For the 20th incarnation of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival programming director Nicky Paraiso reminded us of the importance of experimental theater in times of political turmoil. Something tells me if he could, Paraiso would remind everyone of this. Having had to defend my belief in dance’s value, in the value of movement as not only a critical lens but a political tool, it’s energizing to know that for all that’s wrong with the world, La MaMa is still doing right; calling on artists and audience to keep making and supporting experimental work —- “we’ll need it” Paraiso tells us. As I ascend the stairs to the The Club theater, I think to myself, “we really do”….
Principal Dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and NYU Dance MFA candidate Xin Ying’s Paper Dragon: Five Elements Matrix came first— a meditation on energetic transmissions— a piece concerned with change and reconciliation— Paper Dragon is also “ a new ritualistic form” for all those who have been uprooted from where their traditional roots are cultivated.
The piece, choreographed and performed by Xin, is in collaboration with Eng Kian Ooi, Candice Wu, and Bábara Moreira da Silva. The dancers enter the space, occupying the corners of a square. They stand facing the center as da Silva sings out in variable cadences “I’m on my way” —– Xin counts down from 10. The dancers take sure-footed steps towards the center until they are nearly a single, condensed point.
That there are four dancers and not five strikes me as significant. I imagine that each dancer embodies one of the five elements— their slow approach to the center representative of an impending transformation. Do we imagine the fifth un-embodied element as being in wait? Wuxing, a Chinese philosophical concept dating back to the second or first century BCE, is used to explain various phenomena ranging from bodily functions, to cosmic cycles, political regimes, and herbal properties. The central belief of wuxing is that the five-elements-matrix, earth, fire, water, metal, air, can explain most earthly/cosmic phenomena in terms of cyclic destruction and creation.
Informed by the five-elements-matrix, exploring themes of generative destruction, Paper Dragon bounces between structural pattern-play and intuited abandonment. The piece is at once self-serious and playful, joyous and sorrowful– tonal differences manifesting as many ‘disparate pieces’ structured, somehow, into one.
A structured, self-contained group section is bookmarked by Xin’s electric, dancerly solo— I am struck by the strength and simultaneous fluidity of her movement. I am equally impressed by her commitment to ‘going there’, her eyebrows furrowed in effort, for it being so intimate a space.
Moments later, I am disarmed by Xin’s embodiment of her experience of joy— she cavorts about, laughing-losing herself, as the audience is instructed to rip up colorful construction paper, her dancerly prowess is transmuted into casual joy. We toss it up into the air, and suddenly, delight with Xin in her imitation of Lunar New Year fanfare, which closes the piece on a much more pedestrian note.
In the context of Paper Dragon, wuxing provides the container through which to (re)think ritual ^shift5986 . The mandarin word for “ritual” is “yí shì” which translates to ‘ceremony’, or more specifically:
Rituals rely on regularity— on rules and limitations— for meaning. In ritual lies, also, a crucible of belonging; in saying yes to a “ritual formula”, one is also saying yes to and affirming the history that spawned it. As we imagine the five elements generating/destroying each other in perpetuity, we can imagine ritual practices vibrating/morphing in time with the cumulative histories that inform them.
For Xin, the task at hand was to create a new ritualistic form. In Paper Dragon we read a strong connection to and reverence for Chinese folk tradition. We also see a movement quality informed by her extensive Graham training. As a choreographic-conceptual container, the five-elements-matrix provides room for play, reconciliation, uncertainty, spontaneity— for making unlikely and generative connections —— for being destructive and powerful, and perhaps most importantly, for maintaining a sense of constancy.
Peruvian movement artist and Hunter MFA candidate Maria Angela (Mar) Talavera-Tejeda’s Por Debajo de la Rodilla (“Below the Knee”) came next. An immersive solo, Por Debajo de la Rodilla is part of an ongoing choreographic exploration of matrilineal inheritance and emotional memory– the latest iteration of which, Doves Don’t Fly at Night, premiered at Triskelion Arts this past March.
Talavera-Tejeda enters the space as if in a trance. She walks on relevé, stepping in time to the melodic pulse of an electronic score. She pulls at her long blonde braid seemingly to tether to her —- how, I’m not sure. She holds her hair tight like a rope; walks her hands up and down the braid like she is guiding her own descent into the depths of matrilineal wisdom. She is seen trembling, lurching, contracting, and pulsating. I pay specific attention to her reliance on subtlety and repetition to evoke a sense of divine-possession. Talavera-Tejeda grapples with/ questions ancestral concern for religious salvation—- interrogates her learned/inherited behaviors, and to what extent these subconscious transmissions inform her present. I feel grateful to have seen this work’s evolution from Doves Don’t Fly a Night— a more fleshed-out articulation of these massive topics. The physical conveyal of ‘the desire for salvation’ or ‘guilty fervor’ belongs in an exhaustive, full-length work where dancers drip sweat, and are spent beyond measure.
An MFA showing— highlighting various artists and themes in succession— poses a specific challenge to viewer and performer alike. The performer must have conviction in the mood of their piece, must commit themselves at once, and wholly, to the subject of their work. As a viewer I am tasked with forgetting (or learning how to hold) Talavera-Tejeda’s moments before descent into a serpentine-trance state, while turning my attention to marion Spencer’s SYMPHONY.
