EARTHBOUND

A professor of mine once described modern architecture as flight, a lifting from the ground. I’ve always thought of dance this way, as the body’s movement against gravity, to remain aloft. So the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s performance of Echo Sense by Crystal Tile, at Fall for Dance, was slightly shocking. In this piece, performed before a blank black backdrop, eight young dancers in tailored trousers and vests skirmish, shifting back and forth across the stage. They don’t stand erect, stride, or strut. They are instead, continually, holding themselves just barely above the ground, crouching, hovering, crawling.

The narrative is evocative and, perhaps purposefully, vague. The pinstriped costumes and the stuttering strobe lighting call to mind Depression Era silent movies. The dancers’ physical aggression – they way they approach each other, lay hands on each other, tug each other, surround each other – reminded me of a rugby match or a street fight. At moments all eight coalesce into a single figure, rising up from the ground or cascading towards it, like a series of stop-motion photographs. They are earthbound, in a slow, perpetual fall. But the act isn’t passive. The dancers move quietly, with leopard-like ferocity. They remain sure-footed in a dark, difficult landscape.

November 03, 2017 by Nalina Moses

MOVING DAYS

MoMA has mounted a show about the great African American migration to the north called One Way Ticket. It takes painter Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series from 1941 as its centerpiece. This group of 64 small (about 12″ x 18″) oil paintings documents that movement in intimate vignettes with prose captions on wall texts below. The language is simple, which makes the facts all the more devastating. We read, “The trains were packed continually with migrants… Many of them left because of Southern conditions… They were very poor… Another cause was lynching… There had always been discrimination.”

Each small panel is smartly and economically composed, with strong graphic shapes rendered in flat, acrid hues. The sparse, controlled brushwork allows the white of the wood panel beneath to show through, giving the paintings a rough, unprecious feeling. But these paintings are not about painting. And they are not really about history either. They are about people, about the thousands of black Americans who left the rural south for the urban north between the wars, without money and work, searching for better lives.

Though simply rendered, the figures are never cartoonish. They’re ennobled by their actions, and move in formal, expressive ways. These are paintings that have the character of dance. Four men lifting bushels of cotton, seen in profile, have the solemnity and rhythmic clarity of figures on a Egyptian frieze. A boy peering over a table to watch his mother slice bread from a loaf looks like a symbol of need. Three men in handcuffs waiting deportation stand stiff with pride, like giants. We rarely see people from the front, or see their faces. Instead we see them from the side, from the back, or obscured by a newspaper, a fence, a hat, or a tree. They don’t offer themselves, or their sorrows, up for consideration. Instead they move on.

July 31, 2015 by Nalina Moses

A MORE PERFECT UNION

Surupa Sen and Biyajini Satpathy, principal dancers from the troupe Nrityagam, performed at the Temple of Dendur at the Met last Saturday at dusk. It was a romantic setting for a romantic dance form, Odissi. All five short pieces they performed showcased its signature baroque postures, that bend the body into dramatic, shifting “S” curves that ripple from the face through the torso to the fingers and feet. In the first dances the two women performed standing side by side, about six feet part, in unison but independently. They were majestic but formal.

The three other dances, when the dancers performed as characters who danced “at” one another, were electrifying, charged physically and mythologically. In the first of these they depicted male and female lovers who came together playfully, broke apart agonizingly, and then fell together again, finally, gingerly. The extraordinary final dance described a divided male-female spirit, with Surupa acting the masculine principle and Satpathy the feminine. Sometimes one woman danced standing close behind the other, spinning limbs in mirrored formation. Sometimes one woman squatted and turned to the side while the other hovered above her, balanced on one foot, turned in the opposite direction. Finally, standing side by side, elbows and knees bent, the two shuffled off the stage like a single eight-limbed two-faced creature.

At these moments the dancers seemed blissfully conjoined. Yet they performed throughout without touching; while twisted together they mantained a long, fingers-wide sliver of space between them. More than the Temple or the costumes, this was the afternoon’s outstanding spectacle: two bodies moving in passionate duet.

Photograph courtesy of Nrityagam.

January 21, 2015 by Nalina Moses

I’ve been reeling, happily, all day after seeing Rick Owens’ Womens Spring 2014 Paris runway show. He recruited American college step dancing teams to wear his clothes, and the young women do it while strutting, jumping, and stomping across the stage en masse like possessed tribal warriors. The media focused on Owen’s enlightened casting, since the women are, by industry standards, heavy and muscular, and almost all are African American. But what’s most exciting is how the presentation, called Vicious, deftly reimagines the runway show, turning a rarified formal presentation into a full-on kinetic assault.

Rather than stare beatifically into the mid-distance, as models do, these ladies grimace and bare their teeth. Many of them wear their hair naturally, with Afros stuttering dramatically a half-second behind their strong, compact frames. Rather than sauntering down a catwalk one-by-one, the dancers, each one dressed uniquely, appear in teams of twenty-four grouped by color: first black, then beige, and then white. So instead of a single ensemble appraised in stasis we have a storm of them at once, stretched across flaring limbs and torsos. The spectacle is especially thrilling in the final dance, when dancers bump against each other, swallow each other in a throbbing huddle, and then – each woman crouching to grab the hips of the woman before her – join in a long pulsating chain that turns and marches off stage like a giant prehistoric insect. There’s is a blunt, thundering beauty in this that doesn’t often find its way onto the runway.

Image courtesy of Rick Owens, 2013.

September 28, 2013 by Nalina Moses