Guzman’s Home for Unexpected Dancers
Golden frames hung on every wall in the black box theater. Large and golden, like one would expect the Evil Queen's Magic Mirror to inhabit, exposed a few dancers, pressed against one of the black walls. Flamenco music began to flare from the speakers overhead, and in floated a dancer...on the back of an electric wheel chair of another dancer. With hands etheric, at once inviting and reflective, the dancers sliced through the space, while others filled mirrors, reflecting each other across the divide of the black box, over the faces and behind the hearts of the audience.
Theater in the round is a challenge. Dance in the round is epic; a look back into the days of ritual, of movement to make magic, to conjure. I was intrigued.
I'd been invited by program chair and production direction, Krenly Guzman to come and see what his fledgling dance program at Ventura Community College was creating with its community members. Entitled Cultural Series #1, the program played with repeating patterns, sets of movement that sets us apart from someone else. As described in the program: "an evening of dance that redefines cultural codes to find a home, where we can go and not be questioned."
I could not have been more surprised. One expects a certain level of sloppiness, timidity and rushing in a small community college dance show case. General wash lighting, bad sound, pieces that have no clear ending, excessive 'hairography,' hypersexualization of the performer, exorbitant and showy costumes or the exact opposite--pulled form a bin at the Goodwill. NONE of that was on display that night. Not. One. Shred.
The production values were very high. Right down to the soundscapes and witty uses of everyday objects to create visual puns, disrupting our expectations for use and delivery. The costuming was well conceived, and everyone in scene was properly dressed every time. The running crew was solid. The light design was an integral component of the choreography. This was a real show, an evening length work of art.
As the lights went up and down during the first half of the show, I realized I was watching an a progression of scenes in a two act performance. This was not a showcase. I was so thoroughly intrigued that I started re-winding movement in my mind's eye that i had seen earlier in the evening. How on earth had Guzman managed an evening length work of student conceived and performed works?
The "scenes" were challenging, as they spiraled into each other, piggy backing through gestures, patterns and movements. Isolated shoulders and necks there, gliding arms and broken wrists here. A duo moving from back in time where French café music intones the epic unpainted clown juxtaposed against b-boys and girls circling up sliding in and out of team work, cipher play boxes.
This was grand ballet style, but in reverse, dissected, deconstructed and deployed from deep within "das volk" by the people, for the people. Where a more traditional director might have seen body disparity, Guzman instead mined opportunities from his students varying physiques and skill sets. There were jettés, ronde de jambes, leaps, twirls and release technique, for those who did not require the use of a wheel chair. There was also a lot of laughter, joking, thrashing, floor work, audience participation, and deep, deep thoughts.
...and yes, perfect timing, stage presence, and risk. These kids were giving good space, owning the choreo, demanding that the audience engage and hang on for the ride. It was thoroughly worth our time.
Back in my uni professor days, I used to create pieces for the end of quarter. These were class performances, typically for the more advanced students since dance students are tracked by skill over the course of their academic career. It's rather the norm that only the advanced classes get an opportunity to rock a stage. Guzman completely threw that out: if you took a dance class, any class, and committed to attending and working in rehearsals, you were in the show. It was marvelous. LIberating. Challenging pedagogically. The students rose to the occasion.
At one point, I realized that I was intimidated by the various types of bodies on stage. It reminded me of the exuberance of a cartoon where a little boy must find lodging for his imaginary friend after being found out as a believer in the unseen. The characters in the boarding house turn out to better reflections of human aspiration than those doing said aspiring. Full of tricksters and impeccable timing, the show often had me wondering about where the benefit lies in holding onto “real” or “correct.”
Normally, when one plans these shows, one works hard to match up skills and dancers, looking almost to standardized their limbs to fit the required movements that would demonstrate "dance", "excellence," "choreography," and more importantly the instructor's ability as the professional on hand to discern what each of those terms means to their personal career. Indeed, the goal in standard dance is to get the body either out of the way of the choreo, or to at best, have the dancer channel the choreography, rendering it natural or contrived, as the desired effect may be. To Guzman's credit, the various types of bodies were there as much as to reveal as to revel in the potential of coding, not necessarily in Dancing with that capital D.
Freed from that "D," what the students dished up in return was exuberant DANCING, in the round no less.
I asked him afterwards how he came to put the dancers in a black box in the round. He acquiesced that it as indeed the most difficult of his demands on his student dancers. It was true, often they tried to play to the front, and the invited choreographer, Katiana Pallais, turned in pieces that clearly had a front with which to contend. Still, this reverberation of the sacred circle was no accident.
A graduate of UCLA's World Arts & Culture program, Guzman is known for his investigations of the sacred in the profane via the traditional dance arts, patterns, and rhythms of traditional African-descended religion known as Santeria. Those mirrors on the wall enjoyed coded appearances of Oshun, energy of beauty, art and femininity. That her gestures appeared in a piece exploring the broken mirror of societal norms for the female body in act one, then again in act two where punk and masculinity were explored was revelatory.
That his students were able to deliver was exceptional. Time and time again, small gestures from the pantheon of gods known as Oriccha/Orisha/Orixá would appear in conversation with European music, cotiddienne past times like baseball, getting dressed, and having a drink of water. I left with the gratifying sense tat the students were delivering their understanding of these complex codes rather than regurgitating them through miming.
Typically, we say the student dancers in undergraduate academic settings should be proud of themselves, almost as a conciliation to all the junk they waded through to get to the end of the show, the end of the run. "You should be so proud," is a nice way to say "I really appreciated your effort in that work that kinda sucked and bored me to near death." I found myself seeking out dancers to yell at them "GREAT WORK!" They worked, they sought to understand the codes that build and destroy a given community and they dared us to go on this exploration with them. With their limited training and even exposure to dance, they dove headfirst into the smallest pieces of a movement to discover that they always already knew dance because it was them. That right there, is some masterful pedagogy.
Guzman and his irrepressible methods of dance delivery are to be watched closely. There's magic over in them there hills.
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