Separate Worlds
Quasar
Dance Company
Lend Me Your Eyes (Empresta-me Teus Olhos)
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
September 17, 2003
Reviewed
by Rita Felciano
In
its first Bay Area appearance, as part of the San Francisco
International Arts Festival, Quasar Dance Company from
Brazil gave its audience two shows for the price of
one. Lend Me Your Eyes (Empresta-me Teus Olhos)
trajectory switched gears mid-stream so drastically
that the piece might as well have been cut into two.
Each half ran on its own track without enough of a connective
tissue to hold the two sections together beyond the
fact that the dancers used a similar vocabulary. This
was an evening where you had to be satisfied with spectacular
dancing. If Henrique Rodovalho’s choreography had been
up to the level of his extraordinary dancers, it might
have been an exceptional show.
With Lend Me, Rodovalho set himself the task
of presenting two opposing ways of life: the city vs.
the village, in anonymity or within a community. Not
exactly original, these ideas have floated around since
the early 19th century when cities lost their allure
as places of safety. What was moderately interesting
was the consistency with which Rodovalho realized the
two visions.
In the first half he set the dancers against black and
white videos of insular figures in crowd scenes. A woman
collapsed next to a building. A man progressed up and
down the aisle of a bus, finally ending in a fetal position.
Two men hugged in public in the middle of a crowd. A
woman inside a shopping mall seemed paralyzed. These
images spoke of loneliness and isolation in a cement-clad
environments. The dancers’ response on stage was one
of instinctual recoil and helplessness. They lashed
out, they threw themselves to the floor, they curled
up as if in pain. They chased each other, they hurled
themselves through space. This is where Quasar’s razor
sharp attacks, near collisions and rapid fire rebounds
most clearly showed its debt to Brazil’s martial arts
form of capoeira.
The juxtaposition of these cold grayish videos with
the dancers extreme physicality raised an interesting
question. Did the turbulence on stage speak about what
was going inside the figures on the screen or was it
reflective of the violence of their dehumanized environment?
Gratifyingly Rodovalho didn’t answer the question.
Lend Me’s second half presented a completely
different way of being. The color videos, taken at a
retirement center, showed residents who willingly performed
for the camera, who were engaged with each other, talking,
dancing, teasing. They reminisced—videos were subtitled
from the Portuguese—about hard lives and talked about
a future in which death necessarily plays a prominent
part. If the first section’s video felt cool and highly
stylized with all kinds of fancy camera work, these
videos were warm with a documentary quality and sense
of “real people” about them.
Without foregoing their power moves the dancers on stage
responded in kind. A sense of humor, and ironic self-deprecation
became part of their expressive vocabulary. They tried
on social dance moves, paired into couples, their dancing
often a direct comment on what happened on tape. An
old woman’s repeated cackling provoked a trio’s flapping
its elbows like a chicken’s wings. While the old people
whirled away in each other’s arms, the dancers’ attempts
at pairing mostly failed. In one desperate courting
duet, one partner simply walked away and another took
her place without anyone missing a beat. In another
a third dancer stepped into the middle of the hand holding
couple creating a triangular relationship. In yet another,
the two dancers communicated by jerking their bodies
to the exact rhythm of a conversation coming from the
video.
A moment of real poignancy paired an older woman’s verbal
concerns about dying with a white-clad, tall and bald
dancer on stage. Standing in a pool of light, life slowly
appeared to drain out of her. In the end she simply
stood, slightly leaning to one side, her arms hanging
down, her head like dropping like a wilted flower.
The evening’s most satisfying episode involved a contact
improv-inspired duet which was full of danger and fragility.
This was a relationship that blossomed at the edge of
a cliff. Its unexpected yet flowing moves—hanging from
a partner’s shoulder, oozing over each other’s bodies,
hooking a foot around a neck, cranking a leg in attitude,
grabbing a head in a scissor hold—felt both sensual
and playful.
The two halves, however, badly needed to be put into
a relationship with each other. Co-existence really
did not seem enough. Even the transition--such it was--of
projecting an older man’s image onto the T-shirt of
a dancer--was awkward. The shift in tone at that moment
was a surprise. But surprises work best when they have
been prepared. Depending less on associative and more
on structural integrity would made Lend Me
stronger than it turned out to be.
The program notes stated that Rodovalho studied with
Wim Vandeykeybus, and the Belgian choreographer’s vocabulary
of launching, throwing, catapulting and twisting was
the first thing that came to mind. Rodovalho’sw dancers,
however, made it their own, imbuing it with a relaxed
sensuality when they let their bodies, however momentarily,
luxuriously give into the ground. The precisely calibrated
attacks, canons and unisons also imposed a high degree
of stylization and abstraction. What first may have
looked like improvisation was taken to another level
when the moves were performed in perfect unisons.
Repetitions were intriguing. A sequence would go on
as if the performer was unable to get out of the loop.
One dancer, for instance, flipped backwards and landed
prone on the floor. She then pushed her bottom up, twisted
herself into a bridge and started the sequence over.
She looked like something being replicated on a conveyor
belt. One dancer would return over and over to the same
spot and repeat the identical pattern. Several times
one dancer would start a phrase and others would drop
in seemingly from nowhere. They then segued into a lock
step pattern that hurled, twisted and slid them across
the floor. Intense physicality may look random and accidental
by itself, but becomes ominous when so tightly controlled.
At one point, a dancer walked through a group of collapsed
bodies and lifted the head of one. Like puppets on a
single string everybody jumped up.
Towards the end the dancers carried in a white circular
platform, took off their clothes and sat down with their
backs to us. Whatever that was supposed to mean—mostly
something connected with dying—it was a curiously flat
way to close Lend Me.
Despite reservations, the Quasar Dance Company with
its eight tall, athletically trained performers; an
impressive, largely percussive score (by Hendrik Lorenzen)
with discrete inclusions of heart beats, clocks and
breathing; a set of variously translucent panels (by
Shell, Jr.) and Rodovalho’s lighting design was an excellent
choice for this first time Festival.
copyright 2003 by Rita Felciano
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