The Cuba Project Challenges Audience to Question Truth

Author: Alexandra Hay

Stripes of light shine on the pale golden stage, a grotesque mask sits on a pole upstage left -- a hideously distorted papier-mache` image of a man's face, or a monster's. A Cuban song plays softly, the woman's voice full and rich. The first dance in Artist-in-Residence Amy Chavasse's Cuba Project dance performance, "The Fruit Axiom," is about to begin. A companion piece to her earlier work, "Death, Beauty, and Flying," "The Fruit Axiom" was inspired by the late Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas' novel, "Farewell to the Sea."
At first the interpretation seems almost too literal -- the dancers hold hands and rush towards and away from the audience, echoing the sounds of crashing waves that flood the theater. Then the dance shifts, as the dancers speak one after another, using text drawn from both Arenas' book and Chavasse's own inspiration. They relentlessly describe the ocean in hauntingly detached voices, "glittering, black, deep, black, echoing, blue, immense." The sound of the ocean shifts into an evocative melody that blends into a soft piano section. The music, however, remains a backdrop to the dance itself, a framework within which the dancers create texture and meaning.
Described as "a long, rambling, hallucinatory exposition,""Farewell to the Sea" centers on a husband and wife at the seashore. The tension between their grating, strained relationship and the beautiful imagery of their physical setting emerges. This disturbing juxtaposition seems to have fueled Chavasse's piece, "The Fruit Axiom." The dancers evoke the internal sensations of the novel as their distant, detached faces stare out at a plane of existence more spiritual than corporal. Solos, trios and full company sections flow by in sweeping, off-balance gestures, periodically interrupted as a dancer shakes or jerks, trying to reinhabit a physical reality but never fully succeeding.
Text scattered throughout the piece draws the audience even further into this world, coaxing laughter as one dancer, resting her hands on her knees, challenges the audience: "This is not some new form of transportation," she says, "you won't be going anywhere." She continued, "This is not real fruit; the taste will disappoint you." Chavasse describes her choice of title, "The Fruit Axiom," as an attempt to capture the "dark underside and layers of subterfuge," which permeate Arenas' work. "You expect fruit to taste wonderful, but what if it's rotten inside?"
An axiom being something that is accepted as universally true, "The Fruit Axiom," challenges the audience to look for the dark layer of trick beneath the truth. The Cuba Project traces its origins to the early 90s when Chavasse first started choreographing a duet that eventually grew into "Death, Beauty and Flying." It was influenced by her experiences in the early 80s when she was working in New York City and living with Juan Gonzalez, a Cuban painter who was HIV positive and later died of AIDS.
Her time in New York was a combination of "the most wonderful and terrifying things," as she danced professionally, faced her mother's death, and saw Gonzalez deal with his mortality, painting graceful scenes of "life, death and redemption."
When she started work on "Death, Beauty, and Flying" shortly after his death, she says her inspiration came from "his work, him, and my time with him it was a full and rich time for me."
Reflecting this, "Death, Beauty, and Flying" begins with slides of Gonzalez's paintings projected against the backdrop of the stage.
Many of the paintings feature images of birds and themes of ascension, as haunting figures gaze out of the frames, beautiful and scared. The dance echoes the paintings, as one dancer lifts another who flaps her arms, aching to fly. The tone of the piece is similar to that of "The Fruit Axiom," but darker.
The dancers seem to reach repeatedly upward, straining towards something higher, before falling back down to a world of regret and pain.
The dance moves through a series of bleak portraits, evoking a sense of disconnection and loss before ending as it began, with the paintings of Gonzalez projected on the back wall.
During Feb. break, the Dance Company of Middlebury College will take its production to Cuba. The trip presented some difficulty to organize, as travel to Cuba is restricted and approval for "educational" or "cultural exchange" programs is required. Chavasse said, "There was a lot of red tape, channels and protocol" to be completed in order to plan the event. Music Contact International, a firm based in Burlington that plans many of the high school and college arts exchange programs, organized the trip, developed the itinerary and will be providing an escort to accompany the group.
The Dance Company will stay in hotels, perform informally throughout the week, give at least two formal performances, and participate in Master Classes and workshops every day. It will be dancing primarily with the Narcisco Medina Dance Company of Cuba, which has its own dance venue. The Cuban company presents primarily Afro-Caribbean dance and is excited to see what the contemporary, post-modern dance world of the United States is like.
The Dance Company of Middlebury will also visit other dance groups, including Cienfuegos and the Yuruba Folkloric Group, although they do not know what to anticipate.
Chavasse is prepared for the facilities to be "falling apart a little," and the need to adjust the performance for different technological capabilities. She repeatedly reminds the dancers to have "very loose expectations" of what they will find.
"That's what I like about it," Chavasse says, "I don't know what will happen, what to expect. It's an adventure."