Life as a Modern Dancer

Juilliard’s “New Dances” Showcases Strings and Socks

Juilliard’s “New Dances” Showcases Strings and Socks

By Garth Grimball

Alicia Graf Mack, dean and director of Juilliard Dance, introduced the department’s “New Dances” program with now-familiar caveats: dance rehearsals followed public health guidelines; in-person and Zoom process; casts of no more than 8 dancers; no touching or partnering; lastly, within restrictions creativity flourishes. If only that were true of this program. The dancing is virtuosic and passionate. The dances are bland and long.

Four choreographers, Tiler Peck, Sonyah Teh, Bobbi Jene Smith, and Matthew Neenan, created original works on the students of the Juilliard Dance Department. Are there obstacles this new generation of dancers can’t handle? 

Dancing for camera - check. Creating work under the confines of health precautions antithetical to dance making - check. Ignoring the swamp-face from strenuous activity in a mask to the point of seeming like it’s totally natural - check. Their verve and commitment to dance inspires.

Peck’s “Broad and Free” builds vocabulary out of attitude turns, enveloppé​, and port de bras above the head. The choreography follows Caroline Shaw’s piano and violin composition, never going against the music, but cruising in the wake of its melancholy. The structure and staging have the forward-facing unison common to competition dances. At one point the music slips into a mazurka and Peck quotes Balanachine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.”

For “End, Middle, Beginning” Sonya Teh brings the viewer into the piece with cinema-verite-style filming. The camera moves through the wings onto the stage and out into the audience. For the rest of the piece the viewpoint is mostly static with crossfades as transitions. Group floorwork interrupted by standing solos define the dance. The interruptions lack the punch of creating a ceiling and breaking it, feeling more like a knock on the attic door. The somber music of Son Lux dulls Teh’s creative ideations on the Graham-Gaga lineage.

Speaking of Gaga, Bobbi Jene Smith’s “Ways of Listening” is a parade of solos overflowing with the pelvic floor and energetic mania endemic to the technique. Smith’s choreography and staging is the most dynamic in its use of the theater space. Thankfully she goes against the Nico Muhly cello (more strings) solo played live on stage. “Ways of wanting to be heard” is a more apt description of the dance. Soloists center the action while the rest of the cast stand still observing. The lunges, turns, gestures, and leaps become shouts into the void because of the static listening. Smith breaks the only-8-dancers rule in her climax. Twenty one bodies fill the stage in a tightly structured mix of unison and variations.

Matthew Neenan’s “The Solo 7,” set to String (!) Quintets by Mozart, has the idiosyncrasies of a dance made 10 years ago. Remember between 2009 to 2013 when every contemporary dance had the “flick” gesture (arms unfurl out and snap quickly at the wrist)? “The Solo 7” is of the era when ballet choreographers decided to incorporate the “flick” and other contemporary dance gestures into classical vocabulary. The dance has three costume changes: muted pedestrian, monochrome floor-length dresses, unison brown and black ensembles. The sartorial variation has little effect on the mood or tone of the piece.

Other than being set to strings, all of the dances have one commonality: socks. When did the mid-ankle length sock become the contemporary dance uniform, like pointe shoes to ballet? Each dance used the exact same type of socks, no variation in length or material. I love dancing in socks. It’s comfortable. Socks signify a coziness that contradicts the groundedness of modern dance, the connection to the earth. The Juilliard dancers move with precision and abandon. But through the screen and through the socks, the weight of a body floats away.

New Dances: Edition 2020-21 is available to stream for free on the Juilliard YouTube channel for 1 year.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the Reference Desk podcast and is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective.

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Rosanna Tavarez & Bianca Cabrera Travel in Multiple Dimensions

"Piece X Piece" by LA DANSA DANSA. Photo by Greg Meyers.

 

Rosanna Tavarez & Bianca Cabrera Travel in Multiple Dimensions

By Garth Grimball

The weekend of November 11 - 13, ODC Theater ended its 2022 Fall Season with a split bill: Rosanna Tavarez/LA DANSA DANSA and Bianca Cabrera/Blind Tiger Society. Tavarez’s “Piece X Piece” is an exploration of time, lineage and migration. Cabrera’s “Fever Dreams” births a fantasia of limbs from the coupling of bodies.

“Piece X Piece” has a clarity of style. The stage has a rack of pale clothes and a sewing table and chair. Tavarez and Hyosun Choi are dressed in white. Choi lies in a fetal position on the grand train of Tavarez’s ensemble, pulled through the space umbilically. 

The voices of Tavarez and her mother, Lelia Tavarez, come through the speakers. Lelia tells of her migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States. Tavarez and Choi dance in transparent dresses with lines of vertical white piping. The lines on their bodies are like longitudes on a map. They wear their geographies.

Lelia’s voice returns with a reverie of youth and disco. Tavarez dons a white jumpsuit and I see her dancing; I see her being inside her mother’s story; I see a moment when we realize our parents are people too. 

Tavarez and Choi dance like they are moving through questions and reaching for answers. Heads circle, arms throw, weight drops. Only once do they dance together, in unison, faces visible and calm.

“Piece X Piece” ends in a frenzy. The duo subvert the WPA images of “noble work” done in civic pride. The sound of a sewing machine surging amplifies as they move through repetitive actions exhausting their bodies. Tavarez honors the reality of work done by immigrants, women, mothers.

"Fever Dreams" by Blind Tiger Society. Photo by Greg Meyers.

“Fever Dreams” is an orgy of color. Neon. Day-Glo. Saturated Colors. Cabrera, Nico Maimon, Chelsea Mulholland and Nina Wu are covered in multicolored unitards, layers of color, face paint and nail polish, as if alebrijes were painted in radioactive pigments.

The quartet ooze across the stage. Colors and bodies melt and set. A tree of limbs becomes a deep embrace becomes a Hydra. I doubt there is a centimeter of body that didn’t connect with another body. The dancers perform yogic maneuvers with runway confidence. The energy is carnal not sexy.

Like a dream “Fever Dreams” coheres around aesthetics more than any central idea. The dancers make shapes not crafted to miraculously appear a la Pilobolus to evoke the familiar. Transformation takes effort. The audience sees how the shapes are made. At one point Cabrera pulls her body along the floor with her feet. She leaves a trail of sweat, of residue, of effort in her wake.

