Nejla Y. Yatkin Explores Mata Hari’s Life and Finds Universal Yearnings
DE/REconstructing Mata Hari," choreographed and danced by Nejla Y. Yatkin, had its world premiere at Dance Place, in Washington, D.C., November 2005. The evening-length dance is a tour de force--original in presentation and content, a multimedia blend of reality and abstraction that is cool and passionate, pensive and dramatic, nuanced and direct.
It's the first time I can remember--over half a century of dance-viewing and reading about dance--when a choreographer used personal experience, in this case as a woman of Turkish and Egyptian descent growing up in Germany and immigrating to the U.S., and intertwined it with a historical dancer's incredulous experience. Their commonality is being tall, unique-looking, outsiders, misperceived and misunderstood. Yet Yatkin captures much that is universal about the story.
The name Mata Hari evokes images of exoticism, eroticism, dance, international relations, feminism and a woman accused of being a spy who blew a kiss to her executioners. But who was she?
The creative process, Yatkin recalls, "was not as easy as I had imagined...I read a lot of books to find out about her story and the zeitgeist [the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate] of her time in 19th century Europe....what kind of music was composed then...how women were constrained and how dance helped them to be part of the liberation of women. To replicate Mata Hari's dance, Yatkin read her reviews in diverse newspapers in Vienna. But Mata Hari created her own dance.
"DE/REconstructing Mata Hari" begins with a projected image of a book. Its narrative text recurs throughout the performance to summarize Mata Hari's life in four chapters, which Yatkin enigmatically embodies onstage in eight dance solos. The dance, projected text and spoken monologue and Yatkin's make-believe interviews with Mata Hari dynamically interact with each other.
We see Yatkin's face lit by a flashlight as she speaks to the audience: "I came to the United State--hopeful. I came to dance. I walked into the world of freedom, the world where movement found its greatest expression. The world of Graham, Ailey, Cunningham, Limon, Marshall." Yatkin makes a signature gesture for each.
"I walked into the world of freedom and found it full of other people....something unlike what I had imagined. There were no shouts of hatred, I was not cursed. Well not often. There were no shouts of welcome either, well none that I would entertain"
"All of these lovers of freedom and movement, all wanting to know what box I fit, wanting to know, who, when and why I was. On the streets at first and later in conversation and even in print I was called by many things: Native American, Latin American, Exotic, Different, Egyptian. I was called Cher, Cleopatra and Nefertiti, OHH I heard that one a lot. (See "Nejla Y. Yatkin--The Nefertiti of Dance," Dancer, March, 2004.)
"One day on some street, in some part of America, somebody called me Mata Hari. On another day someone asked me if I was a spy like Mata Hari!! I wondered what did they see, what did they mean? So I went looking for Mata Hari."
Mata Hari was unique since her birth in 1876, in Holland. Named Margaretha Zelle (nicknamed M'greet), she stood out: the only girl in a family of four boys, thick black hair, black eyes and easily tanned olive complexion in a family and society of fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed folk. She was bright, dramatic and quick to pick up languages. Five-feet-ten inches tall, she towered over other females and the average Dutch man.
At thirteen her father went bankrupt and left the family. Two years later her mother died, and M'greet lived with various families. A beginning career as a kindergarten teacher ended in her being forced to leave the school in disgrace because of the proprietor's infatuation with her. A whirlwind of travel, marriage, husband's alcoholism, abuse, infidelity and abandon catalyzed her escape to Paris.
Paris was ripe for a creative, individualistic woman. This was the era of Albert Einstein revolutionizing our concepts of time and space, Debussy and Monet transforming music and painting, respectively. Women began to redefine their roles in society. Dancers Isadora Duncan, Maude Allan, Loie Fuller and Ruth St. Denis turned to ancient cultures to discover or reinvent themselves and to find freedom of speech, association and movement.
However, during World War I, the French secret police questioned Mata Hari's cross-border liaisons with German political and military figures. The French enlisted her as a spy and then suspected her of being a double agent. She was arrested, tried, convicted and executed.
