Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Dance Diplomacy: Healing a Hundred Years of Hatred One Step at a Tim

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Dance Diplomacy: Healing a Hundred Years of Hatred One Step at a Tim

    The Brooklyn Rail
    Sept 4 2014


    DANCE DIPLOMACY: Healing a Hundred Years of Hatred One Step at a Time

    by Gillian Jakab

    "An animal of a man shouted, 'You must dance,
    dance when our drum beats.'
    With fury whips cracked
    On the flesh of these women.
    Hand in hand the brides began their circle dance."

    --from The Dance, Siamanto (1910)

    In his brutal poem bewailing the beginnings of the genocide, renowned
    Armenian poet Siamanto used the imagery of dance as a weapon of
    humiliation's prelude to slaughter. A hundred years later, dance is
    being used as a bridge over the century-old abyss between Turks and
    Armenians. DanceMotion USA, a cultural diplomacy initiative sponsored
    by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural
    Affairs and produced by BAM, facilitated a contemporary dance
    collaboration among artists from the three nations. The performances
    were staged August 14 - 16 at BAM's Fishman Space. Admission, like the
    conscience after confession, was free.

    Dancers Alper Marangoz and Davit Grigoryan, Turk and Armenian, stood
    transfixed amidst the other moving bodies, pulled into a supported
    collapse only to quickly push away: one standing erect, the other
    pressed into the ground. A breath later they were face-to-face in a
    tender moment of apology. This choreographed phrase of reconciliation
    was one of a hundred fleeting cultural exchanges in "Unsettled," the
    hour-long collaborative piece by David Dorfman Dance of New York and
    Korhan Basaran Company of Istanbul.

    Dorfman's company was asked by DanceMotion USA to travel to Turkey,
    Tajikistan, and Armenia in search of artists to invite back to the
    States for a collaborative project. In each of the three nations,
    David Dorfman dancers not only performed, but also workshopped with
    local artists and companies with the collaboration in mind. The
    project would begin with a month-long residency at Bates Dance
    Festival in Lewiston, Maine where Dorfman's company and their guests
    would choreograph and stage a piece to be performed at BAM.

    In Istanbul, Dorfman connected with choreographer Korhan Basaran and
    his dancers. In an interview before opening night, Dorfman recalled
    how a former student of his happened to be friends with Basaran and
    enthusiastically suggested the two meet. Basaran had been busy working
    with his project-based multimedia company, which premiered "Heva,"a
    piece on Rumi and Sufism, last year. He'd also been pursuing his
    artistic interest in the tumult in Turkey surrounding last year's
    riots in Gezi Park.

    "I got to see the folks that Korhan works with in Istanbul," Dorfman
    said, "and I was really impressed by their dancing and the way they
    made dances. So I spoke to Michael [Blanco, director of DanceMotion
    USA] and I said, 'could you consider Korhan for the company that we
    bring back because I feel he's really, really great.' He's a real
    leader--really talented, and I love the people in his company."

    Basaran's company had spent 2009 - 12 in New York, and so while the
    two companies were not completely unfamiliar with one another's
    movement and spoken vocabularies, there were translators at the work
    sessions and the dancing took some time to cohere. "[The Basaran
    Company members are] really gifted movers," Dorfman said in one of the
    behind the scenes YouTube videos. "I mean tremendously gifted, and yet
    not the exact style in which we move. People can have different
    tendencies and yet we can meet in the middle."

    On Dorfman's visit to Armenia, the company held four workshops with
    Armenian artists. There, he met Yerevan-based dancers Karen
    Khachatryan and Davit Grigoryan. Following a series of auditions at
    which they stood out, Khachatryan and Grigoryan were invited to join
    the U.S. and Turkish companies for the project. The cultural diplomacy
    initiative was to "promote themes of reconciliation," in this case,
    encountering the Turkish-Armenian divide through cross-collaboration.

    The piece on August 14th was a meditation on this national conflict as
    well as an abstract representation of micro-reconciliation: fragments
    of stories and danced relationships between and among the individuals
    on stage.

    "We're dealing with the subject matter--not just about Turkey and
    Armenia--but about personal reconciliation," Dorfman said. "About
    travesties that we do to each other unfortunately, about sorrys, about
    thank yous."

