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Last month I had to write a book review on Friedrich Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter for a graduate class I'm taking called Literature, Media and Art of the 1890s taught by Dr. Nick Frankel. Kittler nearly killed me to read, but he sure did inspire me to write. Click here for a PDF file of the review, in which I quoted sentences as poetry, free-associated, and generally ran all over the page, in homage to the author himself.
Back in February I saw the Urban Bush Women and the men of Compagnie Jant-Bi perform together at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. I was to have reviewed the show for Ballet-Dance Magazine, but life intervened and prevented my timely writing. So here I am in April with the show still on my mind, and some thoughts to offer from my notes and memories—appropriately, maybe, for a show titled Les éscailles de la mémoire (The scales of memory), choreographed by Germaine Acogny and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in collaboration with the dancers.
Growing side-light carves through a varied group of men and women ranged across the back of the stage. Four dancers slowly tread forward, drop to their knees, and slowly roll up again. The sound of water fills the hall, and the group’s movement feels like the rhythm of small waves on a lake shore. They begin to speak, giving their names and family history.
From this opening invocation, time slips backward and pulls us with it into the collective memories, the record inscribed in the bodies and psyche of a people. They breathe, rock, stamp, and shudder. They flirt, mourn, rage and laugh.
From my notes, almost-poems emerge:
Energy disperses and re-forms
sound of dog barking—beat dissolves
then burst—
all pull shirts over faces
red.
Beni – arms so fast
at moments you can’t see them.
One light from above
pulse in torso all
form into line, process, shaking
exit.
Face into circle, shouts
cries, stamps in rhythm, claps
calling power in to center
slowly spin off one at a time
volume down to whisper—
man enters carrying rock.
Rock. Crouch facing back,
ripple of head. Gentle singing.
Rock his only land?
Deep into the work, a bench appears onstage. Nore Chipaumire in white stands on it and peels one garment at a time off her shoulder, pries open her mouth, clutches her breast, her crotch, sparks movement in the others grouped around the stage—four dancers upstage move slowly, pulling at their faces. That plain bench—it is the auction block, it is the platform under a lynching tree, a fulcrum for pain and rage, and for telling. The weight of memory should splinter it; instead it weighs the shoulders of four who carry it. It may shape-shift but it does not disappear.
But this section is part of a longer story, a river of history that absorbs, reflects and refracts, breaks up on rocks and surges forward. Men and women laughing together, dancing together, competing, applauding, and breathing together. Such skilled and powerful performers, such tensile strength in dance making and stagecraft, all combine in a work that seems less crafted than plucked whole from the current of the world and made visible for a while. I am grateful.
I spent a couple of days in Cholula, Mexico at the Performatica Festival put together by friend Ray Schwartz. Two weeks of dancing--classes, lectures, performances. All sorts of artists, complete absence of stratification. Experienced and new, students and teachers, all mingled together and learning from each other. Cholula (right next to Puebla), is the oldest continually inhabited city in North America. Aztec pyramids. Spanish colonial architecture. A live volcano across the way, smoking.
Sunday night after arrival, spicy sopa azteca in a bar on the Camino Real, watching the first rainfall since October.
On Monday morning a yoga class woke up every part of my wooden, desk-bound body. Walking past the pyramid with the church on top, we declined various refreshments for sale by street vendors, including fried crickets. In the Mercado we ate grand, cheesy quesadillas on fresh blue corn tortillas, mine with squash blossoms. I regret not speaking Spanish--it feels like something one ought to have just osmosed by now. That night I performed a witchy solo by GZDC associate Damion Bond in a group showing in an old theater in downtown Puebla. Dust and light.
Tuesday night a video showing, and then a party in the courtyard of a tiny restaurant, under an orange tree, small ladies wielding vast culinary powers. Later, a man juggling against the one light, and then eight women wildly dancing.