Shift
Gears
SHIFT
>>> PHYSICAL THEATER
Dance Mission Theatre
August
8, 2003
reviewed
by Ann Murphy
Political
dance has certainly mutated. What once was raw, agit-prop
explosion or sententious sermonizing has all but disappeared
from the dance scene. Okay, for the most part, it’s
no loss, but why is it only the Dance Brigade brings
us regular wild-woman interpretations of current social
and economic events, along with forecasts about the
future, which, by the way, keep coming true? Is it that
nobody dares? Or is it that now people don’t know how?
Maybe
the problem is deeper: everyday politics have been transformed
into hair-raising theater full of spectacular illusion
and unsavory drama. Who can compete? Besides, in what
fashion do you rail against the oppression of you and
your ancestors when nearly everything in the political
geosphere dwarfs those complaints? Genocide erupts as
effortlessly as new epidemics leave the bush these days,
while wars are as blithely scheduled as C-sections.
It’s damn hard to make a ripple.
 Perhaps
that’s why, as earnestly as he tried, Manuelito Biag
in Giving Strength to this Fragile Tongue which
opened Friday at Dance Mission, was almost mute on the
subject of oppression, rage, outsider status, and the
often futile longing to be included, even though he
dedicated the night to Pilipino poet Carlos Bulosan,
who immigrated to California in the 1930’s and became
a farm worker, and even though he wrote a moving introduction
to the program about the fight against "exploitation
and racial constructing".
Biag’s
last few lines of program notes may offer clues to the
gulf between his political thought and yearning and
the dancers’ expression of those things: "Through
these dances we carve our own self-determined space
and make visible the essence and history contained in
our bodies. Working with such themes as self-expression,
the concept of home, longing and displacement, we use
movement to navigate and give strength to our personal
narratives, hopes and memories…."
He
forgot to mention the fundamental social and group nature
of politics: how, before one can turn the spotlight
on oneself, one has to shine it on the group to which
one belongs and hopes to elevate.
This
isn’t to say that political dance has to be The
Red Detachment of Women— those dances are political
propaganda designed to bolster a ruling elite, whether
red or white. What political art must be is incendiary.
Without that, politics is mostly dreaming, and that,
unfortunately, was the sometimes lovely, sometimes sweet
state the program inhabited.
The
dance that give the program its name, Giving Strength
to this Fragile Tongue, a world premiere performed
and crafted by Aimee Lam and Lorevic Rivera with Biag,
was the single piece on the program that shook with
political and social import, even though it was an intimate
duet. Set to a sound collage by Jess Rowland of Gregorian
chant, Buddhist chant, radio voices and an all-vocal
Gamelan, the pair of dancers moved from provocative
stasis to dangerous, spiraling stalking, then frontal
confrontation. When they met, they ricocheted off one
another with a longing and barely-checked violence that
seemed channeled from larger, external forces.
For
instance, Lam moved with a cooly seductive and dangerously
aggression, took a pitcher and, as in a dare, drizzled
water on the floor. Rivera, with sinewy strength, slithered
into the puddle and slipped and rubbed himself until
he absorbed the moisture with loving and debased desire.
Later, the ritual was reinacted in telling inversion:
he drizzled water on her arm and pushed it along her
skin toward her shoulder as she sat in a chair with
her legs on a table in an attitude of cool contempt
that soon shattered.
Without
a hint of polemic these two dancers easily conjured
up, consciously or not, not only a generic battle between
the sexes but the division between angry women (women
are the ones who typically can find work in colonized
societies in domestic service), and needy men (men are
often rendered economically marginalized and dependent).
In the manner of contemporary German dance, Giving
Strength made us feel the poison of politics where
it corrodes generations to come—on the interpersonal
level.
The
rest of the evening never matched the physical succinctness
or clarity of Tongue, despite heartfelt performances
by the dancers. And what were the poems that inspired
them? Although that might have helped anchor the dances,
the real problem was much more fundamental; it was the
vocabulary, phrasing and apparent themes the choreographer
and dancers chose. What is in a transition? And why,
in a work seeking to link the personal and political,
should transition matter? What does it mean to fall?
What about to get up? When you wave, what or who is
coming or going and why do we care? What happens to
the nature of touch or space or physical well-being
in the world you are trying to capture?
What
we saw in When We Believe Again (2003), Near
Whisper and Travelogue were movements
that have become the language of the small subculture
which is the modern dance community in San Francisco:
hand swiping the chest, Cunninghamesque arabesques devolving
into loose turns, horizontal tucks and diagonal tilts
into another body, tender wrestling duets, and lots
of release work on the floor. The movements’ original
link to meaning seems altogether lost now, and so what
we see are the links to all the other dancers and dances
that have a similar vocabulary. The same is true for
costumes—here lots of slip dresses for the women
and men in white shirts, ties and slacks—or props
and texts—writing on surfaces, telling half-realized
stories. Unless these emblems of other choreographers
are used with white-hot intention, the incendiary is
about as far away as fire in a flood.
And
yet, there was a moment, almost accidenta,l of something
that might light a fire if he were to develop it. In
Biag's solo and premiere Near Whisper I caught
a momentary flash of his jutting leg tossed out in a
folk dancey, jiggish way, then stepping down and eliding
into a hip-flicking shimmy. Folk dance giving way to
social dance? Now that was interesting.
Photo:
Manuelito Biag.
copyright
Ann Murphy 2003
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