Oct
15
Political Mother: BAM, boom, ba-da-dum
October 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Even before the curtain lifts, Political Mother has begun. The dim, smoky lighting and cacophonous murmuring of the audience, along with the impassive face of the red curtain shielding the stage, create an initial tone of tension, wildness, and mystery.
As the theatre goes dark, the audience is hushed, forcing silence and darkness to take on volume and shape.
As the music starts, there is a wild yet rhythmic beating of drums: the auditorium becomes a jungle, a battlefield.
A samurai warrior reenacts seppuku onstage; it is a counter-instinctual sacrifice, a suicide, an end.
These separate experiences of contrast are united as the main themes of the performance, expressed through the intricacy, creativity, intimacy, and power of Hofesh Shechter’s choreography and the beauty of the movement of dancer and music. Political Mother is a powerful, complex exploration of light and dark, contact and space, geometry and repetition, silence and noise, and of wildness and control.
The lighting, which shifted from dim greys and ochres to bright white spotlights and violet o’s, mimicked the technique of “tenebrism” used by many painters in the Baroque period by maintaining a dramatic contrast between light and shadow. At times, the bodies of the dancers became abstracted—fluid, faceless movement and shape—while the shadows they cast and the darkness of the stage took on their own forms, creating a multi-layered expression of dance and music, united by the purity of conceptual structures.
In a reflection of the non-physical intimacy that can be experienced when walking in the city, through streets and around buildings and crowds, (such as the role of the flâneur described by authors Paul Auster and Michel Certeau) the dancers would perform identical movements—separate in body but united by choreography—and move together without touching, the darkness and space in-between again playing a role in the volume, emotion, and power expressed by Political Mother. When the dancers did come into contact, they were partially hidden by each other’s movements and shadows: dark embraces expressing the raw, violent power of soul and soul, a perfect contrast and harmony in one. It was a uniting of opposites, much like the architecture of New York City itself, especially the “vertical schism” described by Rem Koolhaas in his book Delirious New York: the co-existence of skyscraper (body) with life on the streets (chaos, energy, movement).
The choreography also included geometric forms created by the arms and moves of the dancers, and a more metaphorical sense of geometry in the steady rhythms of guitar and drums. The majority of the music was performed live on stage, which added both a raw power and the potential for human error, leading to a relationship between dancer and song that was realer and more intense than live dancing to recorded audio. Throughout the performance, there was also a repetition of crawling, writhing, shaking, and rigidity followed by fluidity, all of which communicated a wild energy barely contained, barely under control: a careful toeing of the line between dance and seizure.
The use of silence as a means of communication was reflected during parts of the performance when the music would stop but the dancers would continue, their movements unbroken. In contrast, the stage would sometimes be devoid of dancers and the music, switching abruptly from gritty rock to classical to silence to American folk, would fill the theatre. Near the end of the performance, a red neon sign lit up the stage: “Where there is pressure there is folk dance”, each segment revealed one by one, maintaining tension and mystery and directly involving the audience in the performance.
Of course, Political Mother is a piece of conceptual art and so should be analyzed in the style of Susan Sontag: as a form of beauty in the purity of movement, composition, and form. There can be no one specific “meaning” assigned to Shechter’s choreography, merely an appreciation of his use of contrast, light, and space to highlight the ability of the human body to move and create new shapes, to express power and intimacy, to maintain a delicate control over muscle and tension and wildness. Roger Scruton points out in his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction:
“Music… is not telling a story about a state of mind, that could have been told in another way by another work: it is unfolding its own singular grave expression… performers show their understanding of an expressive work of music not by identifying some state of mind which it is ‘about’, but by playing with understanding. They must fit themselves into the groove of the work.” (Scruton, 99)
As both dancer and music are united—not only figuratively, but literally on stage—each is an understanding of the other and of the indefinable expression of each art form alone: separate, not touching, contrasting, but harmonious. The music and the dance are shadows, silence; shapes and concepts that the audience can feel and hear but never quite pin down. Overall, the performance was complex, breathtaking, and brimming with raw creative talent and energy.
(photograph by Brittany Beyer for The Dance Enthusiast)
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