A week after the twin eruptions of cinephilia at the far corners of the state (Cucalorus in Wilmington and the Asheville Film Festival), the Triangle played host to a festival of its own last Sunday. In its fourth year, the Carrboro Film Festival is comparatively low-key, and strictly locals-only—all entrants must reside, or have at one time resided, or at least stopped for gas in or near Orange County (just kidding about the last part). Sure, the organizers may be a bit loose in their definition of “local,” but then, a loose, down-home atmosphere is part of the festival’s appeal.
In a compact, six-hour schedule—shorts only—27 films screened to a packed Carrboro Century Center. Hoots and whistles greeted the names of the usual suspects in the credits, as the familial Triangle filmmaking crowd gathered to celebrate their own. There was something for every taste—music videos, animation, comedies, dramas, the odd genre horror film, even a relic from the late ’70s that brought to light the considerable distance, for better and worse, between that era and our own.
The three filmmakers who won Indy Arts Awards this year, Nic Beery, Ajit Anthony Prem and Todd Tinkham, made a strong showing, with five films between them. Particularly impressive was Prem’s HELLO, SORRY, WHATEVER, a Cliffs Notes romantic tragedy built around snatches of dialogue consisting almost exclusively of the words in the title. Amory Casto, an actress from Wilmington who’s since moved to Austin, gives a deeper performance than one can reasonably expect from a short in any festival. Coupled with an impressive turn by her co-lead, Dan Kelly, the film reveals Prem’s deft hand with creating dramatic situations, and with spotting and harnessing acting talent.
Another outstanding performance, by local theater stalwart Mike Wiley, was recognized with the Craft Award for Best Actor. In EMPTY SPACE, Wiley inhabits several of the characters from his one-man stage show, Dar He: The Lynching of Emmett Till. Co-directors Rob Underhill and Aravind Ragupathi shot Wiley in a raw indoor space with a mattress and a chair, rather like a spare stage set, putting the focus squarely on Wiley’s performance. It’s the first time he’s brought his work to film, and he was impressed with the results.
“The film captured the grittiness and desperation of the characters,” said Wiley. “The proximity of the camera makes the experience in some ways more immediate. With close-ups and with the sound and the music, it puts it in your face more than I’ve been able to achieve so far on stage.” The screening was Empty Space’s premiere, and it won the audience award for best film.
The nonfiction contingent increased its market share over previous years, with more documentaries than ever, according to committee chair Selena Lauterer. Two docs addressed the hazards of mountaintop removal, the coal extraction process that’s scarring wide swaths of the Appalachians and endangering nearby communities. Another pair centered on the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, housed in a former thrift store in downtown Greensboro. George Scheer created the unlikely art space and “museum” in his late grandmother Sylvia Gray’s shop, which was stuffed with 58 years’ worth of accumulated cloth scraps and odds and ends.
The art space has been attracting attention around the state since it opened a few years back, and was irresistible material for film students Cara Clark of UNC-Greensboro and Natalie Fava of Elon University. Clark’s film, SYLVIA AND GEORGE, completed a North Carolina trifecta of sorts, having played last weekend in Asheville and Wilmington. It’s informative, well-paced and lively, and earned Clark the Student Award.
A notable theme in the festival was the number of films that straddled the line between cinema and graphic design. Software packages like After Effects have democratized access to high-caliber special effects, providing a great many new tools to artists working in the “experimental” genre. Visually dazzling, nonlinear films swept the first- and second-place jury awards: ICHTHYOPOLIS, a campy, surreal blend of opera, collage and, uh, fish, by UNC-Wilmington professor André Silva, took first. BLOOD AND THUNDER, a music video by Philadelphia-based stop-motion animator Tobias Stretch, took second.
Widely available technology has also made it easy to add jazzy design elements to straightforward narrative films. Perhaps the best example of the latter was the third-place winner, FAIT, by Charlotte filmmaker and NC State grad Chris Crutchfield. It’s the story of an adorable little girl who entertains a stranger on a park bench with a shaggy dog story, which comes to life in the form of CGI text and symbols that appear to hang in the air all around them. The catchy visuals are reminiscent of a big-budget commercial, but they’re the product of a one-man, 10-day project.
