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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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(c) 2003 by danceviewwest
page last updated: July 19, 2003