Like waking up from a dream, the end of “Fever Dreams” bemuses. Animal abstraction gives way to contact improvisation lifts soundtracked by an original song from Cabrera and Ben Juodvalkis. Lyrics of longing are sung with emo yearning. The dancers slough out of their trance to look at you human to human.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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Related links:

Rosanna Taverez/ LA DANSA DANSA

Bianca Cabrera/Blind Tiger Society

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Dimensions Dance Theater: Celebrating 50 Years

Dimensions Dance Theater in "Dai Zoe Bush-The Breaking of the Poro & Sande Bush." Photo by Ed Miller.

Dimensions Dance Theater

Celebrating 50 Years

Lisser Hall, Mills College

October 22-23, 2022

Oakland-based Dimensions Dance Theater is celebrating its golden anniversary this year, fifty years of making, performing, and teaching dances of the African Diaspora under the artistic direction of co-founder Deborah Vaughan. Naming and blurring  the line between the traditional and the contemporary, historical experience and the lived realities of the present moment, the company’s 50th anniversary performance at Mills College did not merely present the audience with finely crafted, beautifully danced choreographies but also wrapped us in a community embrace.

The evening opened with In Dis House (2015) featuring the Dimensions Extensions Performance Ensemble (DEPE) - Laëticia Jacques, Naimah Mba, Jayde Rose, Zuri Scott, Kamiley Shakir, and Marie Soumah. DEPE dancers, who range in age from 12-19 years old, must audition for the ensemble, and train in jazz, modern, hip hop, Haitian, ballet, and traditional African movement (DDT website). Choreographed by Latanya d. Tigner and Abdoulaye Sylla, with video and restaging by Marianna Hester (Tigner and Hester are DEPE’s co-artistic directors), the work was pure jubilation. Barefoot in red pants and white t-shirts adorned with rainbow hearts, the dancers demonstrated the depth and breadth of their African diasporic dance knowledge. When laura elaine ellis came out to introduce the next dance, she said of DEPE, “That’s our future.” I hope she’s right because, if it is, our future is bright.

Before we were treated to the Bay Area proscenium premiere of ruminations. [re]visited., choreographed by ellis in collaboration with the dancers (Denice Simpson Braga, Katrina Deans, Shawn Hawkins, Marianna Hester, Erik K. Raymond Lee, Valrie Sanders, Dorcas Sims, Justin Sharlman, Phylicia Stroud, and Latanya d. Tigner), ellis invited the audience to learn a gestural phrase to “prepare the space for what’s to come.” After a few practice rounds, the audience, on its feet, performed the phrase, that included gestures that point to the belly, the sternum, the heart, to a poem written and performed by Atiya Ziyad. I’ve heard choreographers say that the audience is part of the dance or that without the audience there is no dance, but by getting us up on our feet to learn a gestural phrase from a work we were about to witness, ellis involved us bodily. And when I recognized the gestures during the performance, I understood that the invitation to share movement language between audience and performer bound us to each other in loving community. 

ruminations features textile-art costumes designed by Tiersa Nureyev and richly textured spoken word performances of original poems by Jordon E. Dabney and Ziyad. The work opens with Dabney and Ziyad sitting on opposite ends of the stage as the dancers in shades of orange, brown, and pink enter through the audience. A voiceover references “Hands Up. Don’t Shoot” as dancers sprint across the stage, the poem inviting us to see the running as “recess, tag your it, ready set go” and as traumatic flight at the same time. Gestures of protest and submission appear in counterpoint with soaring leaps. The dancers embody themes of incessant motion and the desire to slow down, of invisibility and hypervisibility—an invisible weight pushes a dancer down while others stagger, shake, and twitch. 

ruminations reflects on the challenges of living as a Black person in an antiblack society; it also pushes back against the neoliberal glorification of the individual as uniquely responsible for their success or failure. There is a lot of individual movement expression juxtaposed against the group, a vision of an ensemble, of a community that holds its members tightly or loosely depending on need. The work ends with the gestural phrase we learned and a joyful step-touch phrase.

After intermission and a video homage to Black dancers lost in recent years, edited by Hester, the company brought down the house with another Bay Area premiere, Dai Zoe Bush-The Breaking of the Poro & Sande Bush, choreographed by Liberian dance and music artist Nimely Napla. Poro and Sande refer respectively to the male and female members of the Vai and Gola communities of West Africa. The work brought the company together with the Rites of Passage youth program dancers in traditional regalia designed and constructed by Napla. (Rites of Passage is an educational outreach program that serves youth ages 8-18.)

A trio of drummers (Eric Bli Bi Gore, Mohamed Kouyate, and Napla) ignite the “ceremonial dance rhythms of Vai and Gola people from Liberia's remote Grand Cape Mount County” (program note). The dance tells the story of a ceremony performed by a female “Jennet” who initiates girls into womanhood in the forest. One day, Jennet is killed by a leopard. The performance enacts communal grieving and the way memory lives in the body. We see embodied connection as the dancers across generations share vocabularies and rhythms.

During a pedagogical scene between Jennet and the youth group, the dancers form a circle, a cypher, and the audience is enlivened and emboldened to shout. This isn’t a cheeky aside that breaks the fourth wall but rather a form of call and response that lies at the center of Black dance, what scholar Thomas DeFrantz calls “corporeal orature”: “Dances offer greeting and debate; a mode of cultural identification and recognition which links African Americans in corporeal orature. […] The call and response mode of performance embraces an inclusionary aesthetic of creativity and invention, in that ‘call-and-response implies that every part of the community is important to its continuity and richness, that everyone has a voice and, through it, the power to act, enact, react’ (Gottschild, 1996: 144)” (DeFrantz in Lepecki 2004).

Dimensions dancers demonstrate the ways bodies are inhabited by lineages. The evening invited the audience to recognize and revel in the complex root system that constitutes African diasporic dance. Equal parts technique and heart--especially those kids in white, smiling broadly while losing their hats and leg bands without missing a beat—Dai Zoe Bush was the perfect way to celebrate 50 years of art, community, and love. I hope folks and funders keep investing in this extraordinary company so they can reach their centennial and beyond.

Dimensions Dance Theater in "ruminations. [re]visited." Photo by Ed Miller.

 

Sima Belmar, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and creator/producer/host of the ODC podcast Dance Cast.

somewhere in between - Bhumi B Patel

Rogelio Lopez. Photo by Ryan Kwok.

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.

Kevin Gaytan and Matt Han, standing. Rogelio Lopez, seated. Photo by Ryan Kwok.