A good reference point for the profound changes that filmmaking style and technique have undergone in the last 30 years was provided by BALLERINA, a short with an intriguing backstory. Shot in 1979 by Miami-based cinematographer Kenneth Peterson, it sat in a box for 30 years, and aside from a few small screenings, it hadn’t seen the light of day until now. The original prints of the film were destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but a work tape survived. Peterson, who moved to the Triangle area 15 years ago, decided to submit it to Carrboro and hope for its first festival appearance.
Ballerina tells the story of an aging ballerina and her longtime admirer, who finds her living in an isolated manor decades after her career took a tragic turn. The film unfolds in a leisurely 20 minutes, and the shots are intentionally hazy and slightly dim. The unhurried pace and the distinctive soft focus clearly place the film in its era. “I was going for an almost film-noirish effect,” said Peterson by phone (he was away in California for the birth of a grandchild and couldn’t attend the festival). “I meant it to be dark and romantic in its look.”
Peterson has observed first-hand the vast changes in filmmaking techniques that separate his film from the other entries. Today, for instance, filmmakers can roll inexpensive videotape to their heart’s content, whereas Ballerina was carefully composed on scrounged “short ends,” scraps of film stock left over from larger productions—”150 feet, 100 feet, 350 feet, whatever we could get our hands on,” he said. “Shooting was different then. You didn’t have a preview screen on the camera. You had to have your act together—whatever came out of the lab is what you got, which was sometimes scary.
“Editing was a very physical process—you were marking the film with a grease pencil and cutting it with a razor blade,” he said. “Effects were done in camera. Now everything is done in post.” As for the blurry, dark, “romantic” effect, Peterson achieved it by using a stocking behind the camera lens. Keep in mind, the word “stocking,” as it’s used here, isn’t a technical term for a special piece of filmmaking equipment—it refers to a pair of women’s pantyhose, from which a circular section is cut, stretched tight and held in place behind the lens with a small rubber band.
Peterson fondly recalled the favored brand of stocking: “It was Fogal Noblesse noir,” he remarked, rolling the words off his tongue.
Remember all those Colin Firth and Orlando Bloom sightings last summer? Well, the movie they were shooting, Main Street, just made a stop at one of the stations of the indie-film cross by being screened at the American Film Market earlier this month. The AFM is an international film bazaar in which hopeful producers show off their finished (or unfinished) films; this year, more than 8,000 buyers from around the world viewed approximately 500 films. Most films at AFM will never see the light of day, but others could become the next Paranormal Activity or Clerks or — well, it’s hard to put a finger on what niche Main Street would occupy. Lil’ Abner meets The Trip to Bountiful?
It’s safe to assume that Main Street won’t be the next Reservoir Dogs or Sex, Lies and Videotape…, but as potentially the last new film made from a Horton Foote screenplay, it will definitely merit attention from film festival programmers. And if it’s good, well then it could end up in theaters.
The big announcement to wait for is from Park City, home of the Sundance Film Festival. If Sundance holds to its past form, we should know the first week of December if Main Street will play the festival (it’s entirely possible, if unlikely, that the film’s producers didn’t submit it for consideration). In fact, given the cast and the late screenwriter, who recently was the subject of a New Yorker appreciation as well as a biography by Wilborn Hampton, one would have to think that this film would have an edge on the thousands of films with minimal budgets and no-name actors that are submitted every year.
If Main Street turns up in Park City, that would give Durhamites a lot to be excited about in late January. If it doesn’t play Sundance, it could mean a number of things besides “the film wasn’t good and it was rejected,” although it could mean that, too. We’ll just have to see.
We found this poster on the Internets. It’s not, to be charitable, the most original design. In fact, some people might call it cheesy. However, it’s worth remembering the particular function of a poster used at AFM, as this evidently was. The important thing is to let potential buyers know who’s in your film and a rough idea of the genre (Driving Miss Daisy meets Pride and Prejudice meets The Lord of the Rings meets Baby the Rain Must Fall?). Click the link to see an alternate poster being used on the Web site of Myriad Pictures, the film’s producer.
You take a turn down one of the bustling avenues at the Renaissance Festival, and a calamity appears before you. Three girls in ragamuffin street dress from another time assume a defensive football position against the oncoming crowd. “Hunchbacks!” one roars, “One! Two! Three!” Simultaneously, they drop their shoulderblades on one side and grunt, before assailing the onlookers, in 3-D: “NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT MADE SUMMER BY THIS GLORIOUS SON OF YORK!”
