Familias
Just take a look at this year’s dance offerings in Chicago: we had Bill T. Jones in Still/Here working with “the dying” (a rather broad category, we admit) and Liz Lerman working with the elderly (among others–for the first time some critics were the targets of community outreach when she hosted a movement workshop for artists and arts handmaidens). Donald Byrd’s Minstrel Show explored prejudice, particularly against blacks, and Jane Comfort’s S/he reversed racial and sexual roles to comment on–what else?–racism and sexism. This focus produces an atmosphere of vague accusation and ill feeling: Comfort’s piece was not only simpleminded but vulgar and mean-spirited. Thankfully, in this group it was the exception rather than the rule. Lerman, who’s been working with the elderly for 15 or 20 years, has something of the opposite problem: sometimes she produces long, repetitive pieces because she’s too sympathetic to edit the “raw material” her dancers and workshop participants provide.
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Pepatian–a small group from New York headed by a Puerto Rican husband-and-wife team–take the gentle, understanding approach: there’s nothing mean or accusatory in their work, only good intentions. But where Lerman listened too well to her sources, choreographer Merian Soto and sculptor Pepon Osorio haven’t listened well enough, creatively enough, to the eight Bronx Latino families who provided the raw material of Familias: it offers little but cliches and often in a mimed form that underlines the stereotypes.
Aesthetically Familias (billed as a work in progress, though the Dance Center charged full admission) is a mess. The images and stories are frequently so obvious as to need no decoding whatsoever. In the opening section the five dancers clasp hands, crouch low, and scurry along with fearful looks. Clearly they’re a family crossing some border, which requires absolute unity and trust among them–a closeness that persists and “explains” the violent trauma when the children grow up and want to leave the family. True, there’s a visceral response when the mother grips her daughter and throws all her strength into holding her back, but the obviousness and straightforwardness of the story undercuts our emotional response.
Familias is absurd, and in the worst possible interpretation, cynical. The family members literally walk through, from one side of the stage to the other. They appear not as artistic collaborators (if nothing else, Liz Lerman has demonstrated that nonprofessional dancers can move inventively and gracefully) but as evidence of “authenticity.” Press releases implied that the stories of local families would somehow be included. But the workshops here totaled no more than five hours, and had no discernible impact on the piece. At least one local Latino community organizer who worked on the project questioned the purpose of the local workshops and the impact they had on the Chicago families. Indeed, what was the impact on the families from New York, and shouldn’t that impact be reflected somewhere in the piece?
