War Dances at the Dance Place Season Opener

27th Anniversary Benefit Concert Honoring Dance Educators
Dance Place
Washington, DC
September 15, 2007

By Lisa Traiger
Copyright © 2007 by Lisa Traiger

There’s a friendly, homey feeling about walking into Dance Place. Situated at the edge of a residential neighborhood, there’s nothing flashy about the converted welding warehouse hard by the railroad tracks. But as an evening chill signaling the coming fall set in, the industrial-carpeted lobby and cinder-blocked intimate black box theater warmly welcomed old friends and patrons on Saturday to the tenacious presenter’s 27th season. The modest gala featured selected performers from a spectrum of genres who will return during the year.

Photo: Taisha Paggett in Victoria Marks's "Not About Iraq," courtesy Dance Place.

Most notable, and exceptional, was Victoria Marks’s “Not About Iraq,” an excerpt from a larger work that will be seen at UCLA next month, where Marks is a professor of choreography in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures, and around the country, including a stop back at Dance Place in April 2008. Marks has stripped away the veneer to drive at deeper and larger truths about responsibility and reality and what an artist’s place should be in society. “This is beautiful, so beautiful,” a voice pipes up, as long and lush mover Taisha Paggett doles out phrases, arms splicing the air, torso carving a C-shape, legs planted in solid lunges. Paggett attacks in measured phrases, clearly and crisply; she holds some control in this duet of words and movement but the ground on which it stands remains unsettled. The woman commenting from the audience? That’s Marks and soon she’s standing beside her dancer, a small, complacent smile on her face as she talks on about truth, beauty, duty, power, things that are big and important, with a capital B and a capital I, but in such a friendly, non-effacing way, it’s as if she’s recounting an experience to a dinner party of friends. “This is about power,” she notes and there Paggett is, an arm cocked, elbow bent, muscles at the ready. “This is the truth … words are so … but the body,” she gushes, unable to pinpoint exactly what movement can do.

Then Paggett releases with an easy-going elasticity, a swing, a brush, a fall. But soon the words begin to tumble out, unedited, sounds of children at play in the background, while Paggett can’t keep up, collapsing into a heap, her body wracked with a combination of heavy breathing and -– is it? -- a stifled sob. But she rises, sets one foot before the other, continues on. “This is a confession. This is evidence. This is silence.” Paggett’s gestures evolve into some sort of semaphoric short-hand, signals of horrors unseen yet not unknown. And then there it is: “This is a position of privilege.” Paggett is on all fours and the hideous snapshots taken by Americans at Abu Gharib come immediately to mind. Paggett, ultimately, finally, is beat, breathless, but not purged. “Not About Iraq,” even in this brief but telling excerpt, offers not catharsis. Marks knows better; she maintains the last word: “This is not the end of this dance.”

Two other works carried undertones of war. Vincent Thomas’s opener, “You,” a solo danced with ironic tongue in cheek to the easy-going “It Had to Be You.” Thomas pulls out old drill-team and marching-band tricks, tossing a dummy rifle up, around his waist, behind his shoulder in graceful arcs. Innocuous, yet sinister, another sweet smile pasted on his face. Later he picks up a flag and his ingratiating tone as a flag-waving pawn makes its point. An excerpt from Deborah Riley’s recent “Acts of Faith,” called the “Warrior Section,” draws its movement motifs from yoga stances. The six women scurry and skim the space, creating labyrinthine mandalas and manipulating their bodies into powerful, deep-lunging warrior poses. The assertive energy put forth by Riley’s women suggests her own sensitive acknowledging of a war, distant yet ever-present in our midst.

Two of the evening' s excerpts drew from social dance forms. Sharna Fabiano’s “Tangos From Here” takes tango out of the milonga and onto the concert stage. Fabiano pushes the boundaries of the form in surprising and intriguing ways, from the way partners pair up and separate to the barefooted dancers and the suggestion of evolving relatinlships stories to be told from the two couples dancing. The DC Casineros, directed by Amanda Gill, present Rueda de Casino, a popular Cuban dance that features what Americans know as the traditional square dance formation, four couples in a circle, but with the enticing spice -– plenty of hips and shoulders -- of salsa as they change places in variations of a do-si-do to Gill’s calls. The evening closed with the heart-pounding rhythms of Coyaba Dance Theater, Sylvia Soumah’s 10-year-old West African company. What’s nice about Soumah’s choreography is that she lets the women take up drums and under her direction, dancers Marcia Howard, Lashonda Pendleton, Donna Kearney, Hermione Rhones-Glass, Asha Glover, Chanice Harrison, Nile Ruff and Kayla Hamilton do a terrific job.

The evening began with a simple but heartfelt tribute to five of the Washington, DC region’s most-notable dance educators: African dance master Melvin Deal; tap aficionado Yvonne Edwards; university professor and scholar Naima Prevots; choreography teacher and university professor Meriam Rosen; and choreographer/performer and university professor Maida Withers. Each teacher brought along a student for the short ceremony. It was a shame that Dance Place didn’t allow for an opportunity for the students to offer a dance or a word of thanks to their mentors. But Miss Yvonne, the tap lady, didn’t let Baakari Wilder off the hook. Now a Broadway hoofer, I remember seeing Wilder with Tappers With Attitude on the Dance Place stage as a scrawny, five year old with unstoppable feet. “Baakari, now give me 16,” his teacher demanded. Now long, lean, muscular, a man, he laid it down, without a blink.

Sharna Fabiano and Isaac Oboka in "Tangos From Here," photo courtesy Sharna Fabiano.

September 18, 2007
© 2007 by Lisa Traiger