DV8 Physical Theatre
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA
November 13, 2009
by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano, 2009
“All politics is personal” may be a cliché but it is also true. Put a human face on an issue and you get people’s attention. Would we have paid as much heed to the thirteen people recently killed in Texas if the President hadn’t individualized them with a few deft strokes? statistics, histories and analysis can shine a light on the tangled and often tortured relationships between culture, religion and sexuality. But nothing can hit you in the gut the way a confrontation with their catastrophic affects on a particular individual does. Good theater, with its heightened perspective on life, can do this beautifully. I can’t think of a better demonstration--despite some shortcomings- than DV8 Physical Theatre’s totally involving look at global homophobia in their 2008 “To Be Straight with You.”
With input from eight exceptional dancers, choreographer Lloyd Newson created a tapestry of men—and a few women—who in one form or another have to confront their own sexuality in a world that does not acknowledge anything but binary forms of gender. Drawn on over eighty interviews with people from all over the world, who now live in the United Kingdom, “Straight” is also a great example of how variegated, though sometimes difficult to understand, the King’s English has become. Newson paints a tough and painful picture that is also full of determination, resilience and even a glimpse of humor.
In this country we may be familiar with Roman Catholic and Fundamentalists Christians’ beliefs in regard to homosexuality, or we have read about the schism that threatens the Episcopal Church. Newsom, however, culls his material from a global perspective, including the Islamic world. He cites Nelson Mandela as a leader who recognized that discrimination was wrong—in whatever shape it comes.
Early in “Straight” video artists Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler (MKA) show us a gorgeous image of the Earth: a beautifully shining globe floating in space Then the narrator begins to tear it apart as we learn of the extent of institutionalized homophobia. In Botswana, he tells us, being homosexual can get you 5-7 years of hard labor. Blood red replaces the continents’ beautiful greens and blues.
Sera Adetoun Akinbiyi remembering her lover’s rape morphed into her partner. She ended up crouched inside a cage-like structure with her attacker pacing behind her gulping from his beer bottle. Groupthink has rarely been more effectively portrayed than in a chair dance that grew bigger and bigger as other men joined the cowboy-like Hannes Langolf. Ankur Bahl’s jump-romping picked up speed and complexity as this young Muslim boy became increasingly panicky about having to confront his father who promptly beat him up. Later Bahl returned as the tortured married man who couldn’t help “dancing when he heard the music.”
Again and again the lament of being invisible, of not having a story, of not belonging returned. The remedy was always the same, “be a man,” “get yourself a good woman” or “it’s that white girl that did this to you.” In one scene the dancer desperately tried to “adjust” and ended up as a cartoon angel; another one slowly disappeared as a wave of blackness swallowed him up. Yet “Straight” has its moments of humor. When gays were called worse than animals, they donned horse masks for a frolicking game of cue cards.
While much of “Straight’s” attention was focused on the details of the gripping narratives, Newsom’s choreography placed them into an emotionally resonant context. The dances exuded a nervous sense of energy from, quite literally, always having to be “on your toes”. These people seemed to live on an unstable ground, with no center of gravity to hold them in place. The bodies were out of synch within themselves, with the limbs pulling in all directions. Rocking back and forth on their feet, shifting and sliding, mechanical walking— everything suggested anxiety and absences of repose.When a disk jockey, his image reflected in a sickly green mirror, spouted his anti-gay rhetoric, his frantic body language didn’t respond only to the music but to the poison that spilled out of him.
Ermira Goro’s super-fast stepping in place maked her look like a puppet. Later one she twirled across the stage at top speed while the narrator informed us that she was seventy-year sold and “just so very tired”. A male dancer on his way to work dodged and twisted and flinched as if under attack from an invisible enemy. I didn’t catch his narrative but this was a man who lived his life in a war zone.