 

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

Artist Profile: Rogelio Lopez

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Lasos - REYES Dance

Maya Mohsin (left) and Brooke Terry (right) in "Lasos." Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

 

Lasos - REYES Dance

By Melissa Hudson Bell

10/10/22

Two dancers, dressed in garishly loud primary-colored childlike dresses with over-large pockets stand facing each other downstage. Beads of sweat are visible on each, from almost forty minutes of vigorous jumping, running, gesturing, full-bodied movement. It is a face-off, tense and charged, that the audience has encountered twice already in “Lasos,” the latest choreographic work by REYES Dance presented at Joe Goode Annex this past week. 

This moment of relative stillness is anything but chill. In fact it is an apex of sorts, a notable slowing of time in what is otherwise relentless athletic dance and a cacophonous score of music and sound effects including babies crying, dogs barking, clownish horns honking, alarms ringing and more. This time out of time slowing of action renders the moment an obvious focal point of the choreography. Well, that and the fact that it also happens downstage and center. Well, that and the fact that now, as the audience encounters it a third time, our bodies can physically anticipate the gesture that follows the stillness… 

What we anticipate (and/or, perhaps, hope not to encounter a third time) is the gesture where the dancer on stage left rears back their arm, and with a great swooping action, gestures a slap that slices through the air on a downward diagonal with such force that it sends the other dancer tumbling to the ground in a heap. No actual physical contact is made, but the cause and effect are clear. The fallen dancer then stands, and the gestured slap is repeated. Again. And again. And again. And again. It is repeated enough that my focus goes from the slapping gesture itself to the reverberations of the slap. I notice how the dancers’ body hits the floor, which limb crumples first, how heavily the hips thud, how the arm folds in a little differently each time (perhaps to blunt the inevitable physical impact of such a move?). 

It’s unpleasant to watch, on some level. And yet, in a theatrical setting, it is also familiar. We the audience can both feel the threat of violence, and recognize the threat as staged, as volitional. So, as we-the-audience encounter this stand-off a third time, I find myself pondering the power of choreographic choice. There are a few obvious paths - will Reyes choose to enact this cycle of generational trauma for a third time? There is a Biblical sort of power in offending thrice, we are told… (I should probably mention that theatrical trappings like wigs and costume have denoted it is an elder injuring a presumably younger and more vulnerable human in these encounters.) 

Instead, will Reyes choose to black out the lights and leave audience members with a choose-your-own-adventure ambiguity as to what happens next? This has proven a popular tactic in our American postmodern and post-postmodern dance landscape and would seem a fitting match for the patchwork quilt of a danced narrative she has thus far concocted…

Maybe she will enlist another dancer to stop the action, staging a necessary intervention? In this choice she might be indicating a sort of “it takes a village” mindset for interrupting generational trauma. This seems valuable in a social moment where folks are often finding themselves adjacent to harm of all kind - finding themselves wanting to take action but not knowing how…

Or, in this moment of relative stillness, will we watch the offending figure - who, by the way, has been played by a different dancer each time this motif re-occurs - interrupt their own action? Having spent enough investigative energy in forty-some minutes of churning, roiling, leaping dancing, will they have the wherewithal to make a different choice? To make room for some hope? To indicate the possibility of not only a change of action but also a change of heart?

I don’t think I will give it away.

Instead, I will say that "Lasos," the Spanish word for “ties,” is a performance piece that, as the press materials suggest, concretely explores “the links between childhood trauma and chronic pain in the context of Latin American culture and traditions.” The four dancers - Brooke Terry, Caitlin Hicks, Maya Mohsin, and Jess Bozzo - play various characters in several short films created by Reyes, and then cleverly transition from film to stage as the final film ends with the four dancers cavorting into the Joe Goode Annex moments before they actually appear in front of the audience. In defiance of the gravity of the chosen subject matter, the mood of “Lasos” is not somber. Instead, the piece creates a carnivalesque world where pedestrian-style gestures are writ large with a puppet show sort of quality to them. The gestures are combined with presentational feats of highly structured and organized movement that draws from ballet (someone actually turns fouettes), old school hip-hop, salsa and cumbia, and more. The overall effect is a frenetic kind of story ballet that transports viewers into a world down-the-rabbit-hole (for lack of a better metaphor) in search of not home, but relief. Or understanding. Or connection. Or all of the above.

Reyes is forthcoming about the fact that the pain and the trauma she is grappling with in “Lasos” are not merely metaphorical. They are based on her own lived experience. She was, at one point, subjected to corporal punishment. She was, at one later point, so crippled with pain that she couldn’t walk. She knows/believes/senses that the two are linked, and she decided to work her way through these particular ties using the types of dance and the choreographic strategies that had, in her youth, made her feel strong and powerful, despite circumstances that sometimes made her feel powerless. 

Because Reyes’ chronic pain prevents her from dancing fully, she had to collaborate with the dancers in unique ways, sometimes drawing stick figures depicting action to communicate a plan. She shared journal entries, and had them participate in exercises she had learned in her pain management classes. She also leaned on their training and technique in asking them to execute certain ideas that she could only communicate verbally (each dancer is a beautifully unique and grounded mover, by the way). The end result creates a compelling dance vocabulary that is both familiar, and slightly off-kilter from the familiar. 

From left: Caitlin Hicks, Jess Bozzo, Maya Mohsin, and Brooke Terry. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

One main source of movement inspiration for “Lasos” was the wildly popular 1970s Latin sitcom “El Chavo del 8,” where slapstick humor is a central plot device. Here small acts of violence amongst neighbors or family members are passed off as humorous. They are absorbed as a regular part of problem solving in this television snapshot of a Latinx neighborhood. Interestingly, in “El Chavo del 8,” children are played by adults, which enables these foibles to play out more fully than they would if actual children were involved. Reyes found herself rewatching episodes a few years back, while bedridden with chronic pain following her grandmother’s death. She had watched El Chavo and enjoyed the antics in her childhood home, but as a young adult working through complex familial relationships, she questioned the juxtaposition of violence and pleasure, and love and pain, that were so vividly on display there. In response, she and the dancers that she enlisted for the project began to explore this juxtaposition through dance tropes, finding creative and sometimes absurd ways to indicate that any given moment can hold all the things: the pain and the pleasure and the sensations and the stories we tell ourselves about the sensations - all the past and the present and the now - all at once.

