Danspace Season

Last Saturday F and I went to see the Parijat Desai Dance Company at Danspace Project; the previous Saturday we went to see a Japanese troupe Yummydance. Danspace has been programming for years at the gorgeous St Mark's Church and they are in the middle of a great season.

It is always a joy to be in the main room of the Church, which I think they refer to as the sanctuary. It is a beautiful room, with no altar (one sits in the altar space) and beautiful stained glass windows. Its so pretty when the lights go out and one can see light from the street illuminating the windows above the balcony on the other side of the room. The space is bare, simple, without the gaudy embellishments of most churches. One relaxes immediately in this environment, as if there is room for you and there is no clutter, and no reminders of the torment of Christ on the cross or any other bizarre Christian imagery.

It is also great to see dance and only pay $15 for a ticket. Especially when one thinks that I paid $30 for a seat at City Center and had to elongate my neck, cock my head, and twist my torso in order to gain only a partial view of the stage. At the Church the sight lines are always perfect and even though F and I didn't make a reservation, and it seemed as if the event was selling out, we ended up getting great seats even though we couldn't sit together.

Yummydance performed two pieces. The first "tony, and me" was a pas de trois between a puppet, a puppeteer, and a dancer. Their interaction was intense, and sometimes moving. The puppet was very animated (made in part from a cello) and it was exciting to see how it was being manipulated but at times the dance became a duet between the puppet and the dancer as they moved in sync across the floor. The puppeteer almost disappeared.

Bring Me a PPPeach was the second piece, performed by five women. It was a kinetic piece of much rushing, running, and jumping, less concerned with virtuosic movement and precise gesture than in creative pattern and trajectory while maintaining a deadpan expression. The five women were distinctive but also cohered into a unit of energy, and avoided any and all traditions of Japanese ritualistic dance and cliches about how femininity should be depicted. They were rebellious and enjoying it.

Parijat Desai Dance is rooted in the popular southern Indian dance traditional Bharata Natyam, but the company embraces a variety of other forms, including modern dance, martial arts, yoga, and Pina Bausch-inspired danztheatre (and probably other ingredients that I couldn't discern). Remarkably, the choreography is always coherent even as it is eclectic.

The final piece, "Quiet/Fire", was accompanied by live music (amazing to have live musicians included in a ticket for $15): a violinist, two percussionists, a vocalist (who used the vocal percussion style that I think is called Konnakol) and some sort of box that played the drone (they varied its volume). The dancers' movements were from martial arts, and at times one could have thought one was watching a kung fu movie because dancers fought against each other in very stylized fashion but with an intensity that was spellbinding. It was very exciting to watch. All the dancers were great, but Parijat Desai always stands out: she dances with ease and her gesturing is so articulated--at times it appears as if she is slow motion (because her process of movement is so realized and visible) even when as the leader of the troupe she is always slightly ahead of her dancers. Equally pleasurable to watch was Mohan Kulasingam but for very different reasons: his effort was always palpable and his commitment to the movement was never disguised by technique yet he was entirely graceful.

The second piece "Malaysia" was more Danztheatre than Bharata Natyam. the piece brought in the dancers' experiences as immigrants, students, and Asian-Americans, it also brought in some of the rehearsal dynamics of the company. It centered on the two deictics "here" and "there", which began to have two different distinctions--"here" as the United States" and "there" as wherever one came from before and "here" and "there" as designations of a movement within a dance phrase. Mohan Kulasingam's story about how he couldn't go back "there" because of his gayness was particularly moving, and the ways in which the other dancers, all female, but also all displaced to varying degrees, involved him and were attuned to him, was endearing without any sentimentality. The dancers' everyday personalities came through without sacrificing their virtuosic dance personas, and once again Parijat Desai was particularly charming, playing the choreographer who is rather befuddled by her dancers' concerns about their identities and just wants them to learn the steps in the right order. She is a major talent.