Dandelion Dance Theatre
“Anicca”
Theatre of Yugen
July 14, 2006
A thoroughly naked man with a whistle on a lanyard around his neck and a clipboard in his hand greeted latecomers to a recent evening’s performance of Anicca. They shuffled apologetically into the Theatre of Yugen’s tiny Noh Space, clambering over the row of unclothed people sitting serenely on the floor, and tried so hard not to stare. Was it me, or did they all look just a little disinclined to remove their coats?
Lesson? Don’t be late to performances of Dandelion Dance Theater’s “Undressed Project” – the latest installment of which played at the Noh Space last weekend.
Anicca or Night Marsh II is not Oh! Calcutta! But neither is it a coy production. It’s all hanging out there, right from the start. Oh, sure, there are some clothes on the performers, but they mainly exist to be removed in this series of vignettes that start in the intimate box of the Noh Space, and then continue on the winding site-specific installation segment to culminate outside in the garden overlooking Alabama Street.
Nakedness, or clothedness, as relates to power is the core concept that lurks behind this anti-sartorial bit of dance-theater. It’s certainly not a new concept, choreographers have been doing this since time immemorial – recent exponents include Karen Finley, Pina Bausch, Glen Tetley, to name just a few -- but one begins to suspect that the performance is more of a culmination of a course of healing therapy than serious choreography. There’s a lot of tension-easing ribaldry in the spoken sidelong comments and the movement of the piece, but underlying it all is the question – how naked did it really need to be?
The assemblage of dancers features as wide a variety of shapes and sizes as you can imagine, with two mixed-ability performers, one who performs with a leg prosthesis and the other who works from her wheelchair. A circus barker spotlight, people running amok in BVDs to the music of the hyper-falsetto chansons of the Tiger Lilies, a guy playing Dvorak’s Humoresque on the violin as he’s denuded-- it all starts to look like a cross between healing arts therapy and burlesque.
Still there are a few moments of intriguing dancing. An opening duel between two tough guys who assert primacy by pants-ing each other is amusing, and there’s a gracefully contentious fight over a prosthetic leg and a pair of glasses that covers roughly the same territory. Perhaps the most touching is a solo in which a woman whose leg has been amputated recount the moments she spent locked in the remains of a grisly car wreck.
French choreographer Boris Charmatz once told dance critic Clive Barnes "The naked body hides every bit as much as it reveals." And what is of greatest interest in Anicca is the untold stories of these bodies, those tattoos and stretch marks. Frustrating, though, is the sense that the piece ultimately just scratches at the idea that a body is the story of one’s life -- that it can be just another costume, one more suit that we wear. The typical disinclination to reveal a body part (“The sleeves cover that scar,” “A high neckline hides the flabby skin,” etc.) is the story.
Anicca is hardly prudish and yet, it’s also hardly revelatory. As we rose to begin the walk through of the installation-art portion of the show, I couldn’t help thinking, “nakedness and emotion, vulnerability, a walk down the ‘Hall of Impermanence’ -- yes, I get it. But, then what?”
We entered the outside garden, where I observed -- over the heads of the twenty-odd naked performers who mingled among us -- the familiar San Francisco fog gently roiling over the streets toward us. Swathed to the lip in my typical summer attire – which includes a field jacket over a Polartec fleece, sealed with a 48-inch pashminette scarf -- I placed my well-clad derriere on the metal chairs next to a quizzical ceramic garden goat and thought to myself, “Brrr.”
And yet, the performers stood stoically quivering amongst us as yet another drama played out on a blood smeared carpet under the trees. I pulled on a pair of lined leather gloves and tried politely not to think about shrinkage. And I tried to concentrate on what was going on. “Difficult. Very cold,” it says in my notes. Other audience members huddled under blankets and finally, at the conclusion of the show, one of them tossed a blanket to the performers.
“Here! Now you can cover up!”
They made a beeline for the great indoors. The show was over.
This review originally appeared on KQED.org
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