bittersweet
Saudade
David Rousseve/REALITY
Danspace Project
October 22-25, 2009
Texas-born Rousseve and his twenty-year old company REALITY provoke strong reactions in his one-hour-and-forty-minute Saudade. Billed as bittersweet, it is true to form. Rousseve does not soften his message with understatement or woo you with winsome moves.
The dancers make scary faces in this seasonal October 22, 2009 Danspace performance. But Saudade is not for fun. No intermission, we are warned. My companion said she felt “tortured.” Did Peter Handke's "Offending The Audience" inspire Rousseve as it did William Forsythe? That 60s experimental theater work has an undercurrent of irony that is inherently friendly. Saudade (Portuguese for homesickness) has a different kind of a message to convey.
In between the soft and sweet music, Rousseve tells of a stray cat, a hospital stay, and his slave-girl sister Sally. His magnetic storytelling voice subsumes all. He plays old man or woman telling powerfully affecting events from his past, or the African-American past. Butoh style, he travels across the floor towards us on a diagonal, and ends where he started, looking into a corner. He distances himself in this epic journey that rambles from slavery to Katrina.
Interspersed between Rousseve’s bittersweet bits, is energetic, assured dancing with attitude. The movement's contrasts— fast and slow, joy and pain— engage us, to a point. Pina Bausch lives on in this dance-theater. Rousseve also affirms the work of Ralph Lemon, Bill T. Jones, and others building a black dance genre from modern predecessors.
Seven play an international cast, dancing something of their national forms. The notable Olivier Tarpaga is from Burkina Faso. They are actually from the UCLA World Cultures program where Rousseve is on the faculty. Saudade’s mix of many global styles could result in something unique, but doesn’t. It may be caught between an attraction to anti-dance and a celebration of dance traditions.
The dancers play childlike games that are not so childlike. They tie each other up. They are nasty to one another. They act possessed. They drag dead-weight bodies across the floor. They follow each other in shackles tied together with an orange cord. Rousseve loses us with non-sequitur passages of play and reality. There is, however, an overriding message. Racism has not suddenly vanished in the age of Obama. Race relations are still an uncomfortable issue. In Saudade there is no magical thinking.
Race is still
an uncomfortable
issue. In Saudade
there is no
magical thinking.
Light footed Taisha Paggett moves like a wide striding woman in one of Kara Walker’s silhouettes might, if she could. Anjali Tata’s ‘joyful’ dance, is Indian contemporary with especially loud stamping. In one duet, the dancers double over and beat each other on the back. Nehara Kalev offers moments of musicality in a solo. Marianne M. Kim tries to get the others to eat Chili pepper. She is pictured eating the pepper and vomiting, in Ashley Hunt’s excellent video element.
Peter Melville’s props and set grabbed me from the start— a checkered moonscape cyclorama, and large cement extrusions that serve as mileposts in Rousseve’s journey. Here are benign, compelling visuals that are loaded with possibilities. The dance stands out.
Rousseve says we remember the small things. A dancer has a tiny tab, a deflated phallic protrusion on his pants leg, at the knee. In his joyful dance, it’s this strange and true detail that I remember. If you enjoy discoveries like this, you may feel satisfied by this work. But in the larger whole, less would be more. In the diplomatic, dizzying, display of dance styles, the choreography crumbles, leaving precious little of the dance joy Saudade extolls, or mocks.