It is this general feel that permeates “Lasos.” The ties, it screams, are complicated. They are also generative. They are also quite literally painful, or at least they can be. And through it all, the choreographic choices of “Lasos” seem to intimate that deep investigation of one’s ties - to the past, to familial others, to one’s physical self and one’s deeply buried pain - is a necessary and nourishing feat. Reyes spoke to this in no uncertain terms. “With the show, I was able to finally say some things that I haven’t been able to say so clearly in language,” she told me in a phone interview. “I feel like I have been trying to make this dance over and over again for years and years and I feel like I could finally put it out there… ”

“I feel,” she said, “like I came out of hiding.”

Sounds like a move that requires both a loosening and a strengthening of ties, and an unwillingness to let the entanglements of the past weigh her down.  I’m glad I was there to see it.

Don’t miss whatever comes next from REYES Dance.

 

Melissa Hudson Bell (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, writer, and VP of WKB Industries. She has an MFA in Experimental Choreography and a PhD in Critical Dance Studies from UC Riverside. She recently taught at UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and USF. She spends a fair amount of time dancing in her living room, but she is thinking about getting back out there. Melissa is interested in dance as an art form, field of critical inquiry and agent for social change. Dance events that are experimental, accessible, and collaborative. Choreography that is born of and that stimulates curiosity. Movement as a means of shaping and reshaping our world. More at: melissahudsonbell.com

FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Dances Through Genre

FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Dances Through Genre

By Garth Grimball

Editor’s Note:

For some dance events, securing a dance writer/reviewer can be a difficult task due to timing and availability. But the questions still can linger: How can artists receive feedback and impressions? How are works of art documented in writing for audiences, artists, and funders? Writer Garth Grimball attended Weekend 2 of the FACT/SF Summer Festival in-person, and offered to view the video of Weekend 1. Given Grimball’s writing throughout the pandemic about many performance formats, including recorded and streamed events, this seemed like a great opportunity to ask Garth to engage in a recording of Weekend 1 as well. 

- Jill Randall

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FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival featured six artists over the weekend of July 29-30 at the Joe Goode Annex. Unfortunately no writers from Life As A Modern Dancer were able to attend the festival live, so here I am, six weeks later, writing about recordings of the performances. Which is to say, my responses are to a 2D rendering of a 3D form, and I watched on my laptop from the solitude of my bedroom, not engulfed in the energy of an excited audience. This is an experience of which I am now quite familiar. 

slowdanger. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

slowdanger, based in Pittsburgh, PA, opened the festival with “Resonant Body.” Co-artistic directors Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson, clad in white windowpane-patterned jumpsuits, move behind two microphones stationed on the diagonal from upstage right and downstage left. Their bodies blend and separate like their amplified voices. “Resonant Body” is evocative of Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” (1968); Knight and Thompson explore sound and the body with a specificity that expands.

Sharp & Fine. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Megan and Shannon Kurashige, co-directors of Sharp & Fine, premiered “This Time Tomorrow,” a duet for Eric Garcia and Moscelyne Parkeharrison. The dance opens with the duo speaking back and forth through a tube of packing paper discussing the end of the world. Garcia is dressed in a pink tutu and brandishes the paper tube and a pair of scissors like a fairy wand. “This Time Tomorrow” uses a blend of the mundane and fantastical metaphorically to explore how humans deal with the enormity of things like a pandemic or climate change.

Drama Tops. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

“Boys, Boys, Boys!” from the Seattle-based duo DRAMATOPS makes an effort of effort. Elby Brosch and Shane Donahue enter wearing replicas of Elton John’s famous Dodgers sequined baseball ensemble. After hyping up the crowd they perform lap dances to Ginuwine’s “Pony” that evolve into gymnastic partnering in wrestling singlets. Camp becomes force. Brosch and Donahue lift, drop, cantilever their bodies in endless configurations until they sit facing each other, pounding their torsos together, over and over. Phil Collins’s “In The Air Tonight” plays and the pounding continues until the drum beat hits. Delayed gratification.

Amit Patel & Ishika Seth with Akhil Joondeph. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

“They,” choreographed and performed by Amit Patel & Ishika Seth with Akhil Joondeph, “is inspired by the concept of Ardhanarishvara, the Hindu God represented as half woman-half man.” The trio makes the greatest use of the stage space, creating narrative out of spatial relationships. Blending classical Indian dance gestures with modern dance partnering, “They” moves between harmony and disharmony as Patel, Seth, and Joondeph merge in and out of sculptural tableau.

Chinchin Hsu and Brianna Elyse Torres. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Chinchin Hsu collaborated with Brianna Elyse Torres on the duet “time eater.” The dance succeeds in sticking to its central contrasts. Torres dances all over the stage. Hsu remains stationary. Torres’s movements shift and vary. Hsu is dedicated to one task. Torres undresses as she moves leaving clothes scattered. Hsu slowly empties a burlap bag of grain hoisted across her shoulders. “time eater” shows how the experience of time depends on context as much as measurement.

FACT/SF. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

FACT/SF closed the evening with “Number 6.” Choreographed by Charles Slender-White and performed by Slender-White, Katherine Neumann, and LizAnne Roman, the trio feels like a precursor to the following weekend’s premiere, “For a.” The dancers prance in wearing shiny amber rompers and black socks. The trio is mostly unison choreography of body halves with gesture accumulation to music by Joel Corry & Jax Jones Feat. Charli XCX. “Number 6” is a brisk 3 minutes 15 seconds. Its breezy quality is undercut by an adherence to Modern Dance Face. A little more face would take this dance a long way.

Attending a dance festival can encourage one to proclaim trends or locate a throughline that may be non-existent. What does seeing these six works tell me about dance, about dance makers? Nothing, writ large. But in these six dances I see a grappling with the question of, How to be? What are the connections a body can make in this time and place? Good questions to ask and keep asking.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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Related post:

FACT/SF & DISCO RIOT Dance On Making

FACT/SF & DISCO RIOT Dance On Making

DISCO RIOT. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

 

FACT/SF & DISCO RIOT Dance On Making

By Garth Grimball

FACT/SF and DISCO RIOT, based in San Diego, presented two works at ODC Theater on August 5-7, closing out FACT/SF’s two week Summer Dance Festival. Bay Area audiences were given the opportunity to see this SoCal company thanks to PORT (Peer Organized Reciprocal Touring), a touring program developed by Charles Slender-White, artistic director of FACT/SF.  