    Some of these personal sorrys and thank yous worked. Others fell flat.
    The best-executed moments humanized the dancers with humor. Beyond
    mere comedic relief in the middle of solemn musings, there was an
    unsettling disconnect between what was said, who was saying it, and
    how it was interpreted. At one point, American dancer Raja Feather
    Kelly, one of the most beautiful movers in the piece, darted behind
    his fellow dancers as a ventriloquist. The chat began whimsically as a
    sort of word association: spurring nonsensical lines about sleepovers,
    blue popsicles, and hair extensions. The schizophrenic monologue
    became dark as Kelly manipulated each arm to point at a single body,
    Bryan Strimpel, and then ran through the still figures demanding that
    they say "sorry." The anger turned inward as Kelly began to
    sob--initially sharp in its emotional power, and then uncomfortable as
    the duration stretched, fizzled, and lost its provocative merit.

    The transitions from the more performative passages of spoken text to
    the throbbing full-group unisons colored by traditional central Asian
    dance motifs, worked quite well. The progressions were aided in part
    by the shifts of fractal white lights to the smoky atmospheres of
    yellow and red gels.

    The energy was high as everyone gestured with pulsing arms to the
    ceiling and to the floor. The ferocious rhythmic stomping and body
    percussion was impressive all around, though some dancers beamed while
    others were less confident in outward expression--a dichotomy that
    seemed to fall along cultural lines.

    Basaran and Dorfman themselves danced in "Unsettled." Basaran looked
    as if he had ropes attached to his arms: with each port-de-bras he
    tangled them in front of his tall body and was forced to wiggle
    through the spaces he'd created with his steps. Dorfman, at age 58,
    moved with the vibrancy of a much younger man, extending his limbs
    sharply to cut air in geometric chunks.

    David Dorfman Dance's BAM production culminates DanceMotion USA's
    fourth season. The program has covered significant ground since its
    pilot season in 2010 where it sent eleven American dance companies to
    seven different world regions including Brazil, Mozambique, and Sri
    Lanka.

    One brilliant facet of DanceMotion USA's work is its elevation of the
    journey over the destination. The program's prolific transparency of
    process, from its Youtube channel broadcasting the company's travels
    and work abroad, to its livefeeds and broadcasts of rehearsals, artist
    talks, and performances, highlights the collaborative process. The
    Armenian hand game the dancers played during rehearsal, the
    traditional Turkish dance steps learned at a workshop, the daring
    improv exercises--the genuine moments of palpable cultural exchange are
    shared and preserved so their effects can be felt beyond the dancers
    and their immediate audiences. On the live Internet feed of an
    afternoon rehearsal on August 6th, Dorfman narrated to an audience
    tuned in behind laptop screens that they were about to see a few
    possible endings for the piece. With only two days of rehearsal left,
    Dorfman and Basaran were still deciding. The window into their
    unsettled state was most humanizing.

    Government-sponsored culture is inherently suspect, and rightfully so.
    DanceMotion USA is no exception. It is not guilty of propaganda, the
    most common criticism of these programs, but rather, one questions its
    efficacy. Can dance diplomacy heal a hundred years of hatred? Can a
    contemporary dance collaboration soothe the lingering wounds of an
    ancient genocide? Of course not. Posed this way, the questions
    trivialize the century-old crime against humanity of the Armenian
    slaughter at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. But cultural diplomacy's
    secret weapon is attraction, which is naturally more effective against
    divisions rooted in emotion than political diplomacy's horsemen of
    persuasion or influence. People-to-people exchanges humanize, while
    politician-to-politician exchanges frustrate the hell out of people.
    At the nation-state level, Turkey, Armenia, and the U.S. become
    concepts rather than lands of individuals. Dance diplomacy not only
    pokes through the barriers obscuring the cultural "other," but it
    dives into them, rolls on the ground, and supports them in a weight
    share on its back. It can't choreograph a cure for the past, but it
    can offer steps toward a peaceful future.

    http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/09/dance/dance-diplomacy-healing-a-hundred-years-of-hatred-one-step-at-a-time




    From: A. Papazian
Working...
X