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Home arrow Entertainment Reviews arrow Dance Review: The Floating Outfit Project
Dance Review: The Floating Outfit Project PDF Print E-mail

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Written by Jennifer Noyer   
last updated Wednesday, February 28, 2007, at 10:11:36 ... created Saturday, 28 January 2006
The sixth annual Global DanceFest presented South African choreographer Boyzie Cekwana and his contemporary dance company Thursday evening, in collaboration with Tricklock Companyís International Theatre Festival. Cekwana offered two highly contrasting pieces at the South Broadway Cultural Center: Rona, the Sotha word for us, and Jaínee, formed around the songs and gumboot dances of miners in South Africa. Both of these works dug deeply into rituals and realities of African life revealing a mesmerizing spiritual core in Rona, and the powerful masculine anger and frustration in Jaínee.

 

Rona opened on a dark stage with light coming up at stage right to form a pool around the seated Desire Davids tapping rhythms on a one-stringed instrument. Cekwana and Buyani Shangase appeared at stage left in another pool of light. Wearing simple white briefs, all three were colored in a powdery clay substance giving them a ghostly appearance as they moved in fluid slow motion around the stage, marking a sacred ground. Gradually their bodies began to assume birdlike shapes, Cekwana with elbows flexed high to the side, and Davids rocking forward and back with hands forming a pointed beak as she progressed around the stage.

The two men formed their bodies together in finely sculpted shapes while Davids, swinging a ceremonial censor, moved around them, bringing out faster, more spatial movement as complex recorded rhythms evolved. Shangase's humming became a chant, and then the music combined African instruments with Western, classical choral music, titled LambarenaæBach to Africa, created by Hughes de Courson and Pierre Akendengue. At this point Cekwana and Davids swung out into a glorious duet full of vigorous, forward-sweeping arm gestures and upper torso contractions as they turned and wheeled in space. African and Western dance vocabularies described the merging of spiritual and artistic forms in South Africa. The dance ended with Shangase walking into darkness, breathing out blasts on a curled- horn trumpet, perhaps summoning to a new spiritual future.

Jaínee also opened on a dark stage, but crowded with men shouting, whistling, and moving in erratic patterns around the space. An empty video screen hung high above the action, and a line was strung at stage left from which photo prints were hung, back-lit from off stage. (After the performance the audience was urged to come on stage to see the photos of nude men with guns and clubs, or holding babies on their laps.) The photo display became a focus at different times during the performance.

These were lonely, angry men, living in darkness and bereft of their families, chanting and naming their ancestral identities, and stamping and kicking in the exciting power of the gumboot dances of South African miners, isolated from the world of women. Davids emerged from the darkness as a female dream figure for them, but also revealing the gender problems of that society. She moved delicately along an invisible tightrope, balancing herself carefully within the violent movement of the men. When she came to the line of photos, she reared backwards, as though swooning, and caught herself into low, sweeping turns. She dropped to the floor, cowering and creeping, crablike, away as one of the men screamed at her.

Cekwana's choreography used the competitive patterns of gumboot dances as each man came forward to fling his legs high, stamp the ground, then fall and recover from the earth. Four men developed exciting unison rhythms with feet, and hands slapping their bodies, while their nude images appeared on the screen above carrying spears, and stamping out an ancient legacy of ritualistic moves.

Cewana's art allowed this audience a vivid and powerful view of his culture, and an exciting, aesthetically enthralling glimpse into his imaginative take on contemporary dance.

 

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About Reviewers 

D.S. Crafts (Website)

Composer Daniel Steven Crafts came to New Mexico from San Francisco where he had hosted a classical music radio program on KPFA. His first commission from opera star Jerry Hadley, "The Song & the Slogan" based on texts by Carl Sandburg, was made into a TV program for the PBS network and aired nationally in 2004 and won an Emmy for Best Music.

His latest opera La Llorona is a collaboration with novelist Rudolfo Anaya based on his play "The Season of La Llorona."

Mr. Crafts is currently working on another commission from Jerry Hadley for a piece about the American Southwest which includes texts by Rudolfo Anaya and V.B. Price.

Two CDs of his music, Contemporaries (short, satirical keyboard works) and ARIAS (excerpts from his various operas) have been released on the BACAT label in San Francisco.


David Steinberg

David Steinberg has covered state government, the courts, city and county government in Santa Fe for the Albuquerque Journal.

He's been an arts writer for the past 20 years, and serves as the book editor, for the Journal.

Over the years, he's also acted in plays, sung in choruses and played trumpet.


Jennifer Noyer

Jennifer Noyer has been writing dance reviews for the Albuquerque Journal for 17 years, as well as contributing articles for Dance Magazine and other art journals. She trained in dance with Hanya Holm in New York City and Colorado Springs, and studied several dance techniques at the graduate level at the University of Michigan. After teaching dance at Wayne State University she entered and completed a Masters Degree in Humanities there.

In New Mexico Ms. Noyer has taught, directed, and choreographed contemporary dance for several years. Her writing on dance includes a monograph accompanying the video of choreographer Bill Evens’ ballet “The Legacy.” An overview of Evans’s world wide career, it was written and published during his tenure at the University of New Mexico.

Ms. Noyer’s studies in the humanities, and her studio dance work influence her approach to dance as an integrative art form in the United States.


Barry Gaines

Barry Gaines has taught Shakespeare in the University of New Mexico English Department for over twenty-five years and has received two outstanding teaching awards.

He has written theater reviews for the Journal since 2000. He has attended theater all over the world including Shakespeare productions in Russia, South Africa, Denmark, and Poland. He has also served as literary advisor for two professional theater companies and written performance reviews for Shakespeare Quarterly.

Gaines has taken two years of acting with Paul Ford and appeared in small parts in three plays at the Albuquerque Little Theater. He believes that he is probably a better reviewer than actor.


Joanne Sheehy Hoover

Joanne Sheehy Hoover, music critic emeritus of the Albuquerque Journal, has written for NPR, PBS, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Symphony, among others.

She has also been a music lecturer for the Smithsonian Associates and a music critic and arts writer for The Washington Post. She was director of the Levine School of Music, one of the country’s largest community music schools, in Washington, D. C. 1980-1993.

She and her husband moved to Corrales, New Mexico in July 1993. Also a poet, her fifth collection, “Einstein in New Mexico,” was published in 2002.


Marissa Greenberg

Marissa Greenberg is a member of the faculty of the University of New Mexico English Department, where she teaches Shakespeare and early English literature. A prior guest reviewer for the Albuquerque Journal, Greenberg will be reviewing theater while Barry Gaines is out of town. She also composed and edited the program notes for last year’s Albuquerque Shakespeare Festival and has written performance reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin.

A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, Greenberg has been performing and studying drama for most of her life. She is thrilled to have this opportunity to review for the Journal.

 

 


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