In the Water
In the Water, an evening-length piece, is structured a bit like a Balinese performance. It starts with a procession of musicians and dancers–a mad clatter of drums and other percussion that begins in the lobby and makes its way onto the stage by the two aisles in the auditorium. Six musicians from the group Ulele playing drums precede six women holding small straw baskets containing flower petals. The musicians retire to a corner of the stage, where they play for the rest of the performance.
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The six women begin “Dance to Bless the Space and Welcome the Audience” by running in two intersecting circles, holding the baskets full of flower petals high. Setting them down, they begin a dance with Shineflug’s characteristic sturdy steps embellished with arm shapes taken from Hindu and Buddhist statues. While some dance companies seem to slip through the performance space like fish through water, Shineflug’s dancers seem to eat up the space with hearty steps that connect them to the ground each time. After a leaping circle, the women pick up their baskets, run in two intersecting circles again, then scatter the flower petals over the first few rows of the audience and bless them in the Hindu manner, with palms pressed together at the breastbone, fingers pointing upward. Though the program note calls this “a dance of Yin forces with a dot of Yang: compassion, love, joy, strength,” this section seems to be more about a Western notion of femininity–that women are both as soft as petals and as strong as athletes.
The final section, “Kembali,” is pure dance–powerful dance that illuminates Balinese philosophy much more clearly than words. The program note says that the first half represents the yang force while the second represents the yin. The yang half features big, satisfying movement. When Wise and Wendy Taylor spot each other from opposite corners of the stage, they smile and saunter through thickets of dancers into the center to begin a pas de deux with some lovely lifts. The backdrop, which had shown clouds against a blue sky, becomes saturated with an intense mustard yellow that reaches out and envelops the dancers: the fierce appetite for life and joy in living present in many of Shineflug’s dances fill this moment as fully as the yellow light saturates the space. This is truly yang, not masculine so much as what the I Ching calls “the creative” and describes as heaven’s movement.
