Creative Sparks Across Cultures
Matching the rich glowing colors of the Washington metropolitan area's fall foliage came radiant companies from other countries offering a rich palette of experiences.
From Canada:
At the old DC convention center, Cirque du Soleil presented awe-inspiring, breath-taking and humorous vignettes in its show "Corteo." This means cortege in Italian. "Corteo" portrays a joyous procession, a festive parade, imagined by a clown. In a mysterious space between heaven and earth, the clown pictures his own funeral taking place in a carnival atmosphere, watched over by quietly benevolent angels flying through the heavens and at times swooping earthward. Juxtaposing the large with the small, the ridiculous with the tragic, and the magic of perfection with the charm of imperfection, the show highlights the strength and fragility of the clown, as well as his wisdom and kindness, to illustrate the portion of humanity that is within each of us. The music, by turn lyrical and playful, sumptuous design, rich fabrics in deep colors and powder-blue helium balloons move "Corteo" through a timeless celebration in which illusion teases reality.
Among the acts, whimsical, child-like acrobats bounce on beds into aerial cascades, even landing on the headboard with one foot. The cast includes a couple and two dwarfs who perform beautiful duets with some acrobatic movements. "Pantomime horses" dance about. Four women scantily clad in silk dangle and dance from three immense chandeliers. A man and woman enchantingly and passionately display dance-like moves as they manipulate aerial straps with beauty and style blending contortionism, gymnastics and aerial dance.
Daniele Finzi Pasca created and directed the show which includes the talents of 14 different creators. The cast brings together over 55 artists from 16 different countries: Argentina, Armenia, Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Italy, Israel, Kenya, Romania, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom, United States and Ukraine.
The Cirque du Soleil raises the question of what is dance as we see mime, modern dance, gymnastic, acrobatic and aerial dance. A company spokesperson explained, "We actually don't use a choreographer on "Corteo," since this show is more athletic and acrobatic based, but we do hire contract choreographers to supplement movements. We have a dance captain amongst our artists so she can guide others. Also, our artistic coordinator has a strong dance background."
From Mexico:
The Tania Pérez-Salas Compañia de Danza, a leading exponent of contemporary Mexican dance, came to George Mason University Center for the Arts in Fairfax, Virginia. Award winner Pérez-Salas was born in Mexico City and began dancing when she was eight years old. The Compañia de Danza she founded in 1994 presented two stunning, visual and highly emotive dances for her ten-person troupe. Her distinct vision is nourished by personal experience and literature, movies, visual arts, and philosophy.
"Anabiosis," set to music by David Seeman, George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach that includes mystical chants, juxtaposes the turmoil and anxiety of lust with the healing force of spiritual love. Mixing the literary world with the visual world of dance, Pérez -Salas based the dance on the book The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism by the celebrated Mexican writer Octavio Paz. The dancers move energetically with rapid percussive effort, punctuated by high-voltage surprises in pools of light in a vast dark space. At one point in the dance, projected above the stage, one above the other, are four seated nude women with their backsides to the audience. Later a couple appears seated in serene embrace.
The evening concluded with the spectacular "The Waters of Forgetfulness," inspired by another literary work, Ivan Illich's essay H2O: The Waters of Forgetfulness. According to Pérez-Salas, "this work reflects the symbolic role water plays in human history, as a vital, life-giving force of the soul and spiritual life of humanity." Enmeshed in lovely light-on-water effects and music by Arvo Pärt and M. Danna y Stoa, the dancers splash arcs of water as they move and occasionally fling their hair in a large, shallow 500 gallon pool of water on stage. At the end, about a 12 foot wide wall of rain falls upon the performers.
From France, Africa, Brazil, Turkey:
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts presented "Saint Genet l'Africain," a radical reinvention of The Maids written by Frenchman Jean Genet. His story is about two servants and their wealthy mistress. However, in this danced theater-of-the-absurd play, the maids became male dancers in a prison, and the matron is a male prison guard.
The dance unfolds with subtle butoh-like movements and wilder Afro-Brazilian movements by powerfully built men who are still or whose muscles ripple and vibrate. French West African dancer Koffi Kôkô, a priest in the animist cults of Benin who works as a contemporary dance choreographer in Paris, and Brazilian dancer Ismael Ivo, exposed to Alvin Ailey and expressive dance and dance-theater in Germany, join Turkish dancer/choreographer Ziya Azazi, a master of the whirling dervish tradition, under Japanese director Yoshi Oida, as they all draw upon their native dances.
Kôkô and Ivo portray prison inmates who act out their deepest fantasies in separate cells. Under the watchful eye of an eccentric warden, played by Azazi, their stylized game of dominance and submission soon turns deadly. A longtime collaborator with experimental theater genius Peter Brook, Oida draws upon tribal rituals and Asian aesthetics--also found in Martha Graham's dance-making--to explore concepts of eroticism and confinement.
There is stark symbolic daily repetition of the same words, the same gestures, the same meticulous preparations all toward the same trance-inducing revelation brought by pain and sacrifice. The fluctuations of mood, from delight to revulsion to horror, are accentuated by Brazilian artist João de Bruço, who performs his entrancing, percussive score onstage. At times perhaps too slow, the performance is intense and gripping.
From Ivory Coast, Africa:
Compagnie TchéTché performed "Dimi" at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Béatrice Kombé founded the company in 1997 to "show that woman is not the weaker gender." In the Bété language, tché tché means "eagle," a bird whose power the female troupe embodies to assert its vision of womanhood.
Four women, including the choreographer Kombé, all from the Ivory Coast plus a flutist from Mali and composer-keyboardist from Ivory Coast, presented the evening-length "Dimi." This translates as pain or sorrow and is about the social injustice, repressive morality and enduring patriarchal culture faced by women in Africa. The troupe probes their inner conflicts, reflection, caring, pain, anguish, possession and satisfaction.
As they endeavor to empty their bodies of suffering by outbursts of frenetic movement, women tremble and leap into each other's embrace and sooth each other. They break away and return. Slow deliberate walks -- like the tedium of much of life -- and arresting stillness, suddenly are sharply punctuated by staccato assertive movements with angular rapid jumps and somersaults. The dancers at times create an intensely physical spectacle of African and modern dance movements that celebrate female solidarity.