In our third year of pandemic life touring is a bigger risk than ever. Building an audience and staying healthy can feel like trying to force two negative magnets together. Masking was required of the audience for this split bill and the dancers performed unmasked. Whether the requirement was based on touring or not, I’m grateful dancers are traveling to the Bay Area to perform.

DISCO RIOT opened with “Ex Nihilo” (2019) choreographed by artistic director Zaquia Mahler Salinas. The dance is led by and responds to audio recordings of lectures by Alan Watts, edited within an original score by Jonny Tar, that examine origins, nothingness, and interconnectedness.

The quintet is a slow build. The phrasing feels patchwork like material that has been sewn together. Walking is a frequent transition between dancier moments. Salinas, Guillermo Castro, Lauren Christie, Marty Dorado, and Odessa Uno make their way towards the downstage left corner with a gesture evocative of pulling an arrow through a bow. Watts’s voice describes the duality of sensations and two dancers connect as if forming each other. Christie and Uno cradle each other’s heads, swirling on an axis at center stage.

The first half of “Ex Nihilo” feels like a mismatch of performance quality and choreography. The dancers share a committed presence on stage but the movement doesn’t meet that commitment. Until the powerful modern dance diagonal does its work. At the halfway point the dancers come barreling down the stage right diagonal and the choreography sparks. The dance snaps into focus. Salinas and Castro share a duet of inversions, turns, and floorwork that is propulsive and highlights a creative chemistry that enhances the theme of the work.

The costumes were another mismatch. It looks like the assignment was gender neutrality, but the result was a kind of mermaid-core: shimmery opalescence with a green tinge and fabric bunched and ruffled like scales. The look was memorable but how it connected to the dance was opaque.

DISCO RIOT. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

 

FACT/SF premiered “For a,” choreographed and performed by Charles Slender-White, Katherine Neumann, and LizAnne Roman. FACT/SF is entering its 15th season and “For a” is a culmination of sorts; seventeen artists are listed as choreographic contributors from past productions. The work has easter eggs of past repertory, from movement phrases to the buckets of “The Consumption Series” (2010).

“For a” has one of the best openings I’ve seen in recent memory. The theater’s entire lighting grid was lowered to just above the floor. The beams, the hardware, the wires, all visible. Slender-White, Neumann, and Roman enter gliding beneath it all belly down on creeper seats. It was silly and joyful and the audience laughed.

LizAnne Roman of FACT/SF. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

The trio stands and dances in the alleys between the equipment. Wearing black shirts and skirts that mirror the silhouette of theater lighting cages, the trio play in foreground and background, bodies obscured by the theater trappings. 

Once the lighting grid rose back to its regular station, Neumann danced a solo with a floodlight in hand that felt more like a duet between human and object. This is a dance about dancing the way people say a painting is about painting. The surface, the materiality, the limitations are paramount. The objects are the subject. “For a” is about dance the way Cy Twombly’s scribbles are about painting.

Slender-White is a certified teacher of Countertechnique, the release adjacent movement style that has one perpetually rotating on a vertical axis. Inventive gestures are born out of the dancers’ shaping of Countertechnique. The gestures look unique unto themselves, not like abstractions of a familiar wave or pointing. 

There is a lot of unison in “For a” and it was hard to tell when the unison was meant to highlight the differences of a body’s internal axis, or when they just needed more rehearsal. Either way, motifs emerge. Parallel bourrees, arms tracing down the body and out into space, shoulders guiding in and out of turns.

At times I think the most transgressive choice a modern dance choreographer can make in the Bay Area is to choreograph to classical music, without irony. For this reason Slender-White’s choice of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major feels bold. The trio kept up with the demands of the music, though if FACT/SF had Mark Morris money, I think arranging the composition to a slightly shorter length would benefit the dance. “For a” is a welcome tribute to form and dancing.

FACT/SF. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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Related posts:

Wholeness in "Split"

Artist Profile: Charles Slender-White

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“One. One & One” Equals All - By Garth Grimball

“One. One & One” Equals All

By Garth Grimball

Vertigo Dance Company, based in Israel, concluded this year’s American Dance Festival with a performance of “One. One & One” (2017) at the Reynolds Theater on Duke University campus. The dance opens with a solo. Yarden Oz drips and extends her body while Etai Peri pours peat moss out of a bucket in a line from downstage right to left. Avi Belleli’s soundscore starts with a layering of strings, dogs barking, and, perhaps, explosions. There is an evocation of a wall. A black curtain hangs mid-level on all three sides of the stage, bifurcating the space horizontally. Stone-like benches sit facing each other.

Choreographed by Noa Wetheim (Artistic Director and Co-founder) with Rina Wertheim-Koren (Assistant AD), “One. One & One” features nine dancers whose spines curve, bend, and arch like the slopes of a mountain range. The full cast joins Oz and Peri in overlapping solos and counterpoint. Dancers strut down stage and strike poses. A motif emerges of thwacking hands back and forth between thighs and chest with a force of self-flagellation. 

Each dancer moves like every cell is charged. A body’s internal motion is as evident as the lines and shapes that glide through space. The energy swells and the dancers bring out more buckets creating more lines horizontally across the stage. The lines are broken. The soil is thrown and spread until it covers the stage. Ruth Ben David catapults herself into the new landscape creating dust clouds. She embodies the frenetic mob as she vibrates and rolls.

The relationships shift. Solos become group dances. The men do an abstraction of folk dancing. The cast starts cheering each other with hoops and hollers. They run across the stage and leap into and over arms, reaching higher and higher. The accumulated sweat and soil dampen the neutral toned shirts and pants into second skins to be peeled off.

The movement vocabulary feels deeply influenced by Gaga technique and the Batsheva aesthetic. In addition to soil as set, the style of repetition is reminiscent of Pina Bausch. Belleli’s score leans towards the melodramatic, especially a section featuring electric guitar. The dancers keep the work from feeling derivative. They exude an almost feral presence; ready to erupt at any moment as if they are dancing for the first time.

With the exception of a gendered moment that felt rather retrograde, “One. One & One” becomes a big, sweaty, powerful group dance. The lights go down on a collective, standing together, breathing.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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In “FRAMEWORK,” Kristin Damrow & Co Explore The Body Inside And Out

Dancers Brandon Graham,  Anna Greenberg Gold, Sawako Ogo, Sam Grayson, and Allegra Bautista. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

 

In “FRAMEWORK,” Kristin Damrow & Co Explore The Body Inside And Out

By Garth Grimball

Kristin Damrow knows how to produce live art. Since “Eames” premiered in 2018 in San Francisco, Kristin Damrow & Company has been making dances that are design-forward, thoughtfully staged, and detail conscious. “FRAMEWORK,” presented at The Lab on June 3-4, builds on the company’s reputation of impressive execution while plateauing in movement invention.

