Moving Company from Massachusetts, Karen Peterson & Dancers, Dancing Wheels, "Diagnosis of a Faun"
VSA Festival
Washington, DC
June 6 - 12, 2010
by George Jackson
copyright 2010 by George Jackson
VSA = Very Special Arts. In this year 2010, the VSA organization, which focuses on "arts and disability", is holding its annual festival in Washington, DC at diverse locations - the Harman Center's Forum and Lansburgh Theater, the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage and Terrace Theater, the Smithsonian Institution's Discovery Theater, the Atlas Performing Arts Center and other spots. Over 600 people from all over the world are active participants as authoring artists, performers or their team mates. Dance is represented and importantly so. The possibilities being pursued - anatomic, technological, imaginative - seem unlimited. The actuality of the pair of performances I saw was worthwhile but modest.
Three companies danced at noontime on Monday, June 7 in the downstairs Forum of Harman Hall. The Moving Company from Massachusetts makes audience members feels like participants. Gently, though, for we weren't asked to stand up and volunteer. The performers sat, like we, on folding chairs. They looked at us and we at them. When they began to switch chairs and the game became faster and faster, we played along mentally by choosing a chair and imagining how to get to it first without breaking the accompanying musical beat. Fun for kids? Perhaps, but not for fools or grouches. Everyone was earnest at first but soon smiles broke out and grew broader.
Karen Peterson & Dancers from Florida used people and technology not in a science fiction way but with a sense for that old black magic. Gathered around a small table were a few individuals who seemed to be holding a seance. Some of them, though not all, were in wheelchairs yet it was upper body motion and particularly the arms and hands one noticed most at first. Video projections of the action appeared on a screen behind the table. These were large, elongated images and seemed like ghost shapes. Seeing someone simultaneously in the flesh and as a separate spirit is eerie. When the action moved away from the table, it became unfocused and went on for too long.
Dancing Wheels from Ohio is a rather regular balletomodern dance company except that some of its performers move in special and not always expected ways. Mary Verdi-Fletcher, the group's founder, uses herself like a languorous mermaid when crossing the floor on her own. In a wheelchair, she can be a wild biker. Partnered in lifts, she becomes a kite being launched. As a choreographer and artistic director, Verdi-Fletcher sees to her company's musicality.
Sensuality is central to "Diagnosis of a Faun", Tamar Rogoff's dance play shown June 10 at Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. Rogoff finds erotic impulses in how people move. Whether it is one young woman brushing her foot back and forth over the floor in a standard ballet exercise, another balancing her body as she walks in a pair of high heels, an older man assembling his stance at a lectern or a young man stretching and relaxing his well muscled frame except for the legs which seem to have been frozen stiff at a moment when they happened to be twisted-in, Rogoff turns them all into lovers. They caress their own bodies and bodies they encounter in nuanced rushes of emotion. These solos and duos spin out in varied ways even though the choreographer doesn't always dare to give them an apt ending.
In transforming her cast, Rogoff succeeds particularly well with the young man, dancer-actor Gregg Mozgala, translating the signs of his cerebral-palsy into Faun stances and steps. Mozgala is practically undressed in ones first view of him as he perches in a manner akin to Nijinsky's "Faune" atop a woodland rock. The only clue that he differs is the stiffness of his toes. He becomes the eternal symbol of nature as he is contrasted with representatives of the art of classical ballet and the practice of medicine. Alas, Rogoff isn't the most skilled of playwrights and the other themes she introduces (a ballerina tearing her Achilles tendon, surgery as remedy, the doctor-patient relationship) dilute her passionate choreography.
I didn't get to see the festival's other dance companies - Blue Eyed Soul, CIM Integrated Multidisciplinary, Dagipoli, VSA Guatemala Youth, Wild Zappers and Axis - but they make an imposing list. Once upon a time it was unusual to see individuals with disabilities perform, and when Robert Wilson in the 1960s cast some for parts in his extravaganzas, he was accused of exploitation despite the illuminating use he made of the talents he had discovered and developed. Times have indeed changed.
