THE BEATIFUL SCALES OF A HIDEOUS COD

Urban Bush Women and Compagnie Jant-Bi, as a part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival, collaborated on the production of Les écailles de la mémoire, or The Scales of Memory.  Sadly, despite the involvement of award winning choreographers and world-renown dance companies, Les écailles de la mémoire proves be a disjunctive work that is far less than the sum of its parts.
Les écailles de la mémoire is a dance performance without a central plot, instead trying to convey themes regarding segregation, slavery, and French colonialism in Senegal.  While choreographers Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny both intended to explore the cultural similarities and relations between African Americans and West Africans, the laudable intention actually works against the production.  The problem here lies not in the individual skill of either the choreographers or their respective dance companies.  Zollar’s Urban Bush Women have a repertoire of over thirty works and are trained in a variety of styles, including ballet, hip hop, Capoeira, and other African Diaspora forms.  As for the males, Compagnie Jant-Bi, were all trained at Acogny’s professional workshop at the International Center for Traditional and Contemporary African Dances in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal.
Therefore, one can be sure that the technicalities of the performance will not be lacking, which they most assuredly aren’t.  If one were to look at how either company’s dancers carry themselves when performing with the members of their own troupe, they would be hard pressed to find even a single lapse in step.  That fluency, however, is lost when both companies’ dancers come on stage simultaneously, at which point the choreography falls apart.  The men from Jant-Bi clearly adhere to the rules of African dance; most of their moves, such as the cartwheels and hand-spins, display clear Capoeiran roots.  The Bush Women, however, while trained in Capoeira, have other very visible influences.  From the leaps taken from jazz dance to the shaking movements inspired by hip hop, the Bush Women don’t follow the African dancing rules as closely as Jant-Bi.  While this does complement the theme, seeing as how it is an exploration of both African and African American culture, the latter of which has many of these inspirations, it makes for disjunctive compositions.
As for the conveyance of these themes, the socially responsible subject matter is wholly in line with UBW’s and Jant-Bi’s previous works but the themes here are simply unclear.  While each dance does have its own unique atmosphere, largely due to the excellent soundtrack, atmospheric settings alone don’t state a message.  When one is commenting on social issues, some concrete facts need to be conveyed in order for the abstract themes to make sense and concrete facts can only be explicitly stated, not displayed through dance.
Never truly achieving any chemistry on stage, Les écailles de la mémoire shows how one can take talented components and make a disastrous whole.  Its difficult to say what this could have been but, as it stands, this is a memory best forgotten.