less vulnerable. How nudity was suggested behind shadow was a smart and stunning effect, their glowing décolletage hovering independently over breasts residing in near darkness. Soon the two were confined within a single tube top, a funny and satisfying gag that lent levity to the evening generally. The piece wrapped up (no pun) with Byrne and Lewis enacting a type of tug-of-war within their giant black band of stretchy fabric, smiling, balancing, focusing, and eventually crumpling into a good-natured pile of their two bodies.
Malia Byrne and Melissa Lewis. Photo by Lydia Daniller.
The voice of Connie Francis ushered in the last presentation of the evening. “Who’s sorry now?” she crooned. Soon, a woman in a black skirt and tank matter-of-factly built a stage set from a chair, a glass, a lamp, and a vanity mirror. From a little drawer, soloist Aiano Nakagawa, the choreographer and the performer, proceeded to engage in small tasks that remained somewhat elusive to the viewer but that held a mystery of ritual, of specialness. The dark lighting supported her secret world: a potion was poured, her earrings shone bright, old photographs were methodically displayed with extreme care. Nakagawa cast her spell with patience and poise. Two fingers designating extra-ordinary possibility waved and pointed. A strange crawling pattern moved the dancer from her boudoir to the more liminal performance clearing. Here, never letting go of her established point of view, the performer supplely and reverently bent backwards, stood upright, and turned seamlessly into a walking design that followed an invisible ring on the floor. Fluid, embracing contractions initiated a series of enigmatic gestures that renewed a theme while introducing yet more riddles. What could a piece titled "92/swell" be trying to tell me, I asked myself. Spoken text, superimposed over synthesized tones, alluded to a woman, a priestess, and imbued the dance with more cryptic messages.
An astonishingly fluid mover, Nakagawa floated through a section of watery movement, swaying elegantly against a spirit-invoking sound element. This dancer’s movement capacity was uncanny. I had not seen such liquidity from a dancing body in a very long time. It’s a peculiar and enviable quality shared by few. Nakagawa’s was a summoning of numerous components: some plainly physical, others of a more spiritual kind.
Todd Courage is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance scholar. He is currently artistic director of courage group and continues to build a diverse repertory of work in the San Francisco Bay Area.