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Rosas
'Once'
by Thea
Nerissa Barnes
October 18, 2003
Robin Howard Theatre
/London
The first expression performed in silence displayed a particular kind
of bodily narrative. Was this a device to allow the audience to look closely
at minute details containing head slowly moving side to side, shift of
eye balls, down turned month and drift into hip that could signify a number
of dispositions including the portrayal of a child day dreaming, whiling
the time away? Anne Teresa de
Keersmaeker is a person who in the passage of the dance becomes
the body upon which angst and cherished life experiences are witnessed
and lived through. The movement text ranges between stillness and explosive
gestures portraying desolation, being in a state of lost, a kind of reminiscent
longing or an indulgence presented as a laughable distraction. Each movement
is a rendition of several songs from “Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2”. Baez
is a folk singer closely associated with the 1960’s, a pacifist whose
crooning seeped of unbridled affection with abhorrence for killing of
any sort for any reason. Baez was political in her pacifistic tendencies
for her songs spoke of the pain caused by mistrust and disillusionment
as well as the injustices heaped out by man’s inhumanity to man. Anne
Teresa resonates all these varied emotions in an outpouring of movement
sequences that mime passages of the songs as well as devise movement metonyms
and metaphors portraying an essence of what the song is about or adding
an additional comment.
Entering by kicking off her shoes, the audience is drawn into a world
that can be read from many perspectives giving an individual audience
member’s history with each song, their individual experience with dance,
their experience with the art of Anne Teresa. The audience snickered during
Anne Teresa’s singing of “We Shall Overcome”. It seemed she turned her
head to check the words of the song that were being projected on the brown
cyclorama upstage right. Or did she? Was she being a child not knowing
the words to the song or was this a metonym for a society that knew the
cost but never quite paid the price for injustices of inequality. Personally
I was appalled at the giggles. First Anne Teresa’s stance was indicative
of those opening gestures, similar to the first stance at the top of this
work. There was nothing funny about that stillness and her head gesture
from right to left added to the sense of desolation. Also the song - this
is a song that black and white people sang during sit-ins and rallies
to get equal rights for African Americans. This is a song that people
would sing as police beat their heads and torsos before throwing them
in the back of vans to be transported to jail. This is a song not to be
laughed through no matter what the circumstances. But then not everyone
has the same experiences and so those who snickered thought one way while
I thought something else. There were many of these political, cultural
undercurrents and juxtapositions but there was also those whimsical moments
like the lullaby done with rhythm in the feet and hips with different
arm, head and voice differences that characterised each animal named in
the song or finger gestures that indicated “you” and ”me”. The song “When
Gods on Your Side” had a certain poignancy all its own.
Monotones of black white and beige with the wooden boards that bordered
the black lino gave the performance space with the audience seated a close
feel. It became even more so when Anne Teresa became naked, aside from
a pair of black knickers, changing this world into a very private room.
It was a room we had invaded, where the world of hate and killing and
lost-ness had invaded and striped this lithe creature of most of her beliefs
and challenged her human-ness. Was she a child dancing in her bedroom
to a song she liked? Moving downstage left the video projection inscribing
the horrors of the civil war on her skin that also cast a shadow on the
cyc where the rest of the projected image fell. Anne Teresa dancing the
sorrow of “Once”, a song of a lost sweetheart now become emblematic of
the sorrows of war. Standing striped Anne Teresa’s emotions like Baez’s
singing is laid bare. Naked except for those black briefs, every move
reveals a crease, a twist of skin, wrinkle and tightness, those visible
signs of aging and exhaustion, all that has been lived and what has been
imagined.
Edited by Stuart
Sweeney
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