“FRAMEWORK” is billed as an immersive experience of the skeletal structure and biomechanics. The Lab gallery had three 12-feet high white, monolithic structures cutting through the space at different angles. A striking paper sculpture, made by Damrow, hung from the ceiling like a diorama of vertebrae or layers of skin peeled back. On the back wall a projector showed images of biomass at a cellular level.

Damrow invited the audience to move through the space letting yourself miss some things and discover others. Throughout the show she led by example and the audience followed suit, creating our own swirling biomass. I walked, sat, squatted, leaned, stood still. I was more aware of my skeleton by moving through the space than if the show were a seated event. The audience accepted Damrow’s invitation to immerse.

Allegra Bautista, Brandon Graham, Sam Grayson, Anna Greenberg Gold, and Sawako Ogo entered in black pants and semi-translucent yellow anoraks cropped at the waist. In a line they leaned against one of the monoliths touching their heads to its surface. Delicate moments like this heightened the sense of architecture’s precarity; no matter the strength of the materials the assembling is key to integrity. The dancers disassembled and assembled in solos, group choreography, and stillness.

Kristin Damrow & Company. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

The choreography began with motifs on waves and distal ends. Erect arms acted like a compass for the body to rotate around. Deep lunges were the base for torsos to ripple and sway like bamboo scaffolding. One movement phrase evoked the jelly bones of Trisha Brown—side step into a curtsy lunge as the arms slice across the upper body, using the momentum to change directions.

The motifs recurred throughout the dance but the dominant movement vocabulary became contemporary modern: sickled-foot developpes, pirouettes, body undulations to the floor. All danced beautifully by a technically skilled cast, but the connection to the concept spread thin as “FRAMEWORK” progressed. At the work’s beginning I was truly considering the skeleton. By the end the body’s architecture was backgrounded by dance moves that lacked the specificity imbued in the performance space.

Composer Aaron Gold’s score is replete with hooks and beat drops. Part of the evening’s choreography was the swaying and head bobbing of audience members. As the dancers reached their energetic apex though the music had a flattening effect. There was little sonic space left to ratchet up the energy.

“FRAMEWORK” succeeded in its mission to create an immersive dance experience. Walking through The Lab’s gallery was an orgy of sound, visual art, and bodies in motion. The work’s skeleton could use a few more bones.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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“Four by Four” by Emily Hansel: Reflections on Product as Process

Mia J. Chong, Chelsea Reichert, and Alex Carrington (left to right). Photo by Steve Disenhof Photography.

 

“Four by Four” by Emily Hansel: Reflections on Product as Process

By Molly Rose-Williams

A few weeks ago, I went to a friend’s art opening. It was held in the front room of a large Victorian with lofty ceilings and hip-to-ceiling windows that shone with dusky light. Her prints meandered like a black and white stream around white walls, and lay across a large table in the middle of the room. I started at the table, magnetized towards a small paper box with printed accordion fold-outs that stretched into printed images of verdant greenery.

“That didn’t turn out how I meant it to.” Artist Olivia Arau McSweeney looked on as I pumped the box open and closed, printed sides folding and unfolding in paper pleats. She picked up another small box to my right and pulled it open like an accordion. “See? This was my prototype.” The blank sides on hers stretched flat, while mine stayed furrowed and off-kilter. “I made a sketch of how it’s supposed to work here.” She pointed at a series of diagrams drafted with an engineer’s precision. “I think the ink affected the folding action?” 

She replaced the box on the table. “Anyway, let me know if you have any questions while you’re looking around!” I nodded and she drifted away to greet a cluster of new arrivals.

Last Friday night, sitting in the ODC theater at Emily Hansel’s newest work, “Four By Four,” I couldn’t help but think of Olivia’s show. Though the setting (a dark and drafty theater), the art form (moving bodies on stage), the context (a “completed” work at the culmination of a month's long rehearsal process), and the themes explored (a “messy attempt at refusing productivity” and an exploration of “not knowing”) were distinct, both shows felt like invitations to enter the work through process instead of product. These invitations came not in the form of written descriptions or verbal explanation, but instead by way of the art itself. Both Olivia and Emily used the languages native to their work (sketches, paper prototypes, and choreography) to reveal the processes that had given birth to what we were seeing. 

In doing so, both bodies of work unfolded for me in unexpectedly rich ways. Olivia’s folding box became not just a beautiful and clever paper contraption, but a study on iteration, noticing, and the unpredictability of working with uncontrollable materials like paper and ink. “Four By Four” became a series of infinitely branching questions around the communicative potential of moving bodies on stage—Is movement innately meaningful? What limits and potential do moving bodies have for precision in communication? To what extent is the meaning of a movement shaped by its context (physical, compositional, historical, sonic etc.)? How are all these things the same or different from other forms of communication? And on and on. By the end of the show, I was swimming in a gentle glow of non-verbal intention, clear that something had been given to me, but not yet able to put words to it.

The show took place in three 15 to 20 minute chunks of dancing separated by two 5 minute pauses. During each pause, we were invited to get up and stretch, chat with our neighbors, or do whatever else we wanted—a sort of choose-your-own-adventure palette cleanser. The chunks of dancing read like triplets to me—clearly of the same family, but different enough from one another to feel like separate entities. They became synergistically more fascinating when presented alongside one another. 

Dancers and co-creators, Alex Carrington, Mia J. Chong, Shareen DeRyan, and Chelsea Reichert, danced in every section. Each wore an outfit of monochrome pastel—orange, pink, lavender, and yellow—and their movements stayed in a similarly narrow register throughout. I saw mechanical clocks and ballerinas, swooping birds, a wind-up toy, a water toss, a dog tail-wagging, hugs, butt scoots, and body rolls. Mostly, they moved with a kind of gentle staccato of linear arm, hand and leg gestures, accented by brief moments of stillness, a curve of the spine, spiraling turns, or minor upticks in speed. 

