And the storytelling is immediate. Green tree leaves, island breezes. We are visually transported to another location, both familiar and unfamiliar. These stark images project gently on the stage and fill its entire backdrop. With music that is soft and airy, yet exciting, and a portrait painted clearly before us on the stage, the audience is instantly in another place.
The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s (BAM) Howard Gilman Opera House was a packed venue closing night. As we are once again brought the presentation of a celebrated body of work by the late Pina Bausch of the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Água, a 2 hour and 50 minute production filled with unique and ubiquitous storytelling through the mold of several main tropes such as love, inadequacy, beauty, destruction, fire and even agua. A culminating, theatrical presentation of cultural observation. At moments, it was a point of entry into an observer's eye upon the Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian presence. Various musical drum arrangements, colorful floral and layered dresses and joyous scenes of character. But indeed it was more than that. The performance was not a production, but a larger picture. It was an excerpt from a life-long film, windows of time, inserts into several lives, and a collective representation. More than a production, it was a spectacle of humanism.
The show's sequence was just as fluid as the dancing, with one segment trickling into the next, dancers and dance pieces bleeding, overlapping and unfolding into one another. Throughout the show's entirety, solos, duets and larger group pieces intermixed discreetly through mundane pedestrian transitions. We were made to feel a part of the experience, not only observers of an exaggerated spectacle, but permanent residents of inquiry. If the segments weren't transitioned by colloquial pedestrian movements, they were interrupted by comedic, theatrical interludes. However, the true underlying sentiment of the performance was irony. With each motif being introduced or enveloped in contradiction, adding many layers to what was before us.
Beauty was one point of focus and was brought to the stage in diverse iterations. Its integration was at times whimsical, such as during a scene where a woman repeatedly runs across the stage as new men enter, just to throw herself to the ground and flip her dress over her face. Or at times its integration was dramatic, such as a man professing every single detail of obsession he has for his love, from her hair, to her voice, to her hands, just for the woman to fight against it in immense absurdity. Deeper than these moments of satire and wit, we can see being presented our unhealthy obsession with beauty, or possibly these scenes may just be its comical acknowledgement. Whichever the truth, as an audience member we were able to regard in amusement and laugh at its exaggeration and creative presentation, all while feeling a guilty connection to its truth.
In my interpretation, I saw the show bleeding these themes of love and beauty into a wider picture, which is a human feeling we all experience; inadequacy. The show would interlude with several comedic monologues, giving us unique breaks from dancing along the show. Several of which showed Julie Shanahan’s seasoned and exquisite performance style. In a monologue where she explored this idea of inadequacy, we witness her erupt into an undulating tirade about what she wished she could do and be, but how it was not possible. Enveloped in satire, every action she professes desire to do but claims cannot achieve, she actively is doing on the stage. An intense tirade that was fun, spontaneous, and slightly disheartening all at the same time. She brought us with her on this ride of questioning ability, completion, and value.
This captivating monologue leads me into another point of focus that seemed to remerge both subtly and bluntly throughout the show. It was one surrounding a form of mental torment, or perhaps rather, a personified outward caricature of the internal mind. This theme spanned the entirety of the show in a unique form of commentary, as the show was both constantly repetitious and circular. Whether it was the repetitions of singular movements, repeating partner lifts, the performance of circular physical gestures or reenactments of entire segments of the show, we were continuously found in a feeling of going round-about, or ending up in the same place as where we started. There was always a pattern presented that resembled the repetition of the same actions continuously and expecting a different result. Which, in an eloquent way, seemed to tell a story of an overall battle of the mind.
A theme that was clear to see, even through all of the beautiful pain expressed through movement and words throughout the night, was joy. Pina Bausch expressed joy in her choreography through presenting authentic experiences. The ending scenes with the performers basking in the beauty and purity of water portrayed it all. Pina Bausch was unconventional in many ways. Not only through her infusion of theater within dance performance but equally through her works approach. In Água, her movements seemed to be led by a fixated obsession. That obsession could be an animalistic characteristic, a part of the body, or even the floor. Água was unorthodox in its integration of the audience within the experience, with both verbal and at times physical interactions. Água was daring in its introductions of varying perspectives of sexuality and presentations of the body.
Filled with so many images, monologues, satire, comedy and extraordinary movement, many of us were just lost in the story, captivated in observation. Perhaps Água did not aim to teach, comment on, or change us. Perhaps it was presented just to allow us to observe. Observe a human experience we are all too busy living to really see.
