Amanda Piña’s Frontera is a part of an ongoing challenge during which the Vienna-based, Mexican-Chilean choreographer delves into the backstories of endangered or marginalised human actions – on this case, a dance from the Mexican border city of Matamoros that mixes hip-hop and folkloric influences.
Piña’s programme textual content and creative discourse freights the efficiency with hefty theoretical cargo, however what issues extra is the occasion itself. It takes place on the highest flooring of a Leeds automotive park, marking the tip of the Rework pageant of experimental efficiency in opposition to a panorama of tall buildings and cottony clouds, the coolness air permeating the blankets underneath which we huddle.
Because the title suggests, the concept of the border is central, right here manifesting most emphatically because the one separating actors from viewers. The piece unfolds round one obsessively repeated loop: from the again, the eight performers strategy the viewers in gradual however purposeful traces, their piercing gaze seeming to seek for some horizon behind us. After they attain the entrance – that's, the fourth wall – they cease and switch again, solely to advance once more as soon as they attain the again.
With every cycle, they don totally different garments from the wardrobe rails on the again, plain caps and sweatshirts changing into accessorised with tinselly carnival drapes, shamanic masks and brilliant skirts emblazoned with spiritual icons or nationwide flags. Right here, a lady crawls like cat; there, a person wrestles with a ribbon-like snake after which, backbone swaying, appears to turn out to be a serpent himself. Whereas pictures and associations proliferate, each step of the dance lands precisely upon the drumbeat – an insistent pulse that unites the our bodies of those multicoloured, polymorphous folks.
Unexpectedly, a stay drummer seems and the work takes a distinct flip. Not appearing out their cumulative loops, the forged dance in fiery formation, their whirling and stamping steps nonetheless at all times touchdown precisely on the battering beat, nonetheless irregular and wrong-footing its rhythms. It’s a sudden however sustained blast of power that leaves us buzzing – as if the spirit, if not the our bodies of the performers, had lastly breached the border separating us from them. We descend by way of the automotive park again into the streets of Leeds feeling weirdly dislocated, positively chilly and far enlivened.
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