Dayna Hanson's Indie Rock-Driven Dance-Theatre Take on American History

Photo by Ben Kasulke

"It's been on my mind for the last two years, I'd say," Dayna Hanson told me of her new work, Gloria's Cause, which has its world premiere Thursday at On the Boards (through Sun., Dec. 5; tickets $20). "My boyfriend-slash-collaborator Dave Proscia and I started talking about it after he saw a bumper-sticker out driving that said, 'Engaged for 27 years.' He started scratching his head and said, 'Well that's an odd homemade bumper-sticker,' and he drove past the car and saw an older lesbian couple who were basically just trying to explain to the world that they didn't have equal rights. And this was around the 2008 election, and it was just one of those trigger points that got Dave and I talking about how screwed up things are."

This was almost three months ago, sitting in the lobby of the Ace Hotel in Portland, Oregon just before noon on a Saturday in mid-September. Indie rock was playing loudly and the attached Stumptown Coffee was packed with a mix of your standard Portland hipsters mingling with artists from around the world, no small number of whom were nursing hangovers. The Ace Hotel was playing host to many of the companies in town for PICA's TBA Festival, the two-weekend-long showcase of nationally and globally recognized performing artists, where, the night before, Gloria's Cause had its first public showing as a work-in-progress.

"The ironies are almost never ending," Hanson continued, "which is why it's hard to talk about such a vast thing. So much appears to be so obvious. 'Oh yeah, we know the country's kind of fucked.' And we've grown accustomed to that cognitive dissonance—that I still have to get my coffee, that I still have to go to my job, whatever."

With a degree in creative writing and a background in theatre, Hanson launched onto the global dance scene as one of the two people behind the seminal Seattle company 33 Fainting Spells. Founded in 1994 by Dayna and Gaelen Hanson (no relation) to produce their first work, The Uninvited, 33 Fainting Spells toured nationally and internationally before disbanding in 2006. Both of them proceeded with their own careers, with Dayna Hanson turning to film, though she did produce an evening length work on her own, We Never Like Talking About the End, at On the Boards in 2006.

In Gloria's Cause, Hanson uses a combination of music, text, and movement to try to parse through the aforementioned "cognitive dissonance" by deconstructing the mythology of American Exceptionalism. While what I saw on the stage of the Winningstad Theatre three months ago was only a rough version (much has changed according to at least one dancer I've spoken to), the result was one of the more urgent pieces at the TBA Festival (dissent notwithstanding).

As Hanson explained, part of her process has almost always been one of discovery and learning as she builds out a work, often starting knowing little or nothing about the subject, as was the case here. In order to understand the present, Hanson reasoned, she had to understand the past, and Gloria's Cause, she locates the sources of our contemporary conflicted national self—a nation that believes in freedom deadlocked over issues of equal rights, the idea of an exceptional nation meant to lead the world falling apart under the combined weight of war and economic disaster—in the very founding of the country.

Her research included some of the standard material, from David McCullough's 1776 to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a process eventually supported through more direct contacts between Hanson and her main collaborators and experts, including a brief collaborative residency at UNC Chapel Hill in which the artists spent several days engaging historians and political scientists.

The challenge that Hanson faces is a tricky one. Although she readily admits to being drawn to marginalized people—"the woman, the slave, the landless white man," as she put it—the task isn't as simple as offering a counter-narrative to prevailing, mythologized story of our nation's founding. It's not enough to point out that some people were excluded from the great promise of freedom and liberation (so making exceptions to "freedom" has always come easily to Americans), or that the cause was one of benefit to an economic elite, sold to the rest of society by a propagandistic press. The problem is that myth isn't powerful because it's true, but because it's a compelling story, so it can't simply be counterpointed and problematized.

Instead, what Hanson offers is a phantasmagoric vision of the Revolutionary War era, combining a frequently twisted take on the myths of the Revolution and counterpointing these with narratives of marginalized people, all set to a driving indie rock score played live by the performed. Deborah Sampson Gannett, a woman who hid her sex to fight as a soldier in the war (DADT for an earlier era, I suppose) and Mary Jemison, a white woman kidnapped by Indians who chose to remain with them, both make appearances alongside the bigger names. The result is a big mess of conflicting ideas and stories, harsh realities tearing down cherished myths, but nevertheless collapsed into the same heap, inextricably linked together and sustained by the pulsing 4/4 rock beat.

It's hard for me to offer any real summation since the work has no doubt changed so much since I saw it, but even in rougher form I would thoroughly recommend it. All too often the arts don't seem to have the capacity to ask the right question at the right time, but in this case, with the continuing sense of unease in the country, Gloria's Cause becomes more relevant and pressing by the day. In its contrasts, it's liberating, such as watching dancer Jessie Smith—a punkish, tattooed Seattle artist, incongruously dressed as a down-home country girl—perform a choreographic idyll of America's youthful optimism. That she can play that role convincingly, embodying in her person the red-state/blue-state divide, is as powerful a counterpoint to the chauvinism of the Tea Party or the uselessness of partisan divide as any I could imagine. For her to play that role, we need to acknowledge that "America" is a pretty big tent.

But of course, that's precisely where Hanson's coming from. "It really doesn't take much scratching," she said, "to get below the surface and have your mind blown."