At the top we followed our choreographers and joined hands to form a chain. We circled in around the large tree at the center of the small plaza overlooking the port. In front of me was a boy of about three. We circled in, tightening around the layers of people in front of us as more links in the chain emerged from the stairway and coiled around us. I stretched my friend's arm in order to stay just behind the little boy, providing the other half of the support that his mother's hand gave him from in front. We circle-danced over the uneven bricks and the little boy, in the way that small children have of trusting anyone significantly larger than them, allowed me to use our locked hands as a means to lift him over gaps and slants.
A crowd watched from the sides, skeptically, but walking in the circle I could see the sense of the dance. The warmth of sharing movement with strangers. We broke apart slowly and looked up to find the troupe arranged in the tree.
We stood around them as they dropped pieces of paper inscribed with heartfelt messages in broken Spanish, about dreams and clean water. Balloons drifted down and a man played the accordion. After we had all received a few of the small paper airplanes and paper balls, we began to drift away, chattering. The dancers climbed uncertainly down from the tree.
So ended the VII Festival Internacional Danzalborde de Valparaiso, a yearly October event in the city. It had been a week-long event featuring dance troupes from several different countries. Like the final circle around the tree, it was an event that was heartfelt, experimental, occasionally hokey and at times a flop. As things tend to go, here, there was the occasional lapse in the audio equipment, the fact that the locations of the dances were nearly impossible to find out, and a touch of over-earnestness. The awkward moments, though, never overshadowed the wonderful feeling of living in a place that would organize such a thing: a week of contemporary dance spread out through the streets of the city.
Work and the scarcity of information caused me to miss out on all but the final weekend of the festival. That Saturday afternoon, I joined a friend in an attempt to track down the performance that she had finally found a listing for. We wandered around Cerro Bellavista, until finally we discovered a crowd hanging around a stage-like section of the Museo de Cielo Abierto.
A Columbian dance troupe began with a duet. The man and woman, in black street clothes, mixed the occasional classic dance form with angular, disjointed movements. The music was sometimes harmonic, sometimes little more than ambient noise. These contrasts worked extremely well in some segments of the dance; in others I couldn't help but see hints of the infamous Robot dance. The dancers played out various conflicts and reconciliations that can occur in a relationship. At times the woman would collapse, the man urging her up with a series of pushes from his feet. Sometimes he would fall and she would catch him.
The following dance, from the same troupe, showed the same strengths and weaknesses as the first. A group of people crawled, wiggled, and occasionally spun in arabesques across the space. A woman dropped her bright pink pants and hobbled forwards and backwards before pulling them up halfway and rushing forward to the stairs.
After the performance, the dancers left and the crowd dispersed. A small girl took the stage and mimicked the wide, dramatic jerks and thrusts of the dance she had just seen.
That night, the same friend and I went to an indoor performance by a Mexican group. The listing labelled the style as "Minimal Movement." Given that it was in Spanish, I translated it in my mind as "Minimalist Movement." I should have trusted my first reading.
The hall, the auditorium of a local university, was in fact a converted old church. My friend and I found a spot up in the back corner of a crowded set of wooden bleachers. In front of us, underneath the saints looking down from stained glass windows, a woman sat in a chair. She was surrounded by glowing orange globes, strung together like Christmas tree lights. Three antique lamps sat next to the chair. As the crowd settled in, a strange series of sounds began to play and the dancer moved her hand slowly towards her face in a dramatic gesture. The shadow cast by the spotlight hitting her hand made the appearance of a small black tulip opening on her chest. We waited.
A few minutes later, she moved her head slowly to the side and extended her arm. We waited.
She traced her foot across the ground. She opened her mouth, closed her mouth. The music was the sound of dripping water, echoing tones, and wind, intercut with a sudden scream or the sound of a train. I began to consider the fact that bleachers have no side exits.
The visual effect was striking, but after twenty and then thirty minutes passed, I arrived at the critical opinion that perhaps the "voyeurism" mentioned in the description referred to a sort of mirror effect. As I watched the performer squirm around, miming in extreme slow motion the effects of inner turmoil, I began to feel supremely uncomfortable. Trapped. I switched on my art theory and concluded that perhaps this was intended: the audience sharing the stress of the character being danced.
After forty minutes, I was sure that I would much rather be writing an analysis of this piece than experiencing it.
After fifty minutes, I was considering if perhaps the intended effect was to cause someone in the audience to break down and yell for it to stop, as a sort of peak to the anxiety of the dance.
After an hour, I had decided that no analytical approach to this piece could give me back the time I'd lost sitting uncomfortably wedged between college students, on a piece of wood, watching a woman sit in a chair.
Finally, finally, she stood up. In strange, jerky movements, she made her way to a side door and lurched out of the room. The door remained open for several minutes, shooting a plank of white light into the space dominated by dark and glowing orange. Then suddenly, it slammed loudly shut. The visual effect was beautiful.
I didn't really care. I was scarily close to a temper tantrum when the dancer and the other members of her group--who had been working the sounds and the lights--came out to answer questions.
They explained that interaction with the audience was an essential part of the show and asked for input. Students raised their hands with detailed questions about composition and form. The group proudly explained that other than several key points which were choreographed, the rest was entirely improvisation on the part of all three. While looking carefully over the work for 'key points,' I could settle only on a moment when the sounds stopped and the woman kicked the lights, scattering a pile of forks with a metallic sound that was refreshing in the sense that it was the only sudden thing to happen within an hour and a quarter's time. The man who improvised the sound for the piece exclaimed several times over how he hadn't known that the dancer would leave through the door; she modestly explained how it just came to her. More questions were asked. The group discussed the time a cat had entered the performance space in Buenos Aires and thus became part of the performance. They explained how each piece is different, depending on the location in which it will be performed. The dancer elaborated by detailing how in each new city they go to find costumes and props, and these new pieces contribute to the choreography as well. I mentally threw a quick curse at the vendors of antique lamps, black bell skirts, and victorian-style white blouses, wherever in Valparaiso they may be.
When we were released, my friend and I walked at a near-running pace away from the building, laughing and exclaiming. She thought perhaps there had been a helicopter involved in the idea at some point; I wondered about nightmares. We decided that all of that not-moving made us want to walk widely and swingingly back to her place.
The next day I met her and another friend for another performance and was very concerned to find out that it would be the same group once again. Upon determining that we could not possibly be trapped in the pedestrian road on which the stage was set, we all decided to stay and see what happened. Thankfully, the woman is far more interesting when she moves.
This time the inspirational pieces were a large plastic tablecloth set with a birthday cake and six place settings with plates and empty bottles. The costume was a flouncing purple satin dress, a bright red bike helmet worn backwards, black stockings striped with yellow, large boots, and a yellow fly swatter. The character that arose from all of this seemed to be some kind of combination between a martian and a small child.
The man who had been working the lights the night previously was involved this time, scurrying around in a plastic apron. He beckoned members from the audience out from the sides of the street to take the places around the tablecloth.
At the end, he carried her, kicking and screaming, cake demolished on her boots, out of a side door wrapped in duct tape. I was glad not to be forced into artistic appreciation, and felt much warmer towards the group as I followed the file of people up the stairs towards the circle around the tree.
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