Village Voice Review: Fall and Recover
Posted April 3, 2011 at 8:04 pm
Julliard Revives Nijinska’s Les Noches; the Irish Modern Theatre Brings Fall and Recover to La MaMa
by Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice
A woman sitting on a white chair in La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre is telling a story, without hesitation or pauses, in an African language I don’t understand. From time to time, she chants in a high voice. Beside her sits a woman from a European country. Neither looks at the other, but from time to time, the second woman nods her head, as if she understands. After a while, she begins to echo the seemingly unconscious gestures the first woman uses as she speaks. In the program for John Scott’s Fall and Recover, neither of these women, Kiribu and Nina, reveals her last name or the name of the country where she has family. What they have in common, aside from performing in this work, are histories of pain.
In 2003, Scott, the director and principal choreographer of Dublin’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre, was invited to teach a workshop at the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture (CCST) for people who have experienced “the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering for a specific purpose” (the UN definition of torture). Ten of the 12 performers who came to New York to perform Fall and Recover are among the many clients of CCST with whom Scott has since worked (the other two dancers, assistant choreographers Aisling Doyle and Philip Connaughton, are members of IMDT). They sought asylum in Ireland and are now Irish citizens.
No one could call Fall and Recover “victim art”; no terrible stories are told or re-enacted. It’s a plotless dance whose images convey surviving and starting over with the support of others. And finding joy and release in movements, many of which derive from what emerged in workshop and rehearsal improvisations.
The simple acts of standing with one’s back to the wall or falling onto a heap of bodies explode with a variety of meanings. So does a moment in which Sebastiao Mpembele Kamalandua, a large, impressive man, stands and breathes powerfully, as if he had concentrate everything he had on the action. So too does a passage early on in which performers—all wearing white clothing—draw houses and huts on the white paper covering the floor and connect the dwellings with snaking trails; then they rip up the paper and toss it wildly around. For a few moments, Kiribu in her chair is stranded on a tiny white island on the now dark floor, while others gather up the scraps and carry them offstage. All that time, slender, graying Haile Tkabo stands making grave, slow gestures to the sky that are full of feeling.
One of the most moving things about Fall and Recover is the way Scott’s choreography emphasizes the potency of community as a healing act through devices like having people gradually join to build unison actions, form patterns together, carry one another, hold hands. In these activities, they are supported by shifting lighting and the sensitive music supplied by performer-composer Rossa O’Snodaigh, who sits to one side with his guitar, a tiny bugle, various percussion instruments, and a little music box.
For one beautiful passage, Elizabeth Suh stands against a wall at the back, sliding down it into a sitting position, pushing herself back up, sliding down again, while O’Snodaigh surrounds her with ringing tones and deep, bass notes. When she’s finally stable, the five other women approach, one by one, and paste themselves to her in a clump that they then draw out into a line; together they raise their arms high.
In solo moments, people sometimes spread their arms like wings, aspiring to freedom. Jumping, too, pulls them away from the earth. Nimble young Mufutau Kehinde Yusuf (Junior) repeatedly vaults straight up, high off the ground, and others face off with him and jump too. We can only guess at their histories. Tkabo could be writing words on the air, Patience Namehe scratching them on her body. And amid the falls and the silences and a passage of wild staggering, they also sing and dance. Usually one person starts, and others join until they become a joyful, swinging, stamping procession, their voices in gorgeous, lusty harmony.
Scott has composed Fall and Recover with sensitivity, skill, and astute theatricality, weaving culturally diverse people into an ensemble, while honoring their individuality. All those onstage (that includes Francis Acilu, Faranak Mehdi Golhini, and Solomon ljigade) set their imprint on the work. And they perform not only together and for us, but with and for remembered others. An unattributed quote by one of them is printed in the program: “When we dance, I could say I’m in heaven because I’m mingling with so many people others can’t see.”
In the end, they all lie down and trace their outlines with salt, going over and over the pattern. Under cool lights, the drawings are almost phosphorescent, and when the cast exits, they remain there, shining.
After the bows on opening night, Scott attempted to thank us for coming and to say a few words about the event, but he was drowned out. From backstage, there erupted such jubilant singing that you could swear those vanished others, wherever they are, could hear it too.