Leaps float literally overhead, lifts hover above your lap, tiny gestures are visible, emotions palpable, turns ruffle your hair.
As real estate prices rocket upward, and high-priced housing and stores replace studios and alternative performance spaces, some choreographers are experimenting, performing in borrowed spaces. Choreographer Edisa Weeks/Delirious Dances is becoming an expert at it. “I was tired of spending a year working on a piece and only having 3 or 4 performances, more if we were lucky and got to tour. I wanted to find a paradigm where I wasn’t dependent on presenters, where I could allow time for the dancers to grow into the work. And I was tired of people complaining that audiences aren’t coming to the theater. So I thought, ‘why not go to where people are, in their homes.’”
Since May 2006 Liaisons has been performed in 15 homes, most in Brooklyn, a few in Staten Island, Manhattan, and Berlin. In New York, Weeks relied on friends and friends of friends. In Berlin, where the piece was performed in August of 2007 as part of the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt’s 50th Anniversary Celebration, she knew no one. “I approached people on the street and asked if I could perform in their living room.” Her friends thought this was “sketchy.” But in Berlin she found there was “less of a culture of fear.” Approaching 180 people, in a public library, a park, a grocery store, near a train station, and the post office, three — a law student, a religion professor, and an experimental music curator — said yes.
Weeks’ experiment asks how performing in intimate spaces changes interactions between audience members. Even seated in close proximity “audiences don’t talk to or acknowledge each other’s presence,” she says. I saw Liaisons in a Park Slope walk-up. Home of a gregarious, Texas-transplant costume-designer, she welcomed the audience with queso, salsa, chips, wine, beer, and Mix-a-lotas — beer, spicy lime juice and hot sauce. The chatter in the kitchen, lively between acquaintances, is stilted but pleasant between strangers. Performer/audience introductions at the dance’s end facilitated warm discussion. “I ultimately realized that I could not achieve a community in two hours, but what I could do was have the dance concert be a vehicle for dialogue and interaction.”
Living rooms are family dance halls and Liaisons opens with a close-bodied cha-cha of sorts. Twisting and twining around each other to the King of Easy Listening, Mantovani & His Orchestra, each dancer’s style is unique. Maxx Passion’s hips leisurely shift as her arms slowly lift like a flamenco dancer, Melissa Guerrero prowls around her, teens trying out steps? Passion’s presence is quiet, intense. Solomon Bafana Matea joins her; their bodies close in a sensuous, dreamy dance. Lifting her over his shoulder, Passion hovers over the audience’s heads.
Weeks loves the slippage between home and performance. Guerrero re-enters. Reveling in the dramatic, like a wayward child she starts to pull that most intimate garment, underwear, from a basket. At first slowly, then wildly, she tosses underwear everywhere. She runs waving it; she slides on it; the floor is a mess. In Germany, the law student was mortified until she realized that the unmentionables pulled from her hamper were not hers, but props.
So crucial, so integral is audience reaction that Weeks no longer likes to rehearse without one. The performers need to respond to an observer, it shapes their performance.
Elegant and powerful, Benjamin Asriel occupies the dynamic center of the piece. Guerrero teases him putting layers of underwear on his head, blindfolding him. With Passion she chases Asriel, holding him down, stripping him to his underwear. They poke and tickle, Asriel’s arms flail as he tries to find his attackers, a tortured Blind Man’s Bluff. In this small space fear and anger are palpable — child-like cruelty, date rape, abuse — the dark side of the living room. Asriel turns away from the women, slapping at the audience. “I wanted Ben to inappropriately displace his anger onto the audience,” says Weeks. “But after several performances and audience discussions, I realized he needs to be able to adjust emotionally to what he senses from the audience.” In one home, where a 13-year old girl lived, Asriel dialed down his “anger.”
Matea’s duets with the audience require the utmost in sensitivity. Challenging American society’s common perception of black men as threatening, Matea’s proffered hand initiates improvisational duets. “A black man offering his hand to a stranger,” Weeks comments, but he’s “giving them a gift, a dance.” The duets range from switching audience member’s seats, perhaps separating a couple, to “mapping the lines in their palm” with his bodies strong, expressive movement. The last interaction (there are six) always involves giving control over his body to a person in the audience; the audience member (unknowingly) leads him.” I danced this with Matea. The experience is slightly unnerving. After holding his hand out to me, some audience members refused, he helped me up. Holding me in dance position I waited, he waited. Eventually we walked, tango-like, in a circle. I stopped. We stood. It became a game. I looked at the audience — wondering, exasperated, patient; I looked at Matea, we turned. We stopped. I never knew how he was playing with me.
The end, a quartet, again separates the audience from the beautiful shifting, circling, lifting dancers.
This dance we cannot join; it is not your Grandma’s cha cha. Asriel disappears returning with a plate of oranges for all.
Liaisons is now being performed in hospitals, nursing homes, and senior centers, as well as in living rooms in September. If you are interested in seeing or hosting a performance of Liaisons contact: Edisa Weeks — edisaweeks@gmail.com. More information, and a video of Berlin at www.myspace.com/liaisonsdance.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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