Mere moments later, when the fit has passed, the group debates the merits of a man in the crowd. “Think not I love him, though I ask for him,” one says just a bit too nonchalantly to her unconvinced companion, whose arms are folded and eyebrows duly cocked. “’Tis but a peevish boy, yet he talks well. But what care I for words?”
Seconds elapse, and then two hit the ground, awkwardly trying to make their caps into a blanket. The third, still standing, grimaces: “What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell,” waving the air with distaste.
The trio gets laughs from each of these brief scenes, all right. And in the process, they’ve painlessly added a bit more Shakespeare to the lives of passers-by.
Rebecca Blum, Kacey Reynolds and Carmen-Maria Mandley are members of the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, a Raleigh-based group of buskers—a British term used to describe street performers of the very old school. The Girls are celebrating their tenth year of touring their unique blend of acrobatics, humor and theatrics with street shows and more serious featured performances throughout this closing weekend of the North Carolina Renaissance Festival in Huntersville, just north of Charlotte.
On the road some 25 weeks out of the year, the group’s 2010 season already has performances slated at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and “A Somer’s Eve” festival in Bermuda.
Co-founder Carmen-Maria Mandley recalls their start at the NC Renaissance Faire, a different organization that was operating at the time in Raleigh: “We began making a deal with the people in the lane: If they gave us a nickel, we would give them some Shakespeare—or a rock.”
“To start with, about half of them went with the rocks,” Mandley now recalls, laughing.
But the gag ultimately proved so popular that by their second year, they—and everybody else—were calling them the Nickel Shakespeare Girls. “It kind of became our destiny, to bring Shakespeare to people who wouldn’t see or hear it otherwise, as well as to people who love it.”
The group performed in Duke Gardens this spring, and does workshops and residencies for educational programs in the area including Raleigh Charter High and East Chapel Hill High School.
But it’s the challenge of old-fashioned street theater that appeals to the actors. “You have to fight for your audience,” Mandley notes. “They aren’t captive. They’re not sitting comfortably—or uncomfortably—in their seats. You have about 10 seconds to get them. Or they’ll walk on by.”
“What excites me is when people who aren’t already privy to Shakespeare will stop and listen to Henry V, because the way we’re doing it engages them,” Mandley says. “It’s the kids who come back year after year to see us. It’s the energy it takes. It’s a very sacred thing, we care very deeply about.”
Celebrated, protean British writer Anthony Horowitz visits Quail Ridge Books & Music Sunday, Nov. 22. (Photo by Des Willie)
Anthony Horowitz is considered one of the top television dramatists in the UK, as the mind behind such shows as Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, numerous adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Inspector Poirot tales and, most recently, Collision, currently airing on PBS’ Masterpiece Contemporary (the miniseries concludes at 9 p.m. on Nov. 22; Part One encores at 2 a.m. on Nov. 21, for those with insomnia or TiVo).
But his biggest success hasn’t come from his reality-based dramas but a series of children’s books about a teen spy: Alex Rider, a teen James Bond-style secret agent whose latest adventure, Crocodile Tears, was just published in the States on Nov. 17. Horowitz will appear at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh on Nov. 22 for a signing-line ticket event at 2 p.m.
The series, which started with 2000’s Stormbreaker, pits 14-year-old Rider against a variety of spies, terrorists and evil billionaires; it’ll end after 10 books when the character turns 15. “I’ve aged 10 years to my character’s one,” says Horowitz in a call from England. “It really doesn’t seem fair.”
Horowitz had written numerous children’s books before the medium hit the big time with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. “It was a backwater, it was something you didn’t really do, but I was drawn to it because I loved story,” he recalls. “Children’s books have always had a sort of purity I’ve always liked-you can literally cut to the chase and get on with the action.”
He’s written more than 50 books for both older and younger readers, along with his TV work, the feature film The Gathering, and the play Mindgame, which was directed by gonzo filmmaker Ken Russell in an Off-Broadway production last year (Horowitz will only describe working with Russell as “memorable”).
How does he stay so prolific? “The discipline in my life is being able to stop writing and get out and doing other things and having a life,” Horowitz says. “I’m passionate about what I do, and when you’re by yourself like I am, seven hours is a long time, and you can get a lot done.”
He approves of how American television has adopted the more complex, long-form plotting of British TV: “I think in many respects, American television is now leading the world. It’s not hard to see why: American television has come of age. You have directors as good as Steven Soderbergh and Barry Levinson doing these shows, wonderful actors, and huge, cinema-sized budgets, which of course you can’t get over here. American shows like The Wire, Lost and 24 are the shows we’re talking about over in Britain, even more than most British TV shows.”
