'Traitor' an uneven performance

Author: Robert McKay

The wall clicks on, 1500 square feet of TV static. In contemporary dance, this is about as original a backdrop as the Doric columns behind every early Renaissance saint and his brother. The font, however, is very nice, some kind of chunky ultra-bold with slab serifs. But the words are about as interesting as the static: "There. Is. No. Absolute. Truth. At. The. Quantum. Level." Full stop. Lisa Gonzales '94 is doubling over and popping back up very rapidly, as if afflicted with whooping cough. Slab serif: "And we wonder why our hearts break.

Aside from this laughably cerebral attempt to break my heart, the opener to "Traitor," Gonzales' three-part program with Darrell Jones had some interesting moments. Like the entire program, the piece - entitled "the things themselves" - sometimes thrived and sometimes languished on stark juxtapositions in the dancer's register and tone.

Much of Gonzales' movements in the first piece were jittery, uncontrolled and deliberately un-dancelike. The performance gained tension from her constantly "breaking" and regaining character. However, unlike Jones' character in his solo piece, Gonzales' was ill-defined, with no real narrative or emotional arc emerging from her stomping circumnavigations of the stage; it sometimes looked like she was heading for the Ministry of Silly Walks. Nor did much purpose shine through in her final actions, though they were interesting in and of themselves. At one point, Gonzales opened the wooden box she had placed in a lone spot at the beginning, removed a cocktail umbrella and held it up against a stereo thunderstorm complete with the sounds of car tires carving through puddles. As she slowly backed upstage, the audience got some sense of her as a vulnerable, empathetic figure, but this potentially engaging moment was most unfortunately diluted by Rumi babbling something about "new organs of perception" on the giant TV screen - I think I may have needed some new organs to appreciate whatever it was Gonzales was getting at.

Jones' solo, "third Swan from the end" made better use of its huge leaps in register. Jones' strong, straight-limbed articulation of popular dance vocabulary was arresting. When he "broke character" and went into a casual register of movement and speech, his appeals to the audience were engaging in a sort of front-porch raconteur style. Apropos of the vogue dancing he brought to the stage, Jones took a DJ's sampling approach to the piece, ripping sometimes rough segues between spoken word poetry, dialogue from The Color Purple, a story about gender ambiguity and a fascinating bit about Othello. Here, Jones pointed out three imaginary characters in distinct positions on the stage: Othello here, Desdemona there, Iago there. He then walked through all three positions, perhaps identifying himself with all three characters. He identifies the characters as "black man; white woman; me." Jones as Iago does not seem to fit anywhere, but Jones as halfway between black and white, male and female perhaps does. This would also make sense of the odd anecdote Jones tells about seeing a guy in tough-looking Army fatigues and a "hood cap" walking through Harlem in stilettos. So although there may have been some Shakespearian method to the madness, it was Jones' magnetism as a storyteller that kept the piece from falling apart. Well, that and the fantastic vogue solo he gave us at the end.

Jones and Gonzales came together in the final duet, "Traitor," which transcended the headiness of the solos and delivered something emotional, playful and unexpected. The vocabulary of sampling and breaking character was in its highest form here, with a tango dip leading into an aikido move whereby Gonzales brought Jones to the floor and his head came to rest in her lap. In this moment, repeated later in the piece, the two figures were immensely compelling. We have just watched so much drain out of them: the heterosexual tension of tango, the violence of martial arts and even the stylization of dance itself are gone. They face us in an intimate posture that is impossible to read, or rather, one that lends itself to many readings: parent and child, lovers, best friends.

This wonderfully open-ended quality in the intimacy between Gonzales and Jones had its prologue in Jones' solo, in which Othello and Desdemona prepare the audience for loaded heterosexual and racial tensions. The rest of Jones' piece worked to thoroughly remix his identity, so by the time the finale took place the audience was prepared for the strange kinds of intimacy shown by the dancers. It was an intimacy that flowed effortlessly between choreographed identities and reached a magical space where two human beings interact intensely in a situation with identity pretty much forgotten.

Even the boundary between child and adult was blurred, in the sense that Jones and Gonzales were engaged in the most intense, serious kind of play. They were like children engaged in wild, imaginative roles. "What do you want to do now?" Jones asked. "Let's drink each other," Gonzales responded. These little verbal check-ins stitched the dance segments together, implying that Gonzales and Jones were engaged in a collaborative project of immense importance. Throughout these mesmerizing exchanges, the music made similarly good use of incongruity as funk and minor-key arias played off of each other, the latter lending the dancers' dreamlike frolics an apt quality of goofy seriousness. Jones and Gonzales are to be commended for letting their imaginations and hunches roam free on this last piece - it was a redeeming conclusion to a somewhat rough program.