“Tides Tides Tides”
Jesse Hewit
“Ancient Children”
Embodiment Project
"OhMyEarthGoddess”
Monique Jenkinson
“Brilliant Alarm”
RAWdance
Yerba Buena Center for the Art
San Francisco, CA
September 14 and 15, 2017
by Rita Felciano
copyright © Rita Felciano 2017
The role of the citizen/artist or artist/citizen has always been a contentious one. Do artists have a responsibility towards the society of which they are part beyond the formal excellence of their work? Over the years, the answers have come down on both sides. But at a time when we cannot escape information about the world we live in, is there a particular urgency to re-visit the issue? The two-part Transform Festival, curated by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, YBCA’s Chief of Program and Pedagogy, makes an attempt by throwing out a challenge to local artists in the form of the wide-open “Why Citizenship?” The Fall Festival, with Giacomo Castagnola’s geometric multi-use sets, presented answers by designers, dancers and choreographers. Next May it will be the turn for theater, circus and multi-media artists.
Embodiment Project in "Ancient Children". Photo: David Wilson
On the basis of two of the three programs seen, the results were multifaceted. That was to be expected. The fact that the evening did not yield more truly involving works that would resonate beyond the confines of YBCA’s appropriately named Forum Theater maybe was also to be expected. Still it proved to be a disappointment.
Jess Hewit’s problematic “Tides Tides Tides” impressed and annoyed in about equal measures. As a performer, his range, his intensity and his willingness to almost disappear into the environment mesmerized. Micro gestures in stillness breathed presence; lashing out into whipping contortions, he looked like hell incarnate. While performance as ritual may have become commonplace, Hewit pushes the concept so far that, in order to enter the process, one almost needs to become an acolyte. Few in the audience, this member included, seemed able and willing to go there.
Burdened by bland imagery — ocean waves, an omni-species puppet, falling cloud fragments—Hewit may have been aware of the difficult task he set for himself. Several times he stepped in as a spokesman for what we were about to see. Did he try to focus wandering attention or were these meant as disruptive gestures?
The direct address worked best when Hewit invited the audience to imagine a person of its choice to take the place in the dance he was about to perform. Stretching out his arms wide open, he slowly circled the stage, making eye contact with as many watchers as he could. It approached something of a universal embrace but also became a splendidly theatrical gesture, the envy of any circus master.
In “Ancient Children”, the Embodiment Project’s unwieldy but gripping dance theater piece, Artistic Director/Choreographer Nicole Klaymoon succeeds in what good art does: speaking to the brain and the heart at the same time. Using an almost documentary approach in what sounded like personal experiences and readings from the research by, among others pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris, Klaymoon’s call to arms put the spotlight on what has been called America’s original sin: Ingrained racism still condemns children into a one-way street from school to prison. She balanced this harrowing reality with street and modern dance choreography that highlighted the individuality of each dancer as they and proclaimed a gutsy even joyful determination. Medicine woman gina Breedlove opened the work with gentle evocations; “Ancient” ended with the spotlight on a fierce, crouched Tigre Bailando. He seemed ready to pounce.
Monique Jenkinson (“Fauxnique”), San Francisco’s queen of gender liquidity, invited two guests to share the credits for her new “OhMyEarthGoddess.” Almost as clamorous as Jenkinson, Miss Rahni Nothingmore, tall and super slender in a red sequined mini dress sported the best-looking legs all evening. With the much shorter and grounded Giamaica Zeidler, the duet functioned as a back up team to Jenkinson’s strutting meditation on performed femininity.
Nothingmore, a highkicking and marvelously belting artist, led the audience in a communal dance to what, I was told, was a Joni Mitchell song. Nothingmore and Zeidler came into their own in a skit about blues singer Merry Clayton who “gave birth” to what became the Rolling Stones’ hit “Gimme Shelter”. Despite Jenkinson’s midwifing, the act probably missed its aim except for the most dedicated Stones fans.
As a unit "OhMyEarthGoddess" felt fragmented, Jenkinson seemed off-key either as a performer or as a creator contemplating citizenship. Too much was the Fauxnique that we know and love. However, Mr. David’s splendidly outrageous and immaculately realized costumes deserve a special applause. But what about that Dolly Parton wig? It needed more than a bit hairspray.
In the program notes for “Brilliant Alarm” RAWdance spelled out its take on citizenship by observing history’s “recurring cycles of reverence for intellectual prowess followed by a blinding fear of intellectual thought.“ Fast-paced with overlapping and often contradictory impulses “Brilliant” showed six individually strong dancers that created a plethora of contradictory impulses.
What looked like half a library of books gave the ensemble props which could be read, stacked, thrown, redistributed, hogged and used as stepping stones. They gave the show its grand opening in a serpentine set up that, with the touch of a finger, made you an instant believer in the proverbial domino effect. The dancers later repeated that serially fall -- with less fun. The movement vocabulary's preponderance of slithering and sliding steps effectively suggested a slippery ground, perhaps even ice. Individual moments suggested a sense of going nowhere.
Aaron Perlstein worked an invisible rope with which he tried to pull somebody in. In Ryan T. Smith and Katie Wong’s mirroring duet they appeared to be on a treadmill. The dancers patched together a flag from disparate source which they then parade with their lips sealed. In "Brilliant's" closing moments, a blindfolded Smith made his way on an ever-diminishing stream of (book) knowledge, leaving him spent on his belly as if having died from thirst. Behind him Katie Wong for her part became encased in a pile of thrown away books.
With “Brilliant” RAWdance gave itself another fine vehicle for intelligent and convincing choreography. Could we consider it an act of citizenship?