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The notion of “star quality” would seem an anathema to those ensconced in the world of contemporary dance. It nods to the vacuous ethos of Hollywood’s commercial celebrity-dom; it is created, fictionalized, valorized and vulgarized by the variegated tentacles of a capital-intensive media, it simplifies complex artists into a superficial, je-ne-sais-quoi dazzle, often privileging appearance over internal experience. Despite these profound misgivings, it is a word I feel compelled to use in reference to Luis Lara Malvacias.Dance Theater Workshop was home to Malvacias’ evening-length dance piece There is No Such Thing this past November. |
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The Uncertain Marriage of Dance and Visual Art – Andrea Liu
The notion of “star quality” would seem an anathema to those ensconced in the world of contemporary dance. It nods to the vacuous ethos of Hollywood’s commercial celebrity-dom; it is created, fictionalized, valorized and vulgarized by the variegated tentacles of a capital-intensive media, it simplifies complex artists into a superficial, je-ne-sais-quoi dazzle, often privileging appearance over internal experience. Despite these profound misgivings, it is a word I feel compelled to use in reference to Luis Lara Malvacias.
Dance Theater Workshop was home to Malvacias’ evening-length dance piece There is No Such Thing this past November. Unlike the common practice in modern dance in which the choreographer renders him or herself the main attraction, using auxiliary dancers as a bride uses bridesmaids—to backlight and to direct attention to the choreographer-as-main-dancer—Malvacias took an opposite trajectory. Malvacias rendered himself a marginal, near-apparition or afterthought, appearing for the first time in the piece at the intermission. Here, he woke us up, pungently assaulting us with a wholly different movement quality than the dense, belabored 40 minutes that came before.
Gazelle-like, with a animal-of the-jungle ease and prowess of movement, Malvacias stood facing the audience with a stadium light impersonally glaring at him as he repeatedly fell to the floor in a clean, lithe manner to a pulsating, enigmatic soundtrack. Meanwhile, the audience bustled, went to the bathroom and talked to their friends, rendering this brief combination and first appearance by Malvacias a practice session by someone who wasn’t really in the piece, but who was allowed to practice onstage when the audience wasn’t paying attention. This brief, ten-minute interim of repetitive movement was more galvanizing and engaging than the 40 minutes of constructed piece that came before it as Malvacias exuded a lightning-sharp energy, a sense of conflict and an intelligence with a predilection for deconstructing social norms.
Before the piece began, each audience member filing into the theater was accosted by two bubbly, apple-cheeked girls distributing red and white-checkered smocks for the audience to wear. Not allowed to enter the theater without them, we became a sea of red and white-checkered human smocks, becoming an audience installation. The set of the stage is markedly more elaborate than most Spartan, contemporary dance sets. With two large film screens on the right and left side, and black and white portrait projections of Malvacias with an ambiguous expression on his face and another screen with tersely comical text stated in ellipsis, one is struck by the investment put into this stage installation. But yet, there is something not entirely effective about it. There is something too color-coordinated, too perfectly placed, perhaps something vaguely analogous to an art installation hung with an interior design mindset. There is something not quite messy enough about it, like a Gap advertisement trying to be beatnik, but only accomplishing a clean-cut, glistening-teethed version of beatnik.
The first 40 minutes of the performance is without Malvacias: five dancers come on the stage with the Malvacias signature costumes, with checkers, plaids, red and white, burlap—like a preppy version of Afghan refugee mismatch-chic. They stand upstage, close to the audience and staring at us, while uttering non-sequiturs. Their vibe is very generic—it does not serve Malvacias, who seems to be attempting to challenge conventions by choosing Pollyanna-feeling (female) dancers who, whatever their technical proficiency, would never embody or realize the iconoclast subversion that he seems to be gesturing towards, but never fully realizing. Their energy, when set next to Malvacias, seems like it’s from a different planet. As for Nelson, his long-time collaborator, he feels not entirely present but preoccupied, straining to be vivacious.
Nonetheless, this “team of five” has a closely woven together rapport and investment in each other, going through what feels like an obstacle course regimen of different tasks, consisting of 21 sections. Perhaps one of the most memorable vignettes is a 15-minute sequence where the five dancers stand in a circle and continuously throw a ball to somebody else in the circle, with no pause or break, slowly and incrementally clambering from stage left to stage right. At varying times, one or two members of the circle are lying down and the dancers must continue the steady, unbroken rhythm of the ball-throwing despite the dancer lying prostrate, until the end when they are all lying down, still ball-throwing.
