Attention dance-friendly folks of Blogtown (I know there’s at least two of you out there): the Dance+ Festival resumes this week with five new performances, with final shows tonight and tomorrow. If you still don’t have weekend plans, consider this. I’ve gone to the Dance+ Festival every year —it started three years ago—and this year has been my favorite. The performances are still a mixed bag, with some head-scratching stuff, but in general this year they seem more sophisticated, less heavy-handed, and they’re questioning ideas about dance in different ways (see: last week’s piece by Todd Barton and artist/animator Paul Clay).
This week I really enjoyed Dylan Wilbur and Zahra Banzi’s performance “Veil,” which involves a screen that loops a video of the silhouette of Banzi’s dancing. She dances behind it for a while, then steps out in front of it, and does a duet with her silhouette. It’s very Peter-Pan like; the dance with the screen reminds me a lot of a piece by the Seattle company zoe | juniper, called “A Crack in Everything,” if anyone was lucky enough to see that at the TBA Festival in 2011—they use a loop on the screen to get a similar disconcerting, doubling effect.
- Jim Lykins
- Zahra Banzi makes like Peter Pan.
I had a harder time last night with “before the dawn,” which is a Butoh piece—a dance form from Japan— but here it is choreographed by Meshi Chavez danced by a very white male and female, which was well done technically, but I’ve always had a hard time watching people outside of the culture doing a Butoh performance. It’s a form so rooted in its culture—e.g. the horrors of the atomic bomb and post-war Japan—I personally can’t understand someone outside of that culture adopting it and claiming it entirely. I don’t know what you’re adding to the conversation of that dance form, and it’s not something rooted in your native culture; I don’t get it, and it comes across as affectatious to me. I’m sure others have different opinions.
The show closes with “Radiation City,” by radical child and Kara Girod Schuster. It combines video, and humor, and… filibustering, actually. Basically it’s a duet (between Schuster and Alexander Dones) about love—surprise. But the humor in it takes it to unexpected places. The program quotes Kevin Sampsell’s book This Is Between Us. The movement is really playful, and feels reminiscent of a lot of Bodyvox performances (who Shuster has danced with); the costuming is vest and tie for Dones and cocktail dress for Schuster. The only thing that I was a bit confused by was the prop choices, part of which is a waist-high, makeshift white house, that has the words “TAKE ME HOME” scrawled across it, which kind of looks like bloody lettering? Like, dare I say, something from a Manson murder site? This bewildering aspect aside, I enjoyed this piece a lot.
The remainder of shows are tonight and tomorrow, 8pm. Last night’s show featured complimentary popsicles, so, cross your fingers for those, and get your tickets here.
I long for the day in the not-too-distant future when mentioning ones’ race is as passe’ as mentioning ones’ sexuality now.
Butoh is an adaptive contemporary form rooted in post WW2 Japan but practiced by dancers all over the world. The writer here didn’t want to take the time to talk about what they saw or felt in this piece and decided to air their confusing by pulling the “it’s appropriation” card. If you’re not going to do your research, at least talk to us about what actually happened instead of cop out with some weak critique.
@Kaj-anne Pepper that’s a fair response. I definitely brushed over Butoh, and the performance in particular (though, yes, I’m aware that it’s performed all over the world). It was mostly the score that had me confused. The fact that we were listening to (what sounded like) gunfire, explosions, sounds of drones, paired with these drawn-out faces of agony, plus Joe McLaughlin lying on the floor at the end of the performance, in defeat/death? It really reminded me of its origins, as a response Japan had to the post-war environment, and it made me pull the “appropriation” card. Anyways, it’s a good conversation to have, glad you commented
Thank you for speaking up Pepper! Jeanna, I found what you wrote so utterly racist and uneducated. It seems to me that this has nothing to do with the paper you write for. It has to do with your own idea, and ideals about what races should or should not be involved in what cultures. Really. I love that you said technically the work was good, but that you just couldn’t get over the fact that two white people were doing work that only Japanese should do, and oh my gosh it was created by a Latino and had a Filipino musician! Who could possibly, get involved in someone else’s culture? If that was true, we all should stop speaking english and go back to our mother tongue, we should stop attending yoga, of course unless you are East Indian. No one should ever get involved in African dance except African people, or any thing outside of our own race. Shall we move to separate drinking fountains again? Or is that just to much? If you had done your research you would have seen that I didn’t just wake up one day and say hey I think I’ll steal someone else’s culture. I have studied for years with Master teacher of the work, who If you need it, have given me their blessing. I suggest you take your racist remarks and think long and hard about them.
@Meshi Chavez, I’m sorry this article offended you. I certainly didn’t mean any of this to be a racist attack. What I meant to address specifically (and yea, failed to articulate succinctly) was a conversation about cultural appropriation within genuine artistic expression. (My inquiries about this are similar to the objection of white folks playing really traditional blues music—which is a historied and heated conversation, see: http://www.bluesworld.com/WHITEBLUES.html
Maybe this is an outdated conversation in 2014? Not sure. That’s a good thing to talk about.) I would’ve liked to have a conversation about how to go about understanding an art form which is so strongly rooted in another country’s experience. And particularly in creating a piece—which at least seems to reference that particular (WWII, atomic bomb) experience so strongly—when you’re coming at it from a different vanish point. I agree I could have taken more care in writing this piece and articulating this point
How interesting…the idea that one culture might have a corner on the market of war, grief and destruction of everything we know. War seems to be integral to the human condition, and as dance attempts to convey what it is to be human, then no surprise that a whole genre emerged from WW2. I dont know much at all about Butoh, but what I saw in Joe, Theresa and Roland’s performance was entry into that unfathomable place we land when life has its way with us. Except its not landing–whether through grief or glory life becomes new and unexplored. I saw a warrior for peace, outside of time and place; the milky way spinning on it’s axis showing me how big is big and the mote that I am. Relevant.
Its cool to see these professed dance aficionados get the practice of reviewing as wrong as they claim Jenna Lechner was about their precious white people can do anything and be any culture i’m every woman dance. It’s almost as if they didn’t really consider the effort that goes into it and just thought about their own experience.