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Rare is the dance artist who can pull off the mix
of art and politics. Bay Area local treasure, Robert Moses, with his dance company,
“Kin,” not only creates some of the most gorgeous movement on stage anywhere,
but is committed to tackling ideas of race, class, culture and gender, and does so
successfully.
Appearing as the first dance company on stage at the 450-seat venue,
Kanbar Hall, at the remodeled Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Moses opened an
engagement that runs the gamut from lush and lyrical pure dance to the more polemical.
Unfortunately, the new theatre, which has the perfect audience capacity for a modern dance
group such as Kin, offers a limited playing space and resembles a nicely appointed stage
at a junior high school auditorium. Moses’ work deserves to be seen in a more
spacious setting.
“Biography”
(2003) utilizes a 1961 radio program that
featured the voices of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes and others,
discussing, “The Negro in American Culture.” Moses’ ebb and flow of
strident, nearly violent phrases followed by walking patterns, lines and stillness,
complimented the dynamic exchange of ideas in the sound score. One fascinating image was
that of two white male dancers licking and preening the prostrate bodies of blacks, a kind
of erotic, vampire pieta.
“other gods,” a world premiere, featured an elegiac
orchestral score by Georgs Pelecis and beautiful dancing by four couples. Moses is
consistently brilliant at making up ways of approaching space, momentum and the body, and
at the same time he understands the need to offer formality, lines rather than pure
momentum, and clarity. Kin is a diverse group of strong, accomplished dancers. Here, and
throughout the evening, Katherine Wells, long
and lanky, and Amy Foley, powerful and petite, offered extremely clear and confident
performances while Ramon Ramos Alayo and
Carlos Gonzalez offered a particularly relaxed athleticism that was exciting to watch.
“Cause,”a section of an evening-length work in progress, is a
poetry slam with dancing. Created in collaboration with Youth Speaks, a local nonprofit
spoken word organization, Moses explored the “first stirrings of hate” using the
emotional and provocative live performances of poets Emiliano Bourgois-Chacon, Luke
Brekke-Meisner, Katri Foster, Ise Lyfe, Jason Mateo and Tristan Ching. Here, no dancing could possibly compete with the
stunning power of these young writers, presenting their own stories, their anger. Moses
simply sits them on a stool, surrounded by the crowd of his dance company, and lets them
go. The dancing interludes, with movement nearly as dense and violent as life on the
street, looked appropriately uncomfortable on
the small, crowded stage.
Also on the program was an enigmatic excerpt from “Tasogare,”
(the Japanese word for twilight), with original music performed live by the Somei Yoshino
Taiko Ensemble. Moses’ Kin included Alayo, Tristan Ching, Bliss Kohlmyer Dowman, Todd
Eckert, Foley, Tianne Frias, Gonzalez, Michael Separovich, Raissa Simpson and Wells.
May 3, 2004 – Michael Wade Simpson
