Continuation of Radical Dreaming: a practice on dance writing
Ananya Dance Theatre Presents "Horidraa: Golden Healing" at the O'Shaughnessy September 16th-17th 2016
Three dancers clad in silver vests, hoods over heads, strips of silver paint over their eyes shuffle about with cell phones pressed to their ears. Their eyes are glazed over, emotionless, seemingly driven by task, their directions changing suddenly as if ordered by an unseen force. The section title, “Inside Health, Inc.”.
The sound of a clicking keyboard is amplified as a black woman sits strapped in a medical chair covered in tubes, and robotic dancers attend to her. Here they appear as doctors. The woman’s medical history is on display: “Child of intersecting intimacies”. Her mouth opens wide and closes without uttering a sound. Her silent confusion and struggle is juxtaposed with the automatic or programmed dancers around her. The clean, metallic costuming matched with the sharp, direct, task-driven movement of the “doctors” gives a sense of sterility. White plastic lines the wings like a quarantine ward.
The methods of the doctors prove insufficient to heal so they try a new tactic: love therapy, only, these cold machines can’t love. What ensues is something out of an awkward music video, the dancers make hearts with their folded hands and blow kisses all to some pop beat. The whole thing seems like a 90’s aerobic class with jogging, heels kicking up to meet the butt. This prescribed, prepackaged and fake love fails to cure the woman covered in tubes. There is a system failure and eventually the robots break down and leave the stage. The woman breaks free from the chair that confined her saying, “I refuse this end!”
The dancers then appear upstage, mouths open in struggle, gathering, punching forward, forming lines. A solo arises consisting of gasping both in breath and body. The company continues arching forward, their torsos and reaching legs like waves, the dancers’ energy almost broken. There are moments where the dancers point and laugh at each other. The struggle escalates to a point and one dancer falls to embrace another. All on stage take note of this change. The energy of the dancers is renewed and the company heaves into unison movement. Their collective footwork makes a resounding percussion. The unison in the back of the group dissolves into gasping and an inability to move with the group. Against a whirring of moans comes a blurring base. This section is entitled, “Descent into Memory”. There is trauma in this memory, as shown by the dancers’ struggle to confront it.
A dancer finds a flower and tries to offer it to a woman who is reaching out for it. The other dancers, who are trying to pull themselves forward on the floor, alternate looking up in hope.
The hope leads to another shift in choreography. Circulating torsos propel them to collectively look forward. The lights go from white to purple then the dancers are swirled off stage by a swath of yellow fabric as if blown. It is an undoing of an evil and a transportation to an imagined space. This is, “Magykal Imaginings: Rituals of Memory, Reckonings, Loss, Love, Pleasure, & Imagining Healing”.
The dance shifts as a backdrop of water on glass illuminates, creating a sense of washing. The scrim raises to reveal the company in turmeric colored, layered costumes. Green draping fabric hangs from above like seaweed. Now comes a long awaited gentleness. The give and bend in the dancers’ knees and the tempo suggest the first breath of morning. Sweeping arms expose the armpit in a moving stretch like an opening yawn. Music, full as a honey-sung hums, fills the space accompanied by the sound of trickling water. Hair is loosened. Movement becomes more voluminous than in previous sections. “My body holds memories of voyages, encounters, shared intimacies… In my body live story fragments that, churned by leaping dreams stream turmeric across our firmaments.”
A group of dancers kneeling at the side of the stage hook their finger overhead to lick the air and bring the finger down to paint on the floor. Three solos occur, each laboring in order to give of themselves. The final solo is one of pure joy. It is turmeric coated. “Healing is real, love is yours”. The women from the beginning of the piece emerges, healed. She is venerated and loved.
The dancers transform throughout the work; from inhuman robots, to pedestrians fighting, dancing, and struggling, to dancers celebrating and circulating healing energy. There is an undoing of metallic sterility that lends space for overcoming communal pain. Unraveling the strands of trauma yields to the imagined utopia of ultimate loving and healing.
Questions/comments for Ananya: When you end on such a high note, do you feel you risk giving the impression that all is well in this world? I personally don’t see it as such because the struggle in the middle of the piece is so real and heartbreaking. And through perseverance, light is injected and a better world is made possible.
ANSWER:Yes, I feel that the "all is well and I am therefore relieved of all need to do anything" must be circumvented by the passage through struggle and pain. And it has to be balanced by the rush to "save" women of color and to overlook their continuous refusal to admit defeat
When put on workshops, how do you incorporate “Healing is real, love is yours.”?
ANSWER: In workshops, I take care to connect with every individual, building relationships one by one, "seeing" them. I incorporate exercises that are about seeing each other and knowing how to support one another. I also make energy material so when we touch each other, there is no room for toxicity. One time though, with a drunk arrogant man at a participatory public performance, I had to personally refuse him entry. That was really hard, but he was going to make the entire space unsafe. When I wrote that poem about healing--I was literally thinking of looking my sisters in the eye and telling them that. The dance emerged from that.
Photos by V. Paul Virtucio