He admits that Collision owes a debt to Lost in its use of flashbacks, though he might not need to worry about American TV overtaking the UK: TheNew York Times‘ rave review of Collision said the series “raises an old question: Why are the British so much better at this sort of thing than we are?”
Horowitz says that books give him fewer restrictions than TV: “I can destroy the world, I can visit other worlds, and I don’t have to worry (about budgets). He considers it a “golden age” for children’s literature and looks forward to writing the further adventures of his teen spy: “I find Alex endlessly fascinating. It’s a journey I haven’t tired of, ever.”
DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER/DURHAM—There’s no musical juggernaut like The Phantom of the Opera: The touring version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s great show has been on the road for 17 years. Its upcoming month-long stand at Durham Performing Arts Center represents the fulfillment of one of the facility’s objectives, and DPAC officials are betting that they’ll be able to fill seats for the 32 performances that begin on Thanksgiving Day.
Although the show doesn’t open for another week, the huge work of loading it in began this morning. The famous decorative elements of ThePhantom of the Opera-the chandelier, the underground tunnels and everything else-will fit easily onto DPAC’s massive stage and will no doubt thrill audiences. But behind the opulence is a lot of grunt work that goes into laying the foundation for the complex, notoriously mobile set.
This morning at DPAC, the load-in began-a full week before the show’s opening (it’s still running in Tempe, Ariz., with the actors using a second set). There are about 75 people working under the direction of David Hansen, advance stage manager.
When we enter the facility, we are greeted-awed, even-by the proscenium arch that jutted at a forward angle toward the audience seats. The structure is decorated with friezes depicting Pan-like creatures bearing maidens who are, in turn, surrounded by angels aloft. These figures successfully evoke the Neo-Baroque style of the Opera Garnier setting of Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel. We watch as the workers expertly assemble this grand bit of scenic fakery with the aid of hydraulic lift.
Behind the proscenium lay a tangle of lights, cables and black-painted metallic structural supports. During performances, a stagehand will sit atop this structure to man the lights.
We then see the famous chandelier looming menacingly in a corner. It weighs nearly 1,000 lbs. and incorporates 35,000 crystal beads. For all its delicate gold filigree work, Hansen concedes, the chandelier doesn’t look that great up close-perhaps the result of crashing to the floor nearly 7,000 times. By opening night, 141 candles will have been built into the floor, and there will be footlights designed to resemble gaslights of the period.
The cast won’t have to worry about dancing on an unfamiliar stage at DPAC. “The dancers have the same surface in every city to dance on,” Hansen said. Indeed, the DPAC stage is covered with stacks of floor panels labeled “Phantom III Advance,” with the direction “upstage” marked on the side. We watch as eight to 10 stagehands maneuver each panel, weighing between 80 and 120 lbs., by using a pulley system suspended on a chain hung from the ceiling. Another stagehand wields a T-shaped instrument to push two panels together. Other hands help by pushing their sneaker-clad feet against one panel. Hansen tells us a track is built into the panels to ensure quick fastening and subsequent removal.
Hansen says that it took the show’s designers eight months to prepare such an elaborate, yet portable set. Preproduction costs ran close to $11 million (in 1992 dollars), with $3 million of it devoted to costumes.
The tour travels with 20 48-foot trailers, and nine were unloaded this week. Since the production sends out trucks to the next tour stop while the present one is running, the total number of trucks used is around 30.
Hansen said the advance time is necessary for troubleshooting any problems that may arise. Here in Durham, he’ll check dressing rooms and sinks to ensure that they are in compliance with expectations, do paperwork and establish telephone contact with the venue in Ft. Lauderdale, the next stop on the tour.
The Phantom of the Opera will end its Durham run on a Sunday and open in Fort Lauderdale the following Wednesday. By then, Hansen and company will go to work all over again, laying the groundwork for the Phantom’s next stop, Orlando.
Tonight, Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca take UNC’s Memorial Hall through a passionate tour of this Spanish dance and musical form. The name should be familiar: the group closed the American Dance Festival in 2006 — with a vengeance. Here’s what we found in our July 26, 2006 review:
“At the end of the first act, we’d been all but catapulted out of Page Auditorium on the bravado and the daring of dancer Juan Oglalla’s “Maria - Alegrias.” His solo was equal parts psychodrama and dance, as it deceptively swayed from cool disregard to laser-like insistence.
