| La Zampa’s fully empowered female beauty shattering glass was the strongest image the New Dance Alliance concocted on the 20th anniversary of its Performance Mix Festival. The event ran over six days at Joyce SoHo with around five performances each night followed by a reception. Festival director Karen Bernard’s choices this year included theatrical performance containing any sort of movement (such as Nathalie Claude’s "Lapine-Moi" bunny hop). |  |
Striking a Plus for Curation – Lisa Paul Streitfeld
La Zampa’s fully empowered female beauty shattering glass was the strongest image the New Dance Alliance concocted on the 20th anniversary of its Performance Mix Festival. The event ran over six days at Joyce SoHo with around five performances each night followed by a reception. Festival director Karen Bernard’s choices this year included theatrical performance containing any sort of movement (such as Nathalie Claude’s "Lapine-Moi" bunny hop).
A new element was the Breakfast Mix panel at Dance Theater Workshop in which Vallejo Gantner, Artistic Director of Performance Space 122, discussed curation on the cutting-edge with Tanya Calamoneri, Co-Director of The Field. In the fight for territory and career-defining branding, how are artists supposed to let down their guard to engage in fruitful collaboration and experimentation with new mediums? This assessment revealed the crucial role of Performance Mix in presenting experimental art born out of collaboration from nine separate cities.
On Wednesday night, for example, the New York based D Underbelly drew the audience into an examination of professional angst in an age of technology through movement (Baraka de Soleil) interacting with multimedia (Daniel Givens’ video and music). Persephone’s contemporary underground journey was explored by the Montreal-based Compaignie de la Tourmente’s with the bizarrely erotic element of an underwear clad puppet mimicking a duet’s descent into depravity.
Yet, the collaboration that delivered the cutting-edge of movement to the festival was La Zampa, a six-year old company from Toulouse formed by the male/female partnership/marriage of Magali Milian and Romuald Luydlin. In Dream On Track 1 (Milian) and Track 2 (Luydlin) the body moved into a state of transformation where the male and female energies struggle for domination and result in the precarious tension of the opposites. Saliva pouring from the mouth, perspiration trickling from the pores, in this evolution the primal energy takes over the body, which is subsequently visibly shaped by will. Ludylin, in his knee high black leather boots brought to mind Nazi repression of the feminine while demonstrating the struggle of the male to surrender to this primitive power as the beast arises from within. And Milian, after commanding attention with her shattering of theatrical glass, revealed the internal beauty of the dark feminine as she strips off her outer layer of clothing to reveal the feline beneath the human.
With elements of Butoh and the No Theater, this arresting physical passion play was reminiscent of a magnificent "Purgatorio" collaboration between Mauricio Celedon’s Teatro del Silencio and Karlik Danza Teatro that I was fortunate to experience recently in Santiago, Chile. The presentation of the boot-clad male half of the duo in the Joyce studio after Breakfast Mix was an enticing preview to the convention-shattering image of the empowered female that followed on Friday night. With these separate but integrated performances, La Zampa provided a sociology lesson blasting away at the politically correct post-structuralist view of gender which keeps academia frozen in the 20th Century. It was quite a contrast to the estrogen-drenched excerpt from The Partita Project that opened the evening on Friday that failed to excite at any level.
The access and control of the kundalini power that transformed the movement of La Zampa depicted the opposing manner that the human adapts to and utilize the primal feminine power along gender lines. The internal struggle between the opposites in the male has the tendency to be externalized in violence while the female’s inward integration results in an authentic internalized androgyny that has become hip (witness the recent issue of Men’s Fashions of the Times) through appearances.
Can any form that does not seek to articulate this divine energy consider itself a 21st Century art? Shouldn’t every artist on the planet right now be on a search for a new language of holism that will help forestall human self-destruction? The Kabalistic vision of the human body as a holistic entity in which planetary energies are released sets a standard by which the quality of art can be measured both in accessibility to the forces of nature and the human consciousness of control. La Zampa’s Dream On reveals this once elusive destination is a 21st Century reality.
The Performance Mix Festival would have left an indelible mark if it had highlighted La Zampa on opening night rather than showing the company piecemeal, so to make room for the less deserving. Democracy belongs in politics, not in art. Despite the timidity that prevented a better placement of La Zampa, and therefore a stronger 20th anniversary showing for the festival as a whole, Bernard does strikes a plus for including an international act that refuses to anything less than direct about their message.
