Interactive Dance, Unplugged
June Julian
Stripped down to muscle and bone, several recent dance performances dare to show their purity up front and in your face. From diverse cultures, yet with similar aesthetic intent, Merce Cunningham, Noche Flamenca, and Shen Wei all trust in our abilities to access our own hearts, minds and inner dance to resonate with theirs. Their idea of interactivity is ancient and uncontrived and demonstrates the sublime power of human movement alone to communicate universal truths.
As part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2005 in late summer, Merce Cunningham and Shen Wei, like revered ancestor and talented grandson, display some shared genetics and evolutionary surprises. In Ocean, Merce Cunningham taps into our shared primal memory, the sea. He invites us to flow with his dancers in currents of liquid space to the sounds of whales and the gurgling and rush of the surf. On the bare circular stage inhabited by changing combinations of 15 dancers in simple leotards, are two large digital clocks ticking off of the seconds of the ninety-minute performance and of our own lives. 115 musicians encircle the stage as an audio frame for the dancers who are fish, who are us. Three minutes to the end, all dancers begin leaping in, a sea of purple creatures, some looking up, reaching up, some, most looking down. Then, unequivocally, 90:00.
In Near the Terrace, Part I, Shen Wei integrates elegant Eastern simplicity and the theatricality of Chinese Opera with references to Western modern dance and visual art. The predominant architectural presence in an otherwise empty stage is a large set of white stairs. Pale whitened somnambulists begin to crawl to the top and over, and later glacially descend them, head first on their stomachs. We recall Marcel DuChamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. The topless women with gowns shaped like tree trunks infer a painting by Paul Delvaux. Shen Wei uses our shared knowledge of art as a bridge to help us to interact with his world. Then he shocks us with his completely new dance vocabulary of severe backbends, some U-shaped with upside-down faces walking toward us, some spines intensely arched moving in profile, the vertical and horizontal crawls, and bodies as projectiles shooting sideways fast.
Deriving from a completely different tradition, Noche Flamenca commands our deep interaction with the performance, viscerally, sexually and completely. With fierce passion, solo dancer, Soledad Barrio, metaphorically drags us screaming from our seats and forces us to dance our hearts out with her. In Solea, she dances life for us with a force we wish we could muster, if we only had the courage. The rawness of Flamenco, the intensity of it, is what we need to break our spell of complacency and inertia. The company, under the brilliant direction of Martin Santangelo, is saturated in a superb artistry that is emotionally transformative. The traditional juerga, a group jam of guitarists, singers and dancers, brings excited shouts or jaleos from the audience and performers alike. We are with you and we are one.