It was often unclear if what I was witnessing was improvised or set—the movements were precise, and movement themes consistent enough to make me suspect it must be at least partially set. But they moved with a fluidity and presence that suggested spontaneous composition. After speaking with Emily after the show, I learned that the the first five minutes of the show were fully improvised—an open score to help the dancers “enter the work” from a place of authenticity as opposed to rote memorization—and that after that, the invitation to “do what you want at any time” applied at all times. “It meant every night was different,” explained Emily. 

Shareen DeRyan. Photo by Steve Disenhof Photography.

On the night that I went, each section felt like variations of the same dance—a liberally-imagined remix of the same modest vocabulary of post-modernesque movements. The first was a tour of solos, duos, trios, and quartet dancing. It felt like the most formally-constructed of the three sections, with the dancers following clear geometric pathways across the floor, and each movement section unfolding with a kind of symmetrical linearity. The formality broke down towards the end, when the dancers all went to exit the stage by scooting on their butts backwards through the curtain. The first three of them made it without a hitch, but Chelsea Reichert was left struggling alone, unable to quite make it to the curtain despite her absurdly gargantuan effort. She finally abandoned the task and closed the piece with a stunning solo downstage to the mournful croon of a cello.

The second section started in a single pool of rectangular light. Chelsea Reichert and Shareen DeRyan whispered to each other and they constructed a phrase we had seen in the first section. As they “remembered” more and more of the phrase, they moved across the stage through two more rectangular pools of light that grew to hold them. Mia J. Chong and Alex Carrington watched from the side of the stage, whispering to each other as if welcoming us into a most intimate rehearsal moment. The second section ended with the same cello as the first, this time with all four dancers moving before leaving Chelsea, once again, alone onstage.

In the third section, the dancers moved with the most energetic abandon I had seen yet—a kind of modest celebration performed in the vocabulary of post-modern dance. Once again, we saw echoes of moments from the first two sections, remixed and reworked. It ended with the mournful strings, this time leaving just Mia to dance in the glowing orange light.

Throughout, the phenomenally spatial soundscape by Sophia Cotraccia and Ben Juodvalkis served as a central anchor for my meaning-making. Pebbles falling, children laughing, water flowing, and a deep resonating bass that reverberated through my very bones became a dynamic landscape, painting the action onstage as human, nature, spiritual or energetic. I felt invited by the work to follow the imaginary tangents sparked by the vast textural diversity of sound, somehow confident that there wasn’t a single “right” interpretation that I might miss by allowing my imagination to run wild. I think this spaciousness was created in large part through how the dancers witnessed one another, often with gentle smiles that suggested some kind of inside joke hidden between the seams of this formal movement.

Overall, the effect of placing three similar pieces next to each other evoked a similar fascination to what I felt at Olivia’s art opening. It made me want to look, and then look again. Each moment unfolded like that little paper box—one time this, the next time that. The same movements became something new each time I saw them, like the layers of a many-faced kaleidoscope, slowly revealed, face by face. The most conclusive “take away” I can share, is that by the end of the show I felt relaxed and at ease. I look forward to more from Emily Hansel and her collaborators.

Photo by Steve Disenhof Photography.

Molly Rose-Williams is a performer, writer, maker, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. In her writing about dance, she’s interested in exploring language as a tool for amplifying and challenging the unique perspectives that body-based art can offer. When she’s not dancing or writing, she also works as a creative producer for The Nocturnists podcast, teaches cooking and science, and organizes community arts events. www.mollyrosewilliams.com

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Related posts by Emily Hansel:

Relearning Agency: A Dancer’s Call for Collective Action

Cultivating Healthy, Equitable Workplaces for Dancers

Empowering Dancers Through Contracts

 

 

Review/Response: "One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives II" with Peiling Kao Dances

Peiling Kao Dances: One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives II

May 6th & 8th, 2022 

University of Hawai’i, Mānoa Earle Ernst Lab Theater, Honolulu, HI

Reviewed by Christopher Blasdel

Peiling Kao’s dance concert—One Body, Five dances, Six Perspectives II—consisted of a series of short, commissioned dance vignettes from five guest choreographers. Each of the guest choreographers came from differing cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and they infused different themes, costumes, styles, movement, stage props and music into their works, reflecting a great diversity. The only unifying aspect of these five disparate pieces was the dancer herself.

For the first dance project of this series, One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives I, Peiling commissioned dances from five female choreographers. The second iteration focused on male choreographers. Her intention, according to her own words, was to explore the additional gender dynamic in the process of creating dance. She selected her choreographers on the basis of personal relationship, admiration, ethnicities, styles of the work, and her own desire to collaborate.

Like a musician performing a commissioned piece, the dancer must put herself at the will and direction of the choreographer. Peiling asked herself at the outset whether “this dancer’s body can be colonized by the choreographic intentions,” but she demonstrated that her cultivation into each dance piece was both natural,  meaningful and fleeting. She swept through the pieces like a peregrinating spirit incarnating for a brief period within each dance vignette. It is a tribute to Peiling’s great skill and extensive dance vocabulary that she successfully inhabited these dances and made them into her own. The result was a rare opportunity for the audience to experience a wide variety of highly articulate movement and storytelling.

Pele honua mea (Pele of the Sacred Land)

Choreography: Peter Rockford Espiritu

This piece opened the recital with a chanted tribute to the ʻāina—the concept of land that is sacred to Hawaiians. The chant described the location of the theater and its place within the overall hierarchy of land in Hawai’i, starting with the largest land division in the state: the individual island (mokupuni), in this case Oʻahu. The next level of division is moku (Kona, referring to the southwest part of Oʻahu), and then the lesser ahupua’a division (Waikīkī), down to the smaller subdivisions (‘ili) and finally to the very small division—the hill upon which the Earle Ernst Lab Theater stands.

Peiling emerged from the darkness clothed in a red and black flowing dress. She was Pele, the volcano goddess, and indeed the back story of the dance referred to a defeat that Pele suffered in a disastrous fight with her sister, Nāmaka o Kahaʻi (Pele is the fire goddess, and Nāmaka is the water goddess, so I assume there is a basic instability in their relationship). The story, according to the choreographer, depicted the resurrection of Pele and the rebuilding of her home (Kilauea) as she recovered from the battle.

