At the opening night of Dance Tech 2019, we were greeted by a couple of dance students stationed by the door outside CASP 5&J Gallery. These young ladies standing still, upright, with arms stretched out sideways look like a duo of Colossi of Rhodes with Led lights blinking on their person. They are dressed in grey with billowing plastic bags as tutus and snaking around their arms are rubber hoses and one can deduce that they are attempting to look urban and rugged. Their eye shadow are sharp flecks of black streaking from the front to the sides that are reminiscent of Natalie Portman’s eye make-up when she portrayed (and won an Oscar for) Odile in Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan. These are visual short hands for me that the performances will not be the usual exploration of dance as lightness, elegance, and defiance of gravity. Dance Tech 2019 did have those and yet there was a decided grit to it.
Dance Tech 2019 showed the choreography of Texas Tech teachers and guest artists that are site-specific. The audience will have to contend to walk around selected areas for the different suites of performances (six in total). It was a chance for the performance to go beyond the usual proscenium setting and to respond to available space that are oft-ignored. The opening suite was inside the gallery wherein the lights shifted from purple to blue and cast an ethereal pallor on the dancers who wore grey. The music alluded to some tinkering, almost flights of fancy type of staccato peppered with the dance movements of undulation and extension making the dancers look like cavorting and battling maenads or sea nymphs. The hairstyles are not the usual severe buns of many a ballerina but different braids that remind me of Ukrainian peasant women which add to the playfulness of the performance. In the other suites, the hair fashioned as such would serve as a crucial visual implement of counterbalance as well as a perfect juxtaposition of the urban decay in the surrounding areas. The braids are folkloric, somewhat, to the jagged movements across the Lubbock dust and grime. The second suite had all the audience members follow the plastic bag-festooned ballerinas as guides out in the back which is a start of four suites that caught my fancy. The first and the last ones were the weakest as they pandered to clichés.
The second suite had a metallic structure that looked like a giant peacock tail feather with the dancers occasionally hanging on to it. They are now dressed in white coveralls with face masks. They were wearing heavy workmen boots. At this point, the lighting was not as dynamic as the first one inside the climate-controlled room, but it does not mean it is less creative. In fact, the lighting in the suites outside prove to be among the exciting details for me. They used mobile spotlights as well as headlights of SUVs beaming through the bodies. I take significance in this in the urban experience wherein these headlights are both bane and boost. It can boost the vision of the driver, but bane to those focused on by the lights. One of the apprehensions I feel in this usage of headlights is that it can be a weapon of aggression. This is not a new thing. As the dancers in industrial uniform were performing kicking up small dust storms and their bodies lit laterally, I am reminded of the Spanish painter Goya’s work The Third of May 1808 wherein the executioners used a strong light situated at the ground to focus on the prisoners who are pleading for their lives.
Light has always been an act of illumination, of clarity, but in this work of Goya, and perhaps in Dance Tech, light added to the menace of the narrative. The dancers in workmen’s clothes were at one point emulating the movements of factory workers, disjointed, repetitive. At the end, there was one body being carried out as if in cruciform as a sacrifice for industrial might. The one in cruciform stands in the end, takes down her mask and lets out an audible gasp, the only human sound to have been produced in that suite.
The performance after that was a solo act of a lady in tatters perched on a broken wooden chair grasping a tin cup. She looked like a meditating Bodhisattva or urban decay as she crouched so still while at her back, across the street is the abandoned red brick building with broken glasses. Among all the suites, this dance had the smallest area in which she crisscrossed on which relied more on the drama of the body rather than the reliance of space and sets. Was she portraying a derelict in conversation with her meager resources as espoused by the broken chair and by the empty tin can? Was this a dance portrait of homelessness and being dejected by society? Her movements are splayed like grasping for air with her hands to prayers to an invisible god. This was the sparsest, and dare I say, the most evocative of them all.
The next act had a duo emerging from upturned rubbish bins. They remind me of battling hermit crabs. This act looks like a performance after the apocalypse with the dancers dressed in rags, one looking like a discarded court jester and the other one is an androgynous mound of trash in humanoid form. They were bickering back and forth, claiming, reclaiming the trash bins for themselves. There were ropes with plastic bottles fastened onto them serving as the occasional parameter from each other. One of the most powerful parts of this suite is when the one looking like a court fool sticks his head into a traffic cone and stand on an upturned trash bin in this sandy wasteland which eerily reminded me of that Iraqi prisoner made to wear a black pointed hood and robe by wayward American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison which is a catalyst of the dissolution of American presence in Iraq. The next suite is a trio of dancers in frayed dresses in red skirts with rough and dirty hemlines as they danced in front of the shuttered door (via wooden planks) of an abandoned factory. I thought they looked like beautiful Caryatids of failed industrialization. The final suite was that of the entire dance troupe donning what looks like young, urban hipster clothing as they sashay and romp on a street with their mobile phones as among their sources of light. It was a playful romp that could have been a powerful testament on the change of kinesthesia between human body and mobile device. The last one turned into tableaus of millennial poses for selfies in varying articulated narcissisms. It would have been more powerful an indictment to our current alienation had the choreography focus on the hunched movement and focused on the bright tiny screen like subdued humans being led on by a digital leash. The costumes, too, in the final suite could have been more effective had they looked the same because in the current quest for digital cultural capital, the selfies, the influencers, the hashtags remarkably start to look the same.
If there is any major takeaway for me in Dance Tech 2019 is how site-specificity and movement could have been more glaring in the privilege of mobility. To get to this place would mean having a car or the finances for an uber. That alone is restricting movement and impinging on access.
I took this not just from the dancers, most of which are Caucasians but the audience themselves are majority white people with cars and time to spare in such an artistic endeavor. I frame this on the moment of access to such movements as well as access to witness such movements are seen as carefree by those who can afford it. I thought it was amazing that the dance suites revolved mostly among abandoned buildings who has had its human movements cut off die to disrepair and neglect. Was Dance Tech a way of reclaiming such movements in places where movement has stopped? I glanced at the broken glasses of the window of an abandoned building hoping to hear an answer, but all I could hear were triumphant shrieks of the dancers for a job well done and now commencing the act of capturing place within a tiny frame in a frozen movement: the selfie with friends. Then, they tumble into their cars as I walk, carless that I am, to see a Latino mother and child watching the final performance across the street, because they cannot enter the dance sites due to the barricades. Hampered movement because of a border. If there was anything more site-specific and indicators of movement in Texas, this scene would be it.