Containing Multitudes: Reflections on Megan Lowe Dances' Gathering Pieces of a Peace
By Bhumi B Patel
When I attended Megan Lowe Dances’ Gathering Pieces of a Peace at ODC theater on September 1st, the audience was abuzz with opening night excitement. Friends greeted friends, audiences took in the installation in the lobby, and everyone waited with anticipation. Walking to the theater, audience members stopped to take in the altar that greeted us, images of elders in the flickering candle light. The work is host to mixed race AAPI artistic collaborators and brings together their individual yet complex histories in fragmented vignettes that trace each of their desires to find connection and belonging through song, movement, and storytelling.
As the lights dimmed and the performance began, the dancers, Clarissa Rivera Dyas, Malia Hatico-Byrne, Melissa Lewis Wong, and Megan Lowe, appeared in pools of light of different colors and textures. Each pool its own portal to the stories we were to follow each dancer through. As the performance continued, we were met with stories of gardens and tattoos, mahjong games and grandparents, wood carvings and tropical fruit, all telling the stories of how, as one of the song lyrics reminds us, our bodies are an archive. And no matter how fragmented that archive may be, that archive is a place where we can understand where and how we belong.
The audience was swept into a journey of tracing the portals that were being opened and exposed by the dancers through their creative use of the entire theater space. They swung their crouched bodies under the railings as they danced up the staircase in the middle of the audience; they crossed rows of seats by stepping onto the armrests; they created rhythm by pushing down the empty seats on which they stood; they swung effortlessly from the beams and that criss crossed the wall of the theater. These feats are hallmarks of Megan Lowe’s choreography, yet they creatively extend the stage into the world of the audience.
Watching the hour-long performance, I was struck by the importance of acknowledging that it is not only okay, but it is beautiful to be more than one thing at one time and still be full in all of the parts that make us up. I kept thinking about Gloria Anzaldúa’s space alien consciousness, and how the spirit of that consciousness kept coming through in the work. The space alien, Anzaldúa theorizes, contains endless possibilities and multitudes, available to form solidarity across identity, and lives always at an intersection of many places at once. The space alien is an infinite border crosser. The space alien carries curiosity, and this curiosity was something that came through with the movement, the songs, and the stories that the dancers vulnerably shared.
One of the highlights of the work for me is how each of the dancers’ embodiment of their individual voices and narratives shined through. Both their stories and their movement spoke to each performers’ individuality and unique histories. As I left the show into the cool night air of San Francisco, the performance left me wondering about the power of mixed-raceness as a borderland from which there are endless possibilities for being and being seen. You have two more chances to see the show at ODC Theater in San Francisco on Friday, September 8 at 7:30pm and Saturday, September 9 at 7:30pm.
Movement artist and writer Bhumi B Patel directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, and science fiction choreographer and PhD Candidate (she/they). In its purest form, she creates performance works as a love letter to her ancestors. Patel moves at the intersection embodied research and generating new futures, using improvisational practice as a pursuit for liberation.
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Related posts:
One Good Quote: "Tangram" with Megan Lowe Dances (December 2021)
Still Lingering: Reflections on “Action Potential," Six Months Later
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