We watched as he negotiated a polyrhythmic labyrinth and technical torture chamber of his own devising; a hellish gauntlet of 30-second and 32nd-note subdivisions within already subdivided syncopated beats.
Call it dancing on a tightrope for one. But that would ignore guitarists Eugenio Iglesias and Luis Miguel Manzano, and the singing of cantaores Manuel Gago, Emilio Florido and Nieves Diaz who kept the melodic line taut — that is, when they didn’t give it a good hard snap, every so often, just to ensure the continued interest of all parties.
By the end of Act 1, the audience was certain it had been petitioned, harangued, warned, pleaded with and advised by the cantaores, even though the overwhelming majority couldn’t understand a word they’d said. The dancers’ eyes didn’t search the darkness before them; they studied it instead. The harsh, hoarse voices of the singers, rubbed raw with emotion, cried out again and again over what they knew. Repeatedly, the performers’ hands grasped, bent and broke off notes in mid-breath. Then their outstretched palms opened, as if holding the excavated facts of desolation.
We were being served notice: Love beckons loss. And as for the particulars? They’re as meaningless as the tongue in which they’re sung.
What kept all of this from veering into parody? What divides drama from melodrama? Sincerity, perhaps. Or maybe it’s a certain cautionary knowledge: Suffering is universal. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t need a translator for this particular performance. On an innate level, we all recognize a cry of pain.
Our tutelage that night included emphatic dances that fully acknowledged the extremity of passion and pain; dances that faced the darkness squarely with a ferocious — and, ultimately, finite — dignity.
Was this an obscure dance and musical form, rendered in a language even more obscure? No. It was a return to the very foundation of the drama instead — the classic form of tragedy.
WILMINGTON, NC—After hearing for years about the hip, up-all-night film festival in Wilmington, I finally got to check out Cucalorus for myself this weekend. It’s a cozy affair, taking place mostly in small, intimate venues, and even though it’s developed a national presence in its 15 years, it’s totally unpretentious, with a youthful staff and a laid-back vibe.
The slate of films was nicely varied, with some foreign titles and a few high-profile selections set for theatrical release (including THE MESSENGER, a Woody Harrelson vehicle that opened in New York the same weekend, and PRECIOUS, winner of audience awards at Sundance and Toronto). The main thing to keep in mind at any festival is that no matter how glowing the write-ups, the offerings will be hit-or-miss. The surest way to raise the “hit” quotient, in my experience, is to head for the docs. [Here's Indy culture editor David Fellerath's account of the fest.]
BURMA VJ was there, a three-time award winner at last April’s Full Frame, as was FBI KKK, which screened at Full Frame as a work in progress in 2008. In a weekend of sadly abbreviated filmgoing (owing to some personal business I had to attend to), I did manage to catch a couple of excellent docs, THE GOOD SOLDIER and TRUST US, THIS IS ALL MADE UP.
Jimmy Massey in The Good Soldier
THE GOOD SOLDIER presents five veterans of American wars, from World War II to Iraq. In intensely personal interviews (interspersed with a great deal of file footage), they describe the experiences that led to their disillusionment with the military. Each for his own reasons, in the end they feel a sense of betrayal. But, to a man, you won’t find a hint of self-pity: It’s not the suffering they went through, so much as the suffering they inflicted, that troubles them most.
THE GOOD SOLDIER is the second feature-length doc by married couple Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys, after 1997’s acclaimed RIDING THE RAILS, about young people who hopped freight trains during the Great Depression. Though the couple lives in Brooklyn, their new film is thick with Tarheels, with three of the veterans hailing from North Carolina. Chief Warrant Officer Perry Parks, a former helicopter pilot who served in Viet Nam, is from Rockingham, and Captain Michael McPhearson, a Gulf War vet who’s now the director of Veterans for Peace, grew up on Fort Bragg and lives in Fayetteville.
Perhaps the most harrowing and incendiary testimony comes from Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey of Waynesville. He’d already served in the Marines for over a decade when he was sent to Iraq. In 2003, he relates, his company killed a carful of unarmed civilians, and that’s when he “lost it” and was discharged from the service with an official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
On rejoining civilian life, he cofounded Iraq Veterans Against the War, wrote a book about his experiences that was published in France and traveled frequently for speaking engagements. In the film, Massey describes his time in the service with a bluntness that’s sometimes shocking. He’s shown standing on the street in a silent one-man protest, holding a sign that reads “I killed innocent civilians for our government.”
