Review for The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn
Reggie Wilson & Andrea Ouamba / Fist & Heel Performance Group and Compagnie 1er Temps
April 3, 2010 at YBCA
Most collaborations I see are all about the love of working together. Artists share compliments and tributes with each other in a general lovefest. Dakar/Brooklyn was something much more complicated and beautiful. While it was obvious the two choreographers and the two companies worked well together – and had tremendous respect, and trust for each other – this work showed a more complicated view of collaboration.
The dances were full of conflict, frustration, and even violence. Imitation, correction, disjunction, domination, and even lynching figured into the piece – even as beautiy, grace, lyricism, and intimate collaboration also threaded through the series of dances. Witness the direct and muscular challenges between dancers of all sizes, the almost fighting that happened at some points – and at the same time, other moments in which couples and trios of dancers climbed, held, swung, and morphed their bodies together into singular creatures.
Given that these artists are portraying not only their own collaboration, but a complicated history of continental African and disaporic (especially American) African people. This tone was apparent from the beginning dance, a single dancer looking back and trying to imitate a series of singles and couples dancing together. Her own movements were more graceful in comparison with the crispness of those she imitated. Yet she showed her frustration in trying to adapt her own style and body in imitation of the others.
This show was not beautiful in the traditional sense, but more beautiful in the variety of bodies, styles, and combinations. The water bottles glistened magically in a rather obscure reference to…the Mississippi and Congo Rivers, concerns about potable water, the waves and floods of influence, or the work of building up and tearing down?
The wide-open set, spare and harshly lit to the point that flying sweat and dust were visibly part of the mix, added to this feeling of a spacious ground for the complicated nature of collaboration. Reggie Wilson’s role as a sort of fatherly narrator and caretaker added an interesting and welcome addition to highlight the often-hidden role of the choreographer. Andreya Ouamba’s role was made more subtle, but no less powerful, by not identifying himself until near the end, when he walked among the sprawled bodies of the dancers, speaking in another language – and dance the final, almost-awkward duet with Mr. Wilson.
As someone unfamiliar with the language of dance, as well as possessing little knowledge about the African diaspora, I found the piece to be uncomfortable in a good way. Rather than a feel-good back-to-Africa piece, this one portrayed how histories of separation, violence, romanticism, paternalism, slavery, and co-optation leave a legacy on bodies and movement. One of the poignant references throughout all the pieces portrayed dancers lynching each other and lynching themselves. Toward the end, dancers donned gauzy costumes that seemed to reference the American Southern gentry, a surprisingly emotional reference to the cultural histories that hang around all of us – sometimes hampering movement and sometimes providing a strange enhancement to the performance.
On the evening I was there, the audience seemed to not know what to do with the performance. It was certainly uncomfortable for me as a progressive white person to see the embodied truths portrayed directly in front of my eyes – the effects of history and culture on bodies, and the difficulties as well as possibilities inherent in partnership. And perhaps more difficult – the imperfect relations between the many peoples in Africa and their disasporic kin.
Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction by Luis Alberto Urrea
