‘Voodoo’ Dance Show Brings Dadaism Out of History

By Jennifer Noyer For the Journal

Wild Dancing West, a festival of local and regional contemporary dance, opened last Friday evening with Albuquerque’s Ecotone Physical Theatre at the North 4th Theater, and Readymade Dance Theatre at CAKE (4011 Silver SE). The festival continues for the next two weekends at the N4th Theater.

Ecotone’s “Voodoo Cabaret,” directed by Donna Jewell and Kevin Paul, demonstrated that Dada art is alive and well, at least in this piece. The nihilistic movement originated in 1916 as a protest against the society that produced World War I. Artists fed up with society challenged established canons of art, thought and morality: never follow rules, spit on nationalism, rationalism, materialism — all “isms.” That pretty well describes “Voodoo Cabaret”; however, the nonsense factor produced some humor.

Eight performers, including directors and musicians, were scattered among star-shaped helium balloons staked on strings around the stage. Silence, laughs, grunts of “hup,” and soft hissing sounds were the only music. The movers traveled in curving patterns, interrupted by sharp hand gestures and sudden stops in space. The words “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” and “pas de boure” emerged from the dancers as they moved. This was all improvisation. Jewell writes in the program that here the art form of improvisation is a merging of the performers’ pedestrian and theatrical worlds. Chaos, controlled to some degree, and a cynical attitude toward contemporary life fixed this performance in the tradition of Dada.

Bill Clark’s music evolved with occasional blending of electronic keyboard, accordion, flute and trumpet. One section, built around the theme of alcohol and hangovers, was really beautiful, with musical form and a kind of yearning ambience. The section with a comic cowgirl fashion theme worked with projections of outdoor sculpture as dancers strutted their cowgirl costumes.

As dance, this performance was not really beautiful to watch, but it was an experiment, and that’s good in and of itself.

Zsolt Palcza’s Readymade Theatre presented the emotionally gripping “Pure,” with three dancers enmeshed in a dreamlike video world of water imagery. The stage, a pure white box open only above, was flooded by a projected seascape. Two figures, Sarah Wright and Dana Ten Broeck, lay on their backs, moving slowly as waves flowed around them and across the stage toward the audience. A third dancer, Jenny Hipscher, climbed over one wall to awaken the figures or intrude on their dreams in a series of violent attacks on the boundaries of the white box. Enormous effort was involved, a kind of somnambulant desperation as the visual imagery developed into undersea shapes of jellyfish, man-o’-war, and even an evil reptilian head and eye toward the end.

The white box, like the brain’s bone box, challenged dancers struggling to escape its boundaries, and enclosed a series of unrelated wishes, in a verbal stream-ofconsciousness: “I would like to know my grandparents,”"To stop biting my nails;”"Kill fewer houseplants” and finally, “Stop the war.”

Jenny Hipscher initiated a wild, maenadlike movement with torso flung forward, then back, and a high jump with vibrating arms and hands. This became a strong unison statement by all three figures, throbbing with desperation.

Palcza created the video and sound with a musical collage from composer Goran Bregovic and selections from Eotvos Peter, John Moran and Arvo Part. Small planetlike balls descended from the ceiling to be set in motion by the dancers. At one point one ball was detached and passed from one part of the body to another through full body embraces between the three. This dance was body language, verbal statement, and visual imagery combined masterfully in luscious color.

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