Truth? You Can't Handle SDT's 'Mother of Us All'

Spectrum Dance Theater - Mother Of Us All • Preview from Spectrum Dance Theater on Vimeo.

Here is a message from the American Red Cross about Africa, from today: "ARC increased its support for the unrest in North Africa, sending $100,000 to assist people fleeing, three disaster specialists, and 25,000 blankets." 

Is that what Africa has come to mean, African aid? Or do you think of 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai? Do you think first of Egyptians crowding into the streets for protests? Maybe you read that James Fallows Atlantic article about China's inroads in Africa. Maybe you were at Intiman's production of Ruined, and saw its depiction of how the war in the Congo has blighted women's lives.

Spectrum Dance Theater's exploration of Africa, The Mother of Us All (through March 5 at the Moore Theatre) does not pretend to speak for, or with expertise about, Africa. Choreographer Donald Byrd takes up a more phenomenological position, delving into points of view for signs, I think, of life, of authentic engagement with the complexity of life. The result is too much for any single person; it's a work that demands not only an audience to watch, but also to share what they've seen. 

So, how do you dance a phenomenological investigation? The show opens with what feels like "The Dance of the CIA Factbook on Africa"--a voiceover describes the ways in which Africa, for all of its civil and interstate wars, dictators, and droughts, makes claims on U.S. interests as far more than a charity case. And it's true, from rare earths to oil, Africa has the post-colonial world over a barrel. To the extent that stable governments replace despots eager to negotiate natural resource exploitation, and to compete with China's interests, the U.S. must learn to talk about "partnerships." 

The dancers climb out of a light-emitting trap door at the back of the stage, and perform under graphs and maps projected onto the stage, while introducing Africa as a list of nations. (Spectrum has switched to placing risers on the three sides of the stage, rather than keeping you out in the auditorium, and it's a vast improvement on connection to the dance.) At the beginning and close, their movements are mainly atomistic; they career about the stage, kicking, wriggling, and rolling on the floor. It's an intentional helter-skelter with no center or privileged perspective. 

Byrd writes on his blog that, "I have a choreographic tool, or rather a method that I call ‘intentional progressions’ that guides my choices when I work (play) and helps me to figure out how to stick it all together." Here his motivating impulse was to explore the fertility or fecundity of Africa (and/or our concepts of Africa), and he directed his dancers to focus on expressing their reproductive centers. The result is not pelvic thrusts, but dance that keeps to the ground. The dancers explore their personal space through arm and leg extensions, and those wriggles and tremors I mentioned earlier emanate from their cores, rising upward or downward.  

A trio of women (Amber Mayberry among them), each with a microphone, perform virtuosic monologues about democracy in Africa, while dancing at full speed--some audio processing distorts their voices and adds noise, and your mind can't quite keep up as they tumble and pirouette, and swap the mic from hand to hand as needed. War in the Congo is reported on as another trio struggle, entwine, and collapse into a heap of bodies, eventually dragged back to be dumped into the trap door. Byrd is sometimes literal, sometimes not--hearing about Obama's visit doesn't bring a motorcade, but the Nairobi slums summon up two trios that dance down each other, with a combination of steps and body slaps.

Other moments seem more about the juxtaposition of narrative (both recorded and also read by Marsha Nyembesi Mutisi) and dance, and while you could make an argument of sorts for the tricky balances and partnerings reflecting something about "growing concern over Chinese labor practices," it's also possible to respond to the awkwardness of Kylie Lewallen's hop onto the back of Ty Alexander Cheng, or his unusual rotation of Lewallen's thigh as she perches one-legged, as referencing the sheer difficulty of movement to cope with the flood of strategic rationalizations. Byrd keeps the readings open, solicits them. Perhaps you see Africans laboring to working together under a steady rain of officialese, perhaps you just like the one-footed, hopping kicks of Vincent Lopez because they look cool. (Byrd has fielded an almost frightening array of intense dancers--I haven't even mentioned Tory Peil, Kelly Ann Barton, Bonnie Boiter-Jolley, Michael Bagne, Sarah Poppe, and Meaghan Sanford yet, and each of them deserves it.) That said, I was surprised that when recent events in Tunisia and Egypt didn't manifest in a united ensemble--it felt a little perverse. Was Byrd skirting the anthemic moment in dance? Was the return to disparate, chaotic (when viewed from outside) intention a commentary? 

The surreal, CNN-gone-wild scenic and lighting design by Jack Mehler is joined to a score by Byron Au Yong, with live performance on the kora by Kane Mathis. The kora is an old, old instrument, and Au Yong has it almost vanish within a river of electronic, industrial sonic artifact, only to reappear here and there, never completely overwhelmed. The score is perfectly suited to what you see. Byrd says his goal is that the work will spark in viewers a curiosity in Africa, our de facto "container" so long for the the disempowered and revolutionary, as Africa, here and there, finds its way to a middle class existence (at the same time as the U.S. middle class increasingly finds itself under new strains). Au Yong took that to heart, so there's none of the Afro-pop percussion you might expect (again, an emphasis-shifting elision that effaces a cultural mode that has been reasonably important to Africans, at least). This music, this dance, is more tectonic, filled with subsidences. At the end, you realize that one reason the dancers have tried so strenuously to maintain contact with the ground is that it's moving beneath them.