Next Wave festival: Urban Tribe Dances
You can read more about André Lepecki and his poetics as a writer on the following link: http://www.sarma.be/nieuw/critics/lepecki.htm
CREDITS
Editor Sarma: Myriam Van Imschoot
Editor Portugal: Monica Guerreiro
Research in Lisbon: Jeroen Peeters
Coördination: Steven De Belder, Jeroen Peeters, Charlotte Vandevyver, Myriam Van Imschoot
Translator: Clive Thoms
Financial Support: Portuguese Institute for the Arts
Thank you to: André Lepecki for the contribution to this anthology, BLITZ for giving consent to republish the texts on www.sarma.be, Diana Teixeira (typiste)
1. (side one)
Brooklyn is shaking up New York with its Next Wave festival, organized by the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music. This is one of the city’s leading music and dance festivals, which places it amongst the most important events in the world, as is clear from a programme which concentrates on large-scale productions. In the year that the festival celebrates its tenth anniversary, the names of De Keersmaeker, Philip Glass, Bob Wilson, Mark Morris, Robert Lepage and others are a clear indication of the quality standards adhered to by the festival. In November, in the aptly named Majestic Theatre (other possible adjectives would be mythic or apocalyptic), I attended the New York première of Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams by the choreographer David Rousseve. Politics, loss, revolt – these are Rousseve’s key ideas. Here, if not in America then at least in this city, the mental framework needed to watch dance (or any other art form) involves a premise which is not necessarily present or necessarily applicable to an understanding and decoding of European dance: that the body is the prime political instrument and that gender, colour and sexual orientation is something that reaches beyond the private domain of the individual and which is experienced as a fact with inevitable ethical, moral and sometimes warlike consequences, from which we should not (and cannot) run away. (By the way, it’s only this that makes Madonna’s Sex comprehensible as an artistic project). We should therefore not treat lightly an assertion made by Rousseve to Qanda magazine: “Now, I consider myself a black gay choreographer; before, I was an African-American choreographer”. So his work speaks inevitably of the death which suddenly started to steal the loved ones of a generation which until recently experienced it as something that as a rule happened to older people. But he intelligently turns the metaphor on a different type of death, that of Creole and black cultural identities. This is a long piece, two and a half hours of dance-theatre, in which Rousseve and his Reality company revisit black memory, using the choreographer’s biography as a starting point, and where the music – from gospel live on stage, to seventies funk, Ray Charles, Public Enemy and a finale consisting of a colossal performance of B. J .Crosby’s Amazing Grace, in a single voice which got the audience at the Majestic on to its feet (and given that this was the final moment of the piece, it looked like a trick for getting applause) – creates a dramatic profundity which the author’s choreographic resources sometimes fail to match. Rousseve swings between an over-the-top taste for strong movement in a sort of MTV style, choreographed with great success, which is where he is at his best, and more serious or “artistic” sections in dubious taste, where he incomprehensibly draws on tacky “classical” elements to show that this is “real” choreography: he falls into the trap of trying to justify the dignity of his message/art by drawing on white petit-bourgeois taste. Ice-T does it much better.
2. P.S. 122 + Judson Church (the flipside)
The nice thing about New York is know that there is more to the arts scene than just festivals. All over town, in abandoned lofts, private apartments, in the street, in the parks, in staircases, in venues not always very suitable for the show, and every, every day, there is dance and performance of a more or less experimental, informal, OTT, radical nature, or whatever nature you like. Two cult venues are P.S. 122, where the contact-jams and pure movement scene gets together every Monday to improvise, and Judson Church, at the heart of the huge New York University campus, where everything started for American post-modern dance. At P.S. 122 I saw a stunning performance by Yvonne Meier. The title was elucidative: The Shining. Only twelve spectators at a time, lined up and separated from our friends. You file into the performance space one by one or two by two, depending on the mysterious will of a disembodied voice which shouted out our numbers in the queue. Horror movie music to set the scene. As soon as anyone stepped into the room everything went silent, followed by shrieks of fright. Sometimes, we recognized the shrieks as coming from our friends. I, of course, was last in line.
The experience inside oscillated between a ghost train and the Bastille dungeons on a bad day. A walk around in the dark, punctuated by apparitions of arms, legs, faces quickly lit up by torches. Orders whispered into your ear: “this way”, “quick”. You lose your sense of direction in a closed and low-ceilinged labyrinth made of cardboard boxes. At last we all found ourselves in a clearing. Here, by inconstant torch light and to the hellish music of John Zorn, the dancers constructed a choreography of hatred, violence and intense control, in which despair was never far away. It sometimes tipped over into “crazy-juvenile-paranoia-of-alienation”, which made for a few rather naff moments. The actual concept of making the dance inhabit a physically complex installation which is organically necessary to the life of the piece is a sign that something new is happening with the young American choreographers who are normally very radical in defending the primacy of pure movement. The fear was shared by all the members of the audience, but the free vodka at the end told that in fact the piece was something which was only complete with our presence.
At Judson Church, the programme included work by John Marinelli and Allyson Green. Marinelli presented two strongly theatrical pieces: one which was basically uninteresting, the other hilarious, mainly considering that most of the audience was made up of teachers or students from Movement Research, in that it demystified the parlance of movement classes: “contact with the ground”, “sharing the movement”, “the inner zero”, etc.
The high point of the evening was without doubt the two pieces by Allyson Green: a duet with José Navas, taken from her choreography Between (Songs of Unrest) and a brand new solo danced by Green. Both pieces offered great subtlety and dramatic control of each movement, each gesture, each look, which Green imprints on the body of her partner, in a game of gestured sequences and analogies, which in the duet creates a constant state of surprise. In both pieces, Green successfully creates an atmosphere which is carefully balanced between subtle languor and humour, where the music is a consistently discreet but sure-footed partner (Fred Klatz in the duet, Kodo in the solo). Two surprising pieces and a choreographer whose movement is focussed on creating a poetics of silence.