enjoy bd

Either way, those two were just too easy. Watching and reading is clearly a performative act (lest one forgets), which sits in the potentiality of inertia and not necessarily visible at all times (if ever at all). Except for the involuntary muscle spasms typical of dogs barking on cue at the scent of a stranger. Or of a naïve newly anointed virgin in flirty confrontation with an equally naïve observer persistently enacting paradoxical incursions into the simple. Or of a bored sub/urban housewife waiting for the welcoming distraction brought by an untimely murder in the neighborhood. Or of an irresistibly hot young plumber who has come to fix the leaking faucet. Or of an earnest culture vulture, dodging middle-aged boredom in exchange for isms that have either been barely beaten till its resuscitation or overly emphasized for the sake of play. Luxuries that come unnoticed precisely because everyone else is too busy going about their own business.

Leaving behind what remains as indistinguishable traces of judgment, doubt, the frivolous and seductive appeal of a long-thought out sentence comprehensible only when prejudice has been fully abandoned.

A similar anomaly characterizes the taken-for-granted relationship of a dancer to dance. While a dancer’s relationship to movement and dance should not be the least suspect of agenda, complexities and complicity, it is always easy to assume that the dancer is a pure, authentic, untarnished representation of an idea and subjectivity devoid of politics and power. And this is why the audience can easily relax in their seats and be captivated by the spectacular display of physical virtuosity and commitment to a being-toward-movement.

Recall the many times one is moved to tears by the sheer realistic depiction of a dancer’s emotion onstage, quickly translated into bodily language. Or being taken by the same energetic impulse to perform air-bending tricks and jumps, that makes one want to jump off his/er seat. Or touched by poignancy of a lone female dancer onstage carving the architectural detail of her body. Or of a naked male dancer displaying the same vulnerability that would send any homophobic macho drunk to disgust and/or intimidation. Or of poor disenfranchised street children imbibing hope through the beauty of movement, and systemic subversion of the elitist theatrical space.

But isn’t this the dominant choreographic project--to render the malicious as unintelligible, so why even bother? By muting and transfiguring the master’s design into the neutral an efficient mechanization of the pervasive appeal of moving, moving for moving’s sake, moving for progress, moving towards progress and development is put in place. Never mind that in many remote areas of the country, people carry the trendiest of mobile phones while they have no access to safe drinking water or decent health services. For isn’t this the post-industrial plan, to move towards progress?

Despite wanting to think otherwise, a dancer’s body is the immediate filter through which a choreographer’s vision, presence, and subjectivity is distributed and represented by virtue of it not only being the surface and plane of inscription of dance but also its instrument for writing. Easily hinting at Lacan’s "one should not forget to include in the content of an act of communication the act itself." Or of Butlerian performative utterances where "we do things with language, produce effects with language, but the language is also this thing we do."

Propositions that point us to the exact reason why the complex relationship of the body to the dance most often come unnoticed, if not rarely problematized, if not immediately dismissed as redundant luxuries that preoccupy the minds of the idiotic-artist trapped inside the studio. And yet much of contemporary practice in dance is precisely taking apart the assumptions of how dance is produced onstage for us, for our consumption and even for our own entertainment. So should one expect the usual cathartic releases and appeal to emotion attached to dance and its celebration of the body, a secondary consideration is necessary for the project of contemporary practice is to introduce the political ontology of the choreographic and transparently illustrate the illustration by which a dance is produced, at the same time calling attention to the opacity of a maker’s intention and research agenda.

Indeed such a project entails time and uncompromising investment in developing an audience typically accustomed to the representational mimesis of theater. Not to mention practitioners in the performing arts who have grown complacent to the comfort of formula.

When the Contemporary Dance Map was first launched in 2005, it attempted to break free from the rigid confines of the theater. And not only physically defying it by staging pieces in their working spaces, declaring their working spaces as presentational spaces, but also finding in the parameters that will either delimit or demarcate the frame of theater and dance.

Historically speaking, this spontaneous gathering of contemporary dance makers Jose Jay Cruz, Myra Beltran, Paul Morales, Nina Hayuma Habulan, Raul Alcoseba, Jethro Pioquinto, Elena Laniog as well as support of esteemed dance scholar Basilio Esteban Villaruz paved the way for a progressive dance community each involved in questioning the assumptions of dance-practice in the Philippines. Hopes were definitely high as this signaled a long-due renewed interest in the staid situation of new dance practice in the country. These (homegrown) practitioners embarked on an arduous expedition to define the field of Philippine contemporary dance in their own terms; of course, not without differing views and priorities.

Some hard-work bears fruit, others go on to get married, have kids, work in theme parks or cruise ships for a better life, or live elsewhere. And though this year’s gala performance of the Contemporary Dance Map at Dance Forum Space may seem to be like all the others from the past years, strides have obviously been encompassed. Not only because the show opened to a full house but more so of the choreographic propositions presented by choreographers whose maturity and sophistication could have only been possible because of their persistent research and investigations of the choreographic, presenting potential critique to the representation of dance onstage.