Massey’s claims about civilian deaths in Iraq have been disputed by journalists and Marine Corps officials. Digging through published articles and interviews online, it’s hard to tell how much of his story is exaggerated or fabricated, or to what extent the military and members of the press have engaged in an orchestrated smear campaign.
In any event, the cumulative weight of the five soldiers’ testimony makes THE GOOD SOLDIER a disturbing, powerful film. Perhaps the most memorable line comes from Vietnam veteran Will Williams, who remarks that talk of the “greatest generation” is premature, that the greatest generation will be the one that finally does away with war altogether. The greatest generation, he says hopefully, is yet to come. Continue reading »
Note: The video clip from this performance features graphic language and adult situations. Viewer discretion advised.
“I’ve been an HIV nurse for 14 years, and I know all of those people.”
The endorsement came from a woman in the audience, after the opening night performance of intimacies kicked off the Solo Takes OnFestival of one-person shows, Friday night at the ArtsCenter.
As one of the first television and film actors to come out as gay, Michael Kearns helped pave the way for generations to come. But when he announced that he was HIV-positive, his career evaporated before his eyes. Starved for work, he developed intimacies, a one-man show about six striking individuals affected by AIDS — and he toured the world with it.
Eventually, his career recovered as living with AIDS slowly became a reality, and not just a dream. The 20th Anniversary Tour of his now-historic solo performance continues Saturday night at 8 p.m. at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro. Tickets are $15 and $10.
Playwright, ethnographer and performer Ashley Lucas
Some stories you live. Then you tell the tale.
Playwright, ethnographer and performer Ashley Lucas
began work on Doin’ Time, her one-person show in the Solo Takes Onfestival, when her father was denied parole by the Texas prison system in the summer of 2003.
In a 2008 interview, she said, “When I was brave enough to come out and say, ‘I am a child of a prisoner,’ I was overwhelmed by the number of people who came to me wanting to share their stories as they, too, were in similar situations.”
Lucas corresponded with over 400 prisoners from across the country, interviewing family members of prisoners, former prisoners, and workers in prisons and prison activism in California, Texas and New York. Out of those stories and her own experiences, she has created “a harshly realistic perspective of the desperation of the prisoners and of the families they leave behind — rendering the families of prisoners innocent refugees and forgotten victims of the prison system.”
Performances for Doin’ Time are this Sunday, Nov. 15, at 3 p.m., next Saturday, Nov. 21, at 5 p.m. and next Sunday, Nov. 22, at 3 p.m. All performances are in UNC’s Swain Hall.Tickets are $10 / $5.
The Nov. 12 performance by Urban Bush Women at Duke’s Reynolds Theater began with a lone dancer, her arms and shoulders rippling with muscles, standing under a misty spotlight as someone offstage read the names of African-American leaders and activists from Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X. It set the tone for the evening.
Though Urban Bush Women performances are ostensibly a form of modern dance, they’re more Toni Morrison than Martha Graham. The troupe’s six dancers avoid nearly any hint of classical ballet forms, focusing on athletic, dramatic stomps, slaps and chest bumps. Troupe founder and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar uses dance to give voice and movement to the African-American experience.
The four choreographed works performed at Duke were social commentary as performance, and not in a subtle way either. The opener to “Naked City,” a new work designed to represent the history of Harlem, began with the dancers, in turn, howling like animals as they sat in folding chairs. The show’s final moments, at the end of a long piece based on the diaries of African-American dancer Pearl Primus, showcased a kind of tribal dance hybrid, complete with chants from the dancers and an onstage reading of excerpts from Primus’s writings.
But the best moment, for my money, was from one of UBW’s earliest pieces, “Sisters,” which managed to tell a compelling and often hilarious story of childhood without a word spoken. Like Morrison’s writing, UBW’s performances are interpretive and sometimes inscrutable, but the focus on impressionistic, non-linear storytelling opens the door to something that is unconventional and beautiful, and couldn’t be expressed any other way.
The Nov. 12 performance by Urban Bush Women at Duke’s Reynolds Theater began with a lone dancer, her arms and shoulders rippling with muscles, standing under a misty spotlight as someone offstage read the names of African-American leaders and activists from Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X. It set the tone for the evening.