Performing Chapter 1, "The Dream Victorian," to music by Claude Debussy, Yatkin's M'greet is dressed in a broad-brimmed hat, stiff corset, billowing brocade skirt casting a shadow on the photographic images of the European Belle Époque city scenes moving behind her. M'greet's removal of constricting dress symbolizes her desire to escape the typical Victorian woman's dull life.
Chapter 2, "Realization" to music by Omar Faruk Tekbileki, sees M'greet reinvent herself as an Indian temple dancer and take on the name Mata Hari. Backlit behind a white screen covering the stage and half the floor, Yatkin dances Mata Hari's identification with a Hindu goddess as only her arm snakes through a cut in the backdrop to create Indian gestures. Yatkin tells the audience:
"I did not know anyone in America at first, and I spent a lot of time by myself. I was given this freedom to re-create myself, to leave behind what other people expected me to be. . . .Who would I be, and what would others be to me? It wasn't like putting on a disguise, or concealing myself, more of a rediscovery, a process of becoming myself."
"In my quest to understand Mata Hari and her place in the world, I learned how others place her in their own. To feminists, she was a free woman when women were not free. To historians, she was a spy when nations were at war. To dancers, she was an early choreographer who drew on ancient myth. To call girls she was a pioneer in the art of undressing. To me, she does not fit in any box ."
In "Becoming" to music by Claude Chalhoub, "Mata Hari" appears from the backdrop curtain center. Initially the backdrop is her skirt--the persistent cloth out of which she creates herself. She backs into the extended backdrop as it billows about her. Freeing herself from the backdrop, she arises in belly dance attire and beautifully performs sizzling authentic moves.
Mata Hari was soon luring audiences in the thousands as she performed in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid and other European capitals. She also attracted a number of highly-placed, aristocratic lovers willing to reward her handsomely for the pleasure of her company.
In an imaginary interview Yatkin asks Mata Hari, "What do your dances mean?" She replies, "My dance, my art, is very simple--the most natural thing in the world actually. My dances are sacred and each gesture corresponds to a thought. The dance is a poem and each movement is one of its words. In my dancing, one forgets the woman in me (or, at least they can try)."
Chapter 3, "Behind the Scenes," is danced to music by Evelyn Glennie. Yatkin explains, "Later in her life, Mata Hari found herself with diminishing popularity, in need of employment....More and more she was asked to do things she had not imagined....Endlessly it continued, until the original vision was gone, and all that was left was a trail of questionable choices that took on a life of their own." On a darkened stage she dances with lights fastened to her hands and feet evoking career descent and identity confusion. She was accused of pros-titution and selling secrets. Facing WWI, all outsiders were viewed as potential traitors. Mata Hari belonged to no one. Yatkin says, "Once embraced for her uniqueness, she was now subject to ridicule and persecution for the very same trait."
Chapter 4 is "Slipping Away," also performed to Claude Chalhoub's music. In a short-skirt tutu and black tape across on her bare breasts, "Mata Hari" writhes in distress, filled with shame, fallen from grace.
In "Lamentation," to music by Jules Massenet, "Mata Hari" pulls cloth from the white stage backdrop, that extended onto and covered the floor, to ensconce herself, at times burka-like. Her movement creates shapes, evoking memories of Martha Graham whose lamentation was solely within a garment.
Yatkin asks Mata Hari if she would do it again. "Absolutely. Without question. I would take but a few seconds of stale air breathed by Mata Hari in this prison compared to an eternity by the shore breathing the stale air of the prison that you have to inhabit. No offense."
"The End of the Beginning" to Johan Sebastian Bach's music, spotlights Yatkin dancing herself in a life-affirming solo.
"I do not resemble Mata Hari . . . But searching for her, I found that we do have a connection... for she has returned to me something that I felt was lost, something I stayed away from growing up, away from part of my history. Mata Hari brought me back to it."
"Thus my story ends and begins, more complete for the journey. I only hope that in the final analysis, my path/my story carries some resonance, some echo of being and becoming. As someone once said: 'Some dance, some die, and some do both.'"
For further information about Nejla Y. Yatkin, see www.ny2dance.com.