Spectrum Gives Us Dance About the Neoliberal World Order

Ty Alexander Cheng, Joel Myers & Patrick Pulkrabeck in Spectrum Dance's "Farewell" at the Moore Theatre. Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki, Zebra Visual

Watching Spectrum Dance Theatre's Farewell: A Fantastical Contemplation on America's Relationship With China last night at the Moore (through Sat., Feb 20; tickets $25), I was reminded of something I read in college. The theorist and critic Fredric Jameson once argued that everything from conspiracy theories to cyberpunk, with their paranoid insights glimpsing at the hidden order of the world, were all essentially an "attempt...to the think impossible totality of the contemporary world system."

Seeing as how that "impossible totality" is essentially the subject of Farewell, it seems fair to get all lit-crit about it. The concepts in the show could form the basis of several doctoral theses (and, in fact, I'm pretty sure at least one or two were read from during the show). Aesthetically, choreographer Donald Byrd seems to have taken Jameson's idea to heart: his subject is simply too big, too complex to grasp all at once, so instead the audience gets pieces, bits of information, processed and transformed through both memory and media. News photos of Tiananmen Square and Sept. 11 hang at odd angles from the ceiling; a lecturer reads from various texts you only half hear over the din of Byron Au Yong's live drumming and news-report-laden sound collage; the dance is performed in the round, with the audience seated on three sides.

From any one point, you can't see the whole—the images tilt away from you, dancers block your sight-lines of other dancers. But the effect works. During one segment, with most of the company seated directly in front of where I sat in the front row of the bleachers off stage right, I watched as a lyrical duet unfolded as nothing more than a series of arms and legs extending beyond what was blocking my view. So there is, the work suggests, some order in all that chaos.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In Farewell, Byrd plays with a number of concepts and themes that he tries to make add up to a big whole: the titular "contemplation" on US-China relations. One of the core influences, and the most remarked upon before the show, is Ma Jian's novel Beijing Coma, about a man wounded in the Tiananmen Square protests who spends 12 years in a waking coma. Structurally, Farewell duplicates that narrative by proposing a subsequent coma victim as a result of Sept. 11. The relationship between 1989 and 2001 is painfully high-concept—namely, the idea is that in both cases, a state of emergency threatened the stability of the neoliberal world order, and in the name of preserving that stability, human and civil rights were curtailed.

True, they unfolded in different ways. In China, the defeat of the Student Democratic Movement ended a period of internal debate over whether economic or political liberalization should happen simultaneously. (The answer was no; money comes first.) In America, existing political liberties were seen as expendable for the purpose of security. What China decided not to bother with in the first place, America decided to curtail when it was inconvenient. And all for the sake of our now symbiotic economic relationship, which brings in the idea of "Chimerica," proposed in 2006 by the historian Niall Ferguson and economist Moritz Schularick, who argued that the boom of the 2000s was the result of America and China functioning as a singular economic entity, in which America's trade deficit with China (which leads to a net outflow of dollars) fed our low interest rates and allowed for massive growth at the same time Bush pushed us into massive budget deficits (since Chinese banks turn around and use those dollars to buy federal debt).

Got all that?

 

Photo by Gabriel Bienczycki, Zebra Visual

The easiest criticism you could throw at Farewell is that it's far too high-concept for dance, since all this theory and political-economy seems so far beyond the language of dance, which is experiential and physical. You might even assume that the movement is so abstract in order to explore these concepts that it's dehumanizing (and occasionally, it is). But then again, the twin tragedies that Byrd links together played out in very human blood, and it dawns on you that, in fact, there's a very immediate relationship between the shifting tides of human history and the experience of individual human beings.

Dancer Joel Myers performs as the coma victim(s), offering a human anchor to tragedy. He's already lying comatose on a bench as the show opens with a Chinese dragon dance that feels like a bit of establishing-shot kitsch, before the rest of the company enters to perform their by turns interpretive and abstract exploration of the events leading up to the suppression of protests at Tiananmen Square.

In Ma's novel, the main character's father was a violinist, sent to a re-education camp in the country during the Cultural Revolution. His son never heard him play, but his memories of his father's recollections of playing form a powerful connection to a lost past, and composer Byron Au Yong incorporates them into the score to powerful effect. In contrast to the formal abstraction of most of Farewell, these memory segments are lyrical and almost elegiac duets that showcase the stunning talent of Spectrum's dancers, from the first featuring Vincent Lopez and Geneva Jenkins, to the last between Myers and Catherine Cabeen (filling in for an injured Kylie Lewallen). These are some incredible moments, and the most easily readable: They end with the female being picked up in pose and carried about the male, inviting a literal interpretation of carrying on a memory.

That said, sometimes Farewell felt either unfinished or heavy-handed, and it was hard to tell which. As I mentioned, the effect of the presentation seems to be constant information overload, with didactic texts being read while only being half-heard over the score and half-ignored paying attention to the movement. But frequently, the text would continue for nearly half a minute after a segment and its score had ended, as though to add emphasis to the last few sentences. Then there was the posterboard timeline of American and Chinese history that was paraded around for some reason, even though it was being narrated by the lecturer. And finally there was Byrd himself, sitting with her below a portrait of Mao. About four times during the performance, he initiated a new sequence by barking the command "Go!," but it was so infrequent and inconsistent that I have no idea what the idea was.

Still, for its faults and high-concept impenetrability, Farewell manages to engage and provoke questions. In particular, I left pondering why the final memory duet was between Myers, the coma victim, and Catherine Cabeen, who otherwise served as a sort of Mao Zedong stand-in (though that costume had been jettisoned earlier in the piece). As a weary Myers parades the posed Cabeen, hanging from his shoulder, around the stage, I recalled one of the texts talking about Mao's vision of chaos and instability, and how those were a function of revolution. That concept was, of course, abandoned by the Chinese Communist Party in favor of social stability to sponsor economic growth.

So what does it mean, I wonder, when, near the end, Myers sets down Cabeen and then, lying on the floor and grasping her ankle, this Mao stand-in slowly walks him back to his coma bed, and his endless repose? Intellectually, I can maybe see it as a revolutionary moment, Maoism as a revolt against the stultifying control-state of the neoliberal stability regime. But if it was, it was so wrapped in layers of concepts it was damn near lost. But hey, who wouldn't want to watch those two dance? Sometimes, the simple pleasures make up for a lot.