I’ve been passing out programs at Performing Diaspora at CounterPULSE the past couple of weekends, and I’ve been looking at people’s faces as they walk into the theater space – they enter a little distracted, shuffling up into the risers with a mild, unquestioning acceptance. And they leave transformed.
It sounds dramatic: that people’s experience of the performance shows on their faces. But it’s been one of my tasks as an intern to look people in the eye and listen to their words – we’ve been gathering interviews for our blog -- and with really very few exceptions, something about the work they’re seeing takes them into their own head. Makes them think. Makes them stumble for the words. With something so visual, so visceral, it makes sense that they would eventually resort to well-worn words of admiration or appreciation, and that’s what I usually get in the interviews. But as I’ve said: I’ve been looking at their faces. And I’ve seen them change over the course of two hours.
I’ve changed too, over the course of these performances. As of last night, after seeing Colette Eloi’s “Politics of Poverty” clash grief and celebration, I immediately began to negotiate my experience of that work with Adia Whitaker’s “Ampey!” from the weekend before. It could be too easy to compare these pieces – each dance looks at poverty and African American identity with a hard eye, skillfully and steadily jumping between grief and joy without a lot of warning. The movement required a lot from the dancers, and the experience of the movement required a lot from the audience. Watching, you’re as breathless as the performers, but for entirely different reasons. But the pieces are SO different that it almost seems strange to compare them. Colette inflicts wounds and then finds a way to heal them. Adia still isn’t sure where to look for healing, but she has a sense that before she can heal herself, or the audience or the dancers and the history that she explores, she has to sit with that grief. Stay awhile.
I spoke with Adia a couple of weeks ago, and she talked a lot about myth: what she had imagined Africa to be, and what it really was, once she finally visited. This is what she had to say about her experience of making the piece.
As much as Adia’s work represents a journey outside of herself in order to find the message she’s trying to communicate, Colette’s piece believes in sharing whatever her dancers already hold inside (Call it identity, or call it history. She doesn’t even bother with the words, and instead goes straight for the movement, the muscle memory). I wish I knew the name of Colette’s soloist – the woman who first enters the stage contorted and refuses to offer herself relief from the knocking of her knees, the twisting of her hands and face. When we see her again, she is buoyed by the strong, clear voice of an onstage accompanist. “Spirit, adorned by body,” the accompanist sings, repeating. It’s a call, and this dancer’s movement, a response. Whatever this dancer carried inside of her, her body was a nearly perfect vessel for carrying it outside of herself, and into the audience. Her spirit, and her skill, filled the room. The audience, all of us, sat silent, absorbing, absorbed.