Peiling physically narrated this story with elegantly extended arms and legs, taking ownership of the stage (and her world) by creating an expansive sense of space. She used two props, both long sticks, that (to me) resembled serpents, although in this particular context it may be more meaningful to interpret them as moʻo, the traditional Hawaiian lizard (or dragon) that is an elemental, though troubled, water spirit. At one point in the dance, Pele picked up the largest of these moʻo and held it aloft, in a triumphant gesture of fire subduing water. This movement demonstrated mastery of both her dance/storytelling techniques and the energetic ascendency of Pele back into her rightful status as the volcano goddess. After the dance finished and the light faded from the stage, I thought how appropriate this dance was for the opening. It made clear the Hawaiian’s reverence for ‘āina, tradition and mythology that informs the profundity of the Hawaiian culture, and I felt as if I had witnessed a ceremony attended by divine participants.

How Water Disappears

Choreography: Shinichi Iova-Koga

How Water Disappears was danced in total silence with an almost brutal minimalism. The choreography was a reference to butoh, a movement that originated in Japan in the late 1950’s, early 60's and reflected an intense questioning—at least in butoh’s early days—of one’s place in society as a human and an artist.

Whereas Pele knew her destiny and how to reclaim it with broad, expansive movements, Peiling as the butoh dancer remained focused on her inner world, only emerging for brief moments to express wonder, or perhaps a slight annoyance, of things that were going on in her surrounding physical world. Her body seemed to alternate between an inward uncertainty of the spirit and outward exploration of the physical world, and as she shifted perspectives, I felt myself joining her, going inward into my thoughts then outward to the movements onstage. The switching of perspective reminded me of the traditional Japanese bon dance, where villages and local family members welcome home the dead for a few days of food, entertainment and communion with the living. In some of the local dances, for example the Nishimonai bon dance from rural Akita Prefecture, the dancers move in a choreographed line, first facing inward then outward, symbolically alternating between the world of the dead and the living. Gestures emanating from the dancer’s body, it seems, can exist in both.

Iova-Koga described his dance as being based on the theme of water as a life-giving force. He envisioned images of a child discovering the transitory nature of water that collects in the morning rain and evaporates in the midday sun. Both rain and life are evanescent, and one must enjoy them to the fullest while they are with us.

Hapon

Choreography: Gerald Casel

This dance was well-placed as the third piece in concert. Peiling entered the stage dressed in white and, with Debussy’s  Afternoon of the Faun as background music, began dancing in a modern dance style, totally different from the previous segments. Not surprisingly, throughout the piece Peiling demonstrated an impressive mastery of both modern and classical dance techniques.

Afternoon of the Faun (which originally premiered in 1894) is probably best known as the music to which the Ballets Russes legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreographed a sensual and provocative (for the times) dance in 1912. Indeed, shortly into the piece Peiling began to imitate Nijinsky’s iconic hand movements; kneeling low on the floor with palms extended in straight lines or at a 45 degree angle from the body. Guest choreographer Casel, inspired by Nijinsky and Debussy, choreographed this piece in 2019 during a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, but Peiling’s performance was its premiere. The piece was effective, coming as it did immediately after the fiery Pele Honua Mea and the watery, introspective butoh dance. Peiling danced with a clever sense of self awareness, and it was refreshing that she did not take herself too seriously and enjoyed the brief channeling of Nijinskyʻs spirit.

The Sound Keeps Falling

Choreography: Wen-Ching Lin

This piece was a light-hearted and openly humorous respite from the previous works. Holding four bamboo clappers, Peiling moved around the stage to the well-known Taiwanese dance song Chē gū diào. The arrangement of the piece she used however, was done on synthesizer with humorous electronic timbres, creating an absurd, manga-like parody of the music. Peiling danced this absurdity to the fullest, made even more effective by a straight poker-face held throughout the dance. She heightened the cartoonish effect with humorous actions; for example, she perched her clappers on her shoulders, where of course they inevitably fell off. She replaced them, only for them to dislodge once more. The inevitable futility of this unpretentious action reminded me how entertaining simple repetition can be. It added to the cartoonish atmosphere of the choreography and delighted the audience.

To discover the subtext of this dance, however, one apparently had to look beyond its cartoonish veneer. The choreographer explained that he wanted to make the audience consider the present state of traditional folk dances. He asked questions like: How can one keep these dances alive? What is the place of the traditional folk dance in contemporary society? and How do we make them relevant and meaningful in modern society? Indeed, these are important questions, but for the moment I just sat back and enjoyed the funky music and fun dance.

Island

Choreography, visuals and text: Keith Hennessy

The stage set for this dance utilized more props than the other dances, including a very large, seven-pointed star (made by the dancer herself from cardboard, tin foil and decorative paper) suspended at the back of the stage and a large plastic tarp, consisting of colorful segments sewn together and laid out on the floor.

The music was abstract and blended well into the background. Both the star and tarp were reminiscent of simple folk art and contrasted the minimalist stage settings of the previous dances.

Peiling made her way through these props, exploring a relationship with them. She danced with her star, then made her way to the tarp, at times completely covering her body with it so that it seemed as if its patterns and colors had a life of their own—whipping across the stage like a giant flag torn from its pole, or a tent with the errant leg or arm protruding from it.

In preparation for the dance, a stage-hand came on and set up a microphone downstage, indicating  to the audience that something unusual was going to happen. Near the end of the dance, Peiling suddenly broke the “fourth wall” and made her way to the mic to begin reading, in both Chinese and English, from a set of cards she carried. They were simple statements about her life, like “I have become proficient in cooking,” “I bake as well” or “My mother has a Japanese name.” I wondered if these intriguing declarations were scripted on the card or if they were answers to questions the cards poised.

It was refreshing to hear Peiling vocalize during the performance, though I wished she had forgone the use of a microphone and just allowed her voice to resonate in the small theater. Nonetheless, the scripted words spoken at the end of the final dance forged a deeper connection with the audience.

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Peiling’s dances were transparent yet at the same time full of color, imagery and story. In the program notes, Peiling stated that “The performer’s body is the container that transforms movement through space and time into something meaningful to individual viewers.” Although each dance was laden with cultural references that demonstrated, in the dancer’s own words, the “postcolonial body,” each of the five dances allowed the viewer to make their own personal interpretation.

 

Christopher Blasdel resided in Japan for 45 years and is a recognized master of the shakuhachi (Japan’s traditional vertical bamboo flute). He has worked with dancers throughout his career, including the pioneering butoh dancers of the 1970’s: Akira Kasai, Kazuo Ohno and others. He has written numerous reviews for books and concerts for the Japan Times. He presently resides in Hawai’i and teaches a course on Japanese music at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. www.yohmei.com

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