“Really Real”
Wally Cardona/WC4+
BAM Harvey Theater
Brooklyn, NY
November 20, 2009
by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2009 by Leigh Witchel
It’s exciting when choreographers try to make dances that are more than just dances, but are about ideas. Wally Cardona’s “Really Real” tried to take Søren Kierkegaard’s life and ideas as a springboard for an evening that wrestled with his concepts about the relationship of the self to others. The results were mixed.
The performance, 75 long minutes without an intermission, was in two parts. The first, “He led a somewhat uneventful life,” involved Cardona and a crowd of extras, and was to a text about Kierkegaard by Cardona. As Cardona moved among the assembled and posed crowd, a recorded narration played fragmented facts about Kierkegaard. Half-poignantly, half-irritatingly, the text was read by untrained youngsters with the awkward spontaneity of Haggadah readings at the Seder table.
The second section, “Repetition” was performed by three men and three women with occasional incursions of a crowd, this time the singers of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who also performed the ghostly score by Phil Kline. Fragments and hints mentioned (Kierkegaard’s relation to his family, his broken engagement) in the first section were like clues in an acrostic puzzle to the dances of the second.
“Repetition” had long, arid sections – first a female duet, then a male trio. The trio had sudden flashes of violent movement; Stuart Singer seemingly pleading to the heavens and then Francis A. Stansky slamming his leg to the stage in an arc. The movement picked up from there but the trio stayed three solos; the men occasionally looked at one another but didn’t relate.
Cardona inserted three pop song interludes, “Somebody to Love,” “Ring of Fire,” and “I Feel Free.” He did much of his best choreography to them; Kline’s music was theatrical and effective (for the record, he’s also the husband of a good friend) but Cardona didn’t respond to it intuitively.
The cast was dressed in streetwear; mostly of the Brooklyn thrift shop non-descript variety. Cardona’s own performance looked striking as he signaled and curled rapidly among the crowd in the first section. As lush a dancer as Cardona can be, when his movement was transferred to the others, it looked like PoMo Vogueing, all choppy phrasing with little dance underneath.
The narration states that what’s uncommunicated is as important as what’s stated, but that doesn’t translate well into movement. There’s only so much not-moving an audience that isn’t other downtown dancers can stand. Cardona’s work has seemed padded before and the pacing dragged here as well. Did we really need to see the dancers breathing heavily for two minutes? Stay tuned for Cardona choreographing Harold Pinter.
Even if he doesn't get pacing, Cardona has some sense of theater and so do his collaborators. He broke the “fourth wall” often, having the dancers exit the stage into the audience, sometimes sitting down in the first row to await their next section. But the choreography often seemed so drained of dance impulse that it got upstaged by Roderick Murray’s imaginative lighting. When the dancers weren’t moving enough, Murray would move the lights.
Towards the end Omagbitse Omagbeni started shimmying to “I Feel Free.” It was as if one had emerged from the desert into an oasis. From there, a dance started to happen. The chorus, all in black, filled the stage and stood silently facing the back while Kana Kimura ran repeatedly at Singer and he lifted her. “Really Real” ended with Joanna Kotze and Stansky grappling in the shadows as a rack of lights beamed toward us. They hugged in exhaustion and the lights faded to end. Were the two of them finally expressing their private thoughts?
Until those final minutes “Really Real” didn’t gather enough impulse to move beyond being a lecture to becoming a dance. To reference Kierkegaard, that takes a leap of faith.
copyright © 2009 by Leigh Witchel
Photos by Stephanie Berger
Top: Wally Cardona
Bottom: Kana Kimura, Omagbitse Omagbeni, Joanna Kotze
