Shadow’s Child
Melissa Thodos & Dancers
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Urban Bush Women previewed Shadow’s Child, a collaboration with the National Company of Song and Dance of Mozambique commissioned in part by the Dance Center of Columbia College. This story dance follows Xiomara, who finds herself on the outside looking in when her family moves from southeastern Africa to the southeastern United States. Shunned by the girls in Tallahassee, the immigrant makes friends with Blue, herself an outsider because of an illness that requires her to avoid sunlight. When Blue gets trapped in a swamp, Xiomara battles an alligator to rescue her friend and win the respect of her new community.
Choreographers Kwame A. Ross and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar take the audience on a parallel journey of discovery. They begin with the music, language, and folkways of Xiomara’s home village, strange to most Americans. What’s puzzling soon becomes annoying: What are they saying? How can you tell who wins at jump rope? But after a comically telescoped journey to Tallahassee, our roles and Xiomara’s are reversed: she’s mystified, but we understand perfectly when Blue (the extraordinary Sita Frederick) sings of her plight and when the other Florida girls alternate between childhood clapping games and adolescent booty shaking. Familiarity with the milieu means we can stop examining the movements anthropologically and start experiencing them viscerally, an experience aided by Urban Bush Women’s precision and athleticism. Whether jumping rope or dancing hip-hop or portraying insects and birds (with the help of Debby Lee Cohen’s witty body-armor puppets), they combine strength with grace, lyricism with rhythm. Shaneeka Harrell, in roles ranging from teenage ringleader to threatening alligator, stands out in an accomplished company: intriguing even when masked, she’s irresistible when her face is visible.
Altin Naska’s Take Five, dedicated to the Turkish people and originally performed in Turkey, is a witty send-up of Western notions of belly dancing. Ruedi Arnold, Paul Christiano, and the choreographer himself portray circus-poster strong men (complete with handlebar mustaches) who respond to Tarah Brown’s harem pants, glittery bra, and sexy hip-shaking moves; among other movements, they roll up into shoulder stands to suggest a trio of person-size erections. Striding and preening to Ferruh Yarkin and Paul Desmond’s Middle Eastern-inflected version of Dave Brubeck’s theme song, the men recall–and by exaggeration undermine–every Hollywood stereotype of the “inscrutable East,” from Rudolph Valentino in his tent to Yul Brynner in his palace.
Wilkinson’s Slip Knot lacks the unity that makes My Life Closed Twice so satisfying–but the piece is simply not as bite sized. Again she uses numbingly familiar music (here a New Age staple by Thomas Newman) to new effect, and again she alludes to another dance, in this case Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain. With its fluid contrasts of couples and ensemble, and with powerful images of intimacy in both contexts–two dancers breathing as one, the group ebbing and flowing as a single organism–Slip Knot should reward repeated viewing.