The third piece, SYMPHONY, was choreographed and performed by marion spencer, a mulit-disciplinary artist whose works explore, among many things, the politics of embodiment, intuitive wisdom, and personal/shared lineages. SYMPHONY is an investigative look into spencer’s own archive. Here she asks what and why we hold onto, particularly in a world of imminent climate catastrophe. The child of archaeologists, spencer’s practice is rooted in excavation— interrogating “the personal, the systemic, the unknown, the radical, the cellular and the beautiful.” The programme notes reference Octavia Butler as well as Elizabeth Kolbert and Daniel Sherrell. “In a time of extinction,” she asks: what can we learn from “ancient, non-human teachers that center collectivity, cooperation and curiosity?”
I wanted so badly to write this piece off as some trite response to climate change—- instead SYMPHONY emerged as a refreshingly novel meditation on the critical climate juncture at which we’ve arrived.
SYMPHONY is a slow burn. The piece begins with a premonition; spencer’s recorded voice, calls out “Not safe at home anymore”… spencer climbs an industrial ladder, which she laters carries on her back a la Pina Bausch’s Como el musguito en la piedra. Seashells and polaroids spiral out around the ladder—- the objects scatter across the floor as spencer pulls a trash bag out from underneath them. The lights cut, and for a moment all we hear is an unhurried, persistent rustling. A trash bag worm (spencer) writhes across the floor, deliberate and slow.
This section felt mundane in the way that trash is mundane. In retrospect I recognize this aspect of the piece (its mundanity) as accounting for its novelty. The effect was such that, as she writhed across the floor for what seemed like an impossible stretch of time, a deep immobilizing quietude expanded in my chest, and drew me into her world.
While watching this is what I noted:
gestational
How far into the void?
Calculated lethargy
death, temporality
laborious
Suddenly aquatic and in this way hopeful Detritus
Sparse aural landscape — lended a boring (vast nothingness) quality to the piece
onslaught
“A moody encapsulation of more so than a commentary on…”
At last, a seed of hope: spencer holds out an industrial flashlight, shines it slowly along the back wall onto which is projected an aquatic bubbling blue. She is stark naked. I marvel at nakedness– how it stuns me; I marvel at myself for being stunned—- her nudity is suddenly commonplace. SYMPHONY transforms into something prelapsarian. It is without shame, without commentary, calling to mind the amoebic beginnings of a cosmic do-over.
I felt enlivened by the piece, almost as a consequence of its persistence. A meditation on hopelessness, on a vast and stupid nothingness— inside of which a loss too massive to name swirls around and waits to be claimed. Above all else, SYMPHONY was rewarding.
It’s Life, she seems to say, but not as we know it. It’s the hope of a different world (perhaps one we are not a part of). spencer’s piece, in line with Paraiso’s curatorial aims, reaffirmed me of dance’s necessity as a critical response to the world around us—- and how refreshing, to not feel an anxious desperation to defend the value of something.
The fourth and final piece, Nearly, Barely, Just, was performed and choreographed by Hunter MFA candidate Francesca Dominguez. Her artistic journey, writes the programme, is “marked by a deep engagement with Countertechnique, having trained extensively with its founder, Anouk van Dijk.” A quick deep dive into Countertechnique reveals a concern for presence, with an emphasis on process or dancer experience over audience reception. This ideological concern bled into Dominguez’s Nearly, Barely, Just, as the choreographic exploration of “the tension between compulsion and control,” and “where the lines blur between impulse and agency.” Having failed to read the programme notes before the piece began, I waited anxiously for orientation to emerge: midway through the piece I wrote down: “Who wills it?” Dominguez’s gaze focused outward as her body, nimble and sure of itself, extended, reached, and reacted without hesitation. From a choreographic perspective, Dominguez interrogates a thoroughly-traversed landscape— elevating, as she does, emotive-self-interrogative components over structural concerns. At one point, Dominguez calls out:
“Does anyone have any opinions to share, on anything at all?” And later: “Does anyone have any feedback on how I am doing?”
In an interview with Van Djik, they state the goal of Countertechnique is, “for the dancer to establish a quality of movement that is so sincere that both the dancer and the viewer experience it as if it was really created in that moment and can never be repeated in that way ever again,” Van Djik continues: “The person is not busy with the audience’s perception of him- or herself, the person is in the process of ‘doing’. In the doing, all the layers of putting up appearances disappear.” In this context, Dominguez’s concern for audience perception complicates her easy movement. That said, I don’t feel that Dominguez is unsure of what will happen, e.g. that she is so present in the movement as for it to be unrepeatable. I am curious to learn more about Dominguez’s creative process, and to what extent her concern with impulse/agency interacts with a technique that stems outward from ‘total presence’– or rather to what extent that is her aim.
I leave the Ellen Stewart Theater feeling illuminated to and excited by the function of MFA programs: providing the resources, mentorship, and space for dancers to explore/research their choreographic-intellectual interests to their hearts’ content. In a choreographic landscape defined by a ‘studio rental allotments’, these pedagogical environments provide a respite from the unfair market value placed upon the art. I am reminded that research is imperative to dance: how the choreographic process is informed by one’s access to resources, time, and mentorship. These are essential tools, not privileged add-ons.
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