Rogelio Lopez & Dancers: Entre Despierto y Dormido (Between Awake and Asleep)
somewhere in between
By Bhumi B Patel
What I know is that when I go to see Rogelio Lopez’s work, I’m in for a wonderful kaleidoscope of moments of joy, multi-dimensional interrogation, and gorgeous movement. What I didn’t expect was that this piece would take me through time and space on a journey of nostalgia, humor, and dreamed futures while keeping me firmly rooted in the realities of living in a queer, body of color in the here and now.
Before movement, in darkness, we hear Lopez’s voice. This is both a welcome and a story, one that we as viewers need to know before we enter the world made on stage. We hear about Rogelio’s past, his first moments of understanding queerness, the calling in of both the Indigenous and colonizer blood that runs through him, and that still he lives in the feeling of being an outsider.
The first image we see is an all-too-familiar zoom screen projected onto the back wall. Lopez in shadowy light sits at a desk on stage. Each on-screen box is labeled as “white person.” The primary speaker lists buzzword after buzzword, thanks another white person for sharing their experience of marginalization, and then goes into a vague “new age” movement exercise to “move what you’re feeling.” I could immediately locate this space. I’ve been in this space. I’ve been asked to facilitate this space. Yet here, the piece points to the ridiculousness and absurdity of these experiences, where when we face them in real life they are meant to be taken with such seriousness and gravitas.
As Lopez gets up from the desk, closing the laptop he was looking at, he tucks himself into a vertically positioned bed on stage with beautifully loud floral sheets. Andy Williams’ Moon River begins and initiates the “dream sequence” so to speak. Two dream fairies appear (Kevin Gaytan and Matt Han), also clothed in florals, and draw Lopez from the bed in a sweet and tender queer trio. Their choice to engage with the codified language of ballet harkens to the dream sequences in many a famous ballet: The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty just to name a few. But Lopez makes clear that he is still an outsider to this form through humor. As he makes the gesture to prepare for a grand turn, he subverts our expectations and claps his hands in front of his body like a dancer marking the number of turns they would do. The audience laughs. Those with dance experience know this gesture, and likely know it well. And then, in thigh high leather boots and thongs, the dream fairies return, grounding us in the queerness of the world we’ve entered, to seduce and entice Lopez through a sexy and sensual trio before all getting back into the vertical bed, where bodies move under the covers suggestively inciting audience cheers.
And so the piece goes on and we continue to see the movement form evolve. Lopez integrates the many lineages that live in his body, available to him in the liminality of the space that is between asleep and awake. We see modern dance inversions paired with Latinx forms of social dance, club and house dancing in conversation with folklorico. The dream fairies lead us, and Lopez, through this unstable, ever-shifting world that futures a place where all of these threads can braid together.
What strikes me about this piece is how deep the idea of in-between spaces permeates. There is liminality from the title of the work, the beginning narrative that addresses borders, and even in the movement form presented on stage. I’m reminded of Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space. It is a place where, as Bhabha suggests, the formation of postcolonial diasporic identity can occur. For many diasporic-bodied people, this is simultaneously in between home, and home itself.
Where Lopez’s work diverges from Bhabha’s theory is that this third space isn’t, and can never be equal parts of two things. It is a separate thing that is made up of changing proportions of its parts, almost never equal. This space gives diasporic-bodied people the opportunity to negotiate new meanings and new representations. And Lopez does just this. He moves through form reminding the audience constantly that he is not and cannot be just one type of artist and that, in fact, they all intersect and converge. This convergence is not just the choreography. The program notes that Lopez crafted nearly everything we saw on stage: the costumes, the set pieces, the projected films, and even the lighting design. And through the embodiment of a dance work, Lopez is not just occupying the third space, whether that be between sleep and waking or between movement languages, or even in the many hats he wears in the production, but that he is the third space. Royona Mitra writes that taking a “phenomenological approach” which Lopez does here, there is a rewriting of “the third space as an embodied and lived condition” in order to “collapse the conceptual segregation of space and body as distinct entities.” We know right from the beginning that Lopez has lineages of displacement, alienation, transnationalism, and hybridity in his existence, but what we learn from the piece is that the site of reconciliation is the body. It is through the body that he becomes.
As Lopez returns to bed, our floral-clad dream fairies return. They deconstruct the space and drop Lopez back into what seems like our plane of reality, but he is changed. In a colonial or postcolonial world (though I’m not sure what exactly we are ‘post’) hybridity marks all of the elements of culture because nothing is free from hybridization, and here Lopez honors and touches and embodies the third space with humor, but also with a tenderness and love that is necessary of intercultural collaboration, even when that collaboration is between the forms that live in one’s body. As SanSan Kwan proposes in Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration, love cannot always overcome imbalances of power, but rather “both acknowledges and strives to accept differentials.” Kwan further offers that to meet the embodiment of interculturalism with love is imperative, but that the embodied dialogues between cultures can even set up “the conditions for loving.” In this state of in-between, through the melding of many movement languages, floral prints, humor, nostalgia, and yes, even love, it would seem that Lopez finds the space to become, and, I hope, belong.
Bhumi B Patel directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, science fiction choreographer, movement artist, and writer (she/they). In its purest form, her performance work is a love letter to her ancestors. She has presented at Dance Studies Association, Popular Culture Association, and Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, and has published writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance.
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Related posts:
Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 3 Days until “Entre Despierto y Dormido" with Rogelio Lopez & Dancers
Still Resonating: Dicotomía del Silencio by Rogelio Lopez & Dancers
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You can experience the show again in 2023, November 3-12 in San Francisco!
Tickets: https://d36000000j5m0eac.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/#/events/a0SHp00000EW4ioMAD
Posted by: Jill Randall | 10/29/2023 at 03:14 PM