Influences: A Cinematic Showdown
Santa Cruz Center for Culture, 1805 E. Seventh www.aztlandance.com
Through Sept. 19
It’s the way some professional dancers start out, and I suspect it’s also the way all sorts of folks spend secret hours in their living rooms: unshod, bathed in grayish light, copying steps from the television showing movies, MTV, or So You Think You Can Dance. The program notes for Aztlan Dance Company’s Influences: A Cinematic Showdown suggest the work might move beyond these amateur beginnings by distilling dances from classic films down to “the dancing body.” I imagined this could mean an almost spiritual internalization by the dancers of the physicality and artistry of those on film. I hoped for a striking visual of history, of evolution and change, a platonic link between eras embodied live onstage. But in the first half of the work, titled Cine Clasico, Aztlan director and choreographer Roén Salinas wrested the dances from their context and failed to provide a new one. With movie clips projected behind them, the dancers onstage matched the steps and characters on film one for one. While dance is always more thrilling live than onscreen, the film clips Salinas chose were fascinating in their own right, showing the breadth of Latin dance in Mexican films of the 1950s and ’60s with examples representing the sexy, the tribal, the sleek, and the comic. But Salinas missed, or declined, the opportunity to have his dancers relate to those on film (there was no “showdown”). The dancers didn’t seem to be aware of the film behind them, and when the ensemble danced in front of the screen, it was difficult to make out what was going on in the grainy video behind them, and I wondered why it was there at all.
Salinas seems to have taken a more figurative approach with the second half of the show, called Desperado. In this section, no film was projected, and the tone of the inspiring films – those set in deserts and border towns – was conveyed with defiant expressions and traditional steps blended with contemporary dance. Sadly, contemporary dance is no longer, in 2010, contemporary. As critic Gia Kourlas put it in a recent New York Times article, “As a term related to anything involving experimentation, ‘contemporary dance’ is ruined.” I don’t mean to pick on Aztlan, because it’s an important company, an Austin institution, and when its dancers leave their 9-to-5 jobs and begin stamping their heels, the house comes down. But it saddens me how the plague of contemporary dance affects Salinas’ work and that of so many other Austin choreographers. Its vocabulary suffocates them artistically.
Thus, for most of the performance, I focused on Stephanie Keeton, the clear star of the company, and tried to pin down what makes her stand out from the others. She has a refinement that makes her expressions in the Desperado section regal while the others look angry, scrappy, or mean. She holds her own when she dances with Salinas, the other strongest presence onstage. She has solidity in her core, and her sternum is lifted. Her arms are less appendages than they are radiations of her center. The complement to this strength is her looseness: The isolations of her hips and shoulders are clear and viscous. In Keeton, the lineage of Latin dance, and the lineage of all dancers, is most evident. Whatever the era or style, there are those who just dance, and there are those who share with us the thrill of the dancing body. Keeton does the latter, and Aztlan Dance Company is her vehicle.
This article appears in September 17 • 2010.