There is something inexplicably intriguing about this very simple and ostensibly mundane sequence, perhaps harkening to a stripped-down, Yvonne Ranier/Trisha Brown-like, unadorned, task-oriented authenticity of non-fake, un-prettified movement. The pleasure in witnessing this sequence is not how prettily they point their toes or render their body into lovely shapes—but rather, how they deal with an elementally simple yet urgent, real world situation. It is the honesty that makes it compelling to watch. The dancers, without affectation, are making themselves vulnerable to an exigency—one of keeping up the rhythm of throwing this ball without dropping it. Although resembling an exercise that could very well occur in sports practice, without the overarching jock culture backlighting it—with the sports world’s binary denominations of winners and losers and quantitative, not qualitative, judgments of excellence—this passage has a wholly different, and refreshing, connotation. As the passage progresses, one can feel the audience invested in whether this group will drop the ball—but not from a win-lose sports perspective.
Another memorable sequence involves a woman engulfed by 15 unwieldy colorful, cloth canvas shopping bags strapped to her, which she must cumbersomely flips over, in a 180 degree arc in the air in order to move, as she cartwheels, careens, collapses, somersaults and trips across the stage in high heels. She ends the outlandish, ten-minute sequence by quipping, “I hate high heels.” Although all these vignettes are commendable and show a level of ingenuity, there is something a bit too “workshop-y” and at times trying-too-hard-to-be-cute about them. They don’t feel like they have a raison d’etre, an authorial reason for what they are trying to do or say coming from the artist’s vision. They feel like they were inherited from a six-week, choreographer’s workshop where someone was given weekly assignments for creating tasks, each week with a different gimmick or prop. The vignettes are fairly safe and unchallenging—at their best, they showed enlivened, exciting and wholly encouraging movement reminiscent of the infectious energy and charismatic quirkiness and idiosyncrasy of Pooh Kaye—at their worst, at times they came off as vacuous.
Finally, I want to address the issue of Malvacias’ obvious predilection for 60s, Dada-like interventionist strategies of rendering the audience a part of the work, collapsing boundaries between audience, artwork and performer; disrupting dance concert etiquette, behavioral convention and the divisions of the dance performance. Along with having the audience wear smocks upon entering the theater, Malvacias also showered hundreds of leaflets from the ceiling towards the end of the performance with the evening’s programs printed on them, then ended the performance by having stagehands stroll onstage the coat rack where audience members had hung their coat, as part of the performance. Although these were refreshing and clever, again I get no sense from where they are coming. It feels like Malvacias is toying with these issues without fully knowing what his investment in them is. At best, these features were thought provoking. At worst, they came off like someone trying to check off the boxes of various conceptual, anti-art conventions, but without being completely situated on the other side of the norms to be able to pull off flouting them with authenticity or panache a la Jennifer Monson or Koosil-ja Hwang. Malvacias must ask himself, “Why do I want to collapse the boundary between audience and performer? How does this fit into the rest of the piece?” For me, the answers to these questions were not apparent from his performance.
Not to sell him short by any means, Malvacias deserves unequivocal praise for his movement quality. A centripetal, cumulative force in his movement, married with an attitudinal aura of iconoclasm, imbues us with an electrifying sense of imagination and freedom. This is the “star quality” he possesses, where he could be on stage doing the same exact movement sequence with five other dancers, but watching him is intriguing and feels as if there are infinite layers of an onion to be peeled in order to understand or apprehend his movement. There is something enigmatic, both showing us enough to elicit us to want to know more, but withholding full disclosure. There is an evanescence to his movement quality, like a comet you want to catch that goes by He does himself and the audience a huge disservice by having our taste of his movement be so fleeting and clipped. He would be better served by a one hour solo—not in the sense of showcasing some traditional virtuoso, but because his movement quality is too unique, too complexly evocative and indefinable to be paired with more factory engendered, homogenized dancers who have crammed a lot of dance moves into their bodies’ memory bank, but who may not be entirely awake or aware of the conceptual basis of their movement—or not to the devastating impact and power that Malvacias is.
