In and Out of the System

“Delinquent”
Circo Zero
November 13, 2008
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA

by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano 2008

What an odd place the Bay Area is for watching dance. One night you sit in an alley, under a full moon, and watch LEVYdance’s quintet of exquisitely volatile dancers in work that is so luscious that you can’t take your eyes of it even though most of it uncomfortably slithers over the surface of the issues it raises. The following evening there is a group of “graduates” from the Juvenile Justice System brought together by Keith Hennessey’s Circo Zero in an awkward, at times bumbling work that scrapes at you like sandpaper on the soul.

“Delinquent” assembled dance, trapeze, acrobatics, spoken word and music into a loose string of collaboratively created episodes based on its performers’ special talents. One of them is an accomplished gymnast, one a budding poet, one a promising dancer. One a former gang member, one a high school junior, one a college senior. “Delinquent” was commissioned by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of the fifth Bay Area Now (BAN), its wide-ranging triennial series that purports to look at local artists’ preoccupations.

In more religious times, truth telling was left to prophets. Today it’s in the hand of artists, in this case nine of them between the age of 16 and 24. “Delinquent” is full of truths that we don’t to want to know about. What’s the percentage of African-Americans in jail relative to the rest of the population? The number of Americans incarcerated in comparison to other countries’ imprisonment rates? We all know—or suspect--the answers to these and some other two dozen troubling questions. They were printed on prison-color orange cards and passed around the audience before the show. What to do with that knowledge hangs over the hour-long work like a murky challenge. It would have been good to see some of those issues more clearly reiterated on stage.

Hennessey, who started his Bay Area career with the legendary Contraband, thinks deeply about the wounds in our society but he doesn’t go for band-aid approaches. He is also a man of the stage and often succeeds in distilling burning issues into captivating theater that shoots for the core but doesn’t hit you over the head. For the impressionistic “Delinquent” he chose to work with young performers. Together they created a work that is rough-hewn but buoyant in its blunt humanity. Cleary these gifted young people, whatever, their backgrounds, are no losers. The piece, however, could have used more stringent dramaturgy.

The setup is simple. The audience is seated in an L-formation around an open performance space. Along the sides of the stage, two black and white arrows point to the stark options young people have. It is either “Inmate” or “Classmate”. On top of the ceiling’s lighting grill squirms a spread-eagled male performer. He looks like a fly on a squatter.

The cabaret-like “Delinquent” spins through a series of vignettes tied together by a musical collage (by Matt Jones) and choral chanting from “Westside Story’s” ‘Officer Krupke.’ Performed in a circle, these rhythmic incantations seem to act as a bonding ritual before the performers split apart into individual presentations. Suspended in a cocoon-like trapeze, spoken word poet diminutive Constance Castillo starts by reciting a long litany of vital facts. “Half of us have B.A., half us have parents who are divorced, all of us have stolen and were never caught.” Later on Meghan Milam’s poem on the inequalities of life on 24th Street—a neighborhood of the very poor and the very wealthy—ends in a collective howl in mourning people recently lost due to violence. Tracy Piper, an impressive circus performer, folds herself--on trapeze, in a suspended aerial cage and in a Death costume—in so many ways that the body’s natural state disappears like the mental convolutions survival necessitate.

“Delinquent” deals with pervading fear as something that is about to crush you—a wall that tilts precariously, another that falls repeatedly with the dancer underneath barely escaping by split-second timing rolls. Dawon Davis describes his experience in jail as something to make you keep your eyes closed except that “when you open them it’s much harder.” Davis literally gets locked up as the other artists encase him in a box.
Davis is a lanky but highly energized Hip Hop dancer whose style sets up an intriguing contrast with the multi-lingual vocabulary of the show’s other African American dancer, Trae Greer. Greer seems to be all about creating space while Davis focus in what happens inside space. An indifferently danced episode with masked performers as hookers and their Johns, however, falls flat.

These young artists also need to learn that having a mike doesn’t excuse the mumbling of text. There are such skills as enunciation and projection. Hennessey himself is a first rate practitioner.

Photo of  “Delinquent” performers by Phyllis Christopher