Vestigio (9 minutos depues)
Sometimes I think critics have an entirely different experience in the theater than other audience members–not necessarily better, just different. If the press materials for Antares Danza Contemporanea hadn’t told me, I would never have known that the evening-length piece by this Mexican modern-dance troupe, part of the festival Cruzando Fronteras (“Crossing Borders”), was about “confront[ing] death, both physical and otherwise.” The same materials also informed me that the work “evokes the literary style of magical realism found in the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez…and Isabel Allende.” Still, I didn’t feel right about handing on my privileged information to the poor man next to me when he confided at the end that he didn’t have a clue what the piece was about. Because despite the confident self-assessment of the artists, I still wasn’t sure.
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Vestigio (9 minutos depues)–choreographed by one of Antares’s three artistic directors, Miguel Mancillas–features a trio made up of two women (Claudia Landavazo and Elsa Verdugo) and one man (Mancillas). Another man (Luis Antonio Cancino) plays a secondary role, and five dancers in black seated around the periphery of a grid on the floor play a tertiary role. No one needed to tell me that Vestigio has something to do with religion: clouds of incense, ceremonial bells, and Cancino’s look of a village priest were enough. It was also clear that some sort of progression was going on: each of the three main characters is carefully prepared to “enter the ring” at the beginning of the dance, the women’s long cloaks removed to reveal iridescent, liquid gowns, the man’s boots drawn off by the village priest to expose his bare feet. About midway through, the trio are ceremonially redressed in bright, shiny unitards. The watchers on the periphery who ring the bells and announce their significance–first bell, second bell, “five minutes,” and so on–indicate a carefully timed event, as does the dancers’ counting on their fingers when another dancer falls, as if he or she were a boxer down for the count.
Mancillas looks and seems young. Perhaps in Vestigio he’s simply working through his own current issues, and that’s fine. The choreography–what there is of it–can be very appealing, and the primary performers establish their characters clearly. Landavazo and Verdugo, the two women, are strong, fluid dancers; I only wish they’d been given more to do. For the truth is that a very little bit of stuff has been stretched over a very long period in Vestigio.