What sets this apart from the rest of the recital-like marathon performances in the past is the deliberate attempt to keep the program tight and short with no more than seven pieces presented including three major works by Elena Laniog, Mia Cabalfin and Myra Beltran. Though, the program would have equally stood well with just these three pieces, leaving some breathing space for the audience to luxuriously tinker upon contemporary practice in dance.

Rarely is the choreographic bothered with in local dance performances. Most of what we see is distractive negotiations of agile bodies moving up and about on the stage, defying gravity and every contortion possible within a set of dance vocabulary. And this we have come to know as dance and choreography, the strict adherence to perform the idea of a disciplined body, making spectacles out of the body’s capacity to be set in motion. A strong religious attachment and obedience, Andre Lepecki aptly describes as “mysterious capacity for making visible and present otherwise absent forces and voices of command.”

To propose otherwise, easily comes off as taboo for what is dance without spectacle of intricate moving/movement. And hence the restrained agitation felt among the audience as the evening’s performance opened with a short lecture on dance by World Dance Alliance Philippines president Basilio Esteban Villaruz who briefly set the historical precedents of gatherings such as the one for the evening. Appropriately setting the dramaturgical tone and context that tied some of the works for that evening.

While Elena Laniog’s Silhouette contained the popular elements one typically looks for in dance, Laniog takes a slight detour from her signature agitated, fragmented, gestural work that proved to be quite refreshing. Retaining her formalist approach to dance composition, this one is rather minimalist in comparison to her previous works. Known for her powerful depiction of the energetic female, almost reminiscent of an urban babaylan in state of transfiguration, Laniog takes two steps back by stripping her babaylan naked of its pagan past in retroactive fashion.

Here the piece opens with eight female dancers in working-girls garb enacting typical womanly gestures, fixated on their silhouettes performing to an imaginary mirror to no other than their selves. A purposive subversion of the other’s gaze through earnest narcissist acts of vanity, ordinarily cloistered in the privacy of the female subject. Proposing a confrontation that was anything but confrontational but subtle even subdued to almost like those girls from exclusive Catholic schools who wear glittery headbands just to tick off their nun schoolmasters. In the second part of her piece, the dancers strip from their office attire and change into their ‘dancerly’ personas, uniform earthly abstract beings representing perhaps the repressed female subjectivity. Laniog pursues her anatomical fixation, proposing varied eccentric bodily combinations, an osmotic body without organs struggling with its core.

But the real risk for the evening was Myra Beltran’s Looking for the Spirit of the Rose. A deconstructive take onMichel Fokine’s classical perfume ballet Le Spectre de la Rose, based on the poem of Théophile Gautier of the same title that featured famous dance legend Vaslav Nijinksy. Unlike most ‘dancey’ contemporary takes on classical material, Beltran opts for the direct and somber. Even foregoing her presence on stage by letting history speak for itself. The piece opens with a documentary material projected on the screen with Nijinsky’s daughter Kyra, probably in her 60s or 70s recalling the legacy of her father, which segue into the famous pas de deux section of the ballet.

Beltran teases out the uncomfortable relationship of the body to history through restraint, to a point of inhibiting the authoritative voice of a choreographer in favor history, in favor of time, in favor of the communicative. In choosing the straightforward path of showing an archival material in dance, she has given way for the audience to have the time and space to decide whether they would identify to the piece or not. A move to be considered risky, but one borne of maturity, showing Beltran’s experience as a choreographer in the paradoxical act of partially letting go of movement in dance.

This further lays bare the ontological relationship of movement and dance. So never mind if we did not see Beltran in her signature solo expositions in dance. This introduced a timely break into engaging with history by introducing what anthropologist Nadia Seremtakis idea of the “still-act” in order to interrogate her historical and subjective relationship to dance. However, this seeming digression ultimately only leads us back to Fokine’s original intention when he created this piece, which was to stage a ballet in an intimate setting of tiny room enclosed by two walls “leaving little room for dancing” where the difficulty lay not in the execution of intricate beautiful steps but in “confining the dance to such a small space.”

Beltran is surely the least one to recede from hard meticulous and risky choices. Known for her brave attempt to establish an independent practice of dance in the country, “threading on the path least taken,” this work reclaims for Beltran her place in contemporary dance practice. With this material, one can sense the crisis of the body that she is confronting--one, that many dancers face as they go through life. In the second part of the piece, a group of young dancers enter the stage to execute short ‘contemporary rendition’ of the dancing sequences previously projected on the screen. Surely, a dramaturgical risk that could have possibly dissipated the stern decision to inhibit dance, but this is what makes Beltran’s practice poignant and daunting is her capacity to put herself into that vulnerable position of standing by her artistic choices.

Should celebratory even memorial performances typically be dismissed as trivial or unapologetically nostalgic and sometimes cheesy sentimental, the gala performance of Contemporary Dance Map celebrating International Dance Day proved to be otherwise. In fact, it has stayed true to its original impetus that is to push dance practice into the contemporary nitpicking even to the point of solipsism because whether you want to admit it or not, we’ve had enough of those boisterous let’s feel good about ourselves ‘dancing around’ the city already.