It’s informative to read in ODC Artistic Director Brenda
Way’s program notes that motivation on her part for mounting Kate Weare’s
full-length work “World’s on Fire” issues from a wish to look deeply into our
heartland, to better understand what Way tags as a “divisive” culture. It’s
certainly a more sanguine approach to the rural poor than the one taken in
Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” outburst. Of course, the upside of
the Clinton spleen-venting sound byte was its exposure of a purely choleric
class bias to vote against. If it qualified as “divisive,” it did us the
service of confirming the existence of certain immutable class divisions. It
reminded us that the multi-class electoral “we” is plucked from a lower-hanging
basket of deliberate confusions and politically illiterate illusions.
In “World’s on Fire,” Kate Weare has created a “from the mountains to the
prairies” folkloric work for the current crop of ODC dancers. They have been
axiomatically culled from a Vaganova school, a National Guard police squadron, and
first and second-string classical and contemporary ballet companies. As an
ensemble, they represent a geographical spread extending from the Philippines
to Overland, Kansas. Weare chooses a genre of music composed and arranged by
Jeff Kazor, that shoehorns this rangy troupe into an artistic footprint
comparable to an Airstream mobile home. It appears that Weare was intending to respond
to a treasure trove of authentic, carefully curated musical traditions among
mountain and plains dwellers, while simultaneously reprising a monoculture as multicultural
scripture.
The Crooked Jades accompanied the dancers on stringed instruments. Played jauntily
or hauntingly, at first blush, the melodies enliven, but ultimately, they
upstage the choreography. Women dancers
wear Anthropologie-style earth-hued summer dresses and the men, casual wear in
the same muted tones (Costumes: Sarah Cubbage). The set is a bolder, more
aggressive incarnation of the Jardi Tancat post-fence surround.
Weare has given the dancers novel, appealing shapes that want a home for their
texture in a more expansive genre of music. There are pauses where the music
stops dead to punctuate a combination; further truncation comes with an ending
stamp or a timed swat by an article of clothing. Contrapuntal elements meant to
alert city slickers to what is cyclical in farm or mountain life assert
themselves throughout. When a woman sits up, her male partner falls flat;
circling lifts meet with jet-propelled floor slides. Forces of nature fashioned
into human quatrains roll in like amber waves of grain until flagged down by
side-by-side dancers as chugging freight.
Stringed instruments implore; silences stand in for scenic shifts. In a segment to the song “Judgment,” we hear
“one foot on the land, one on the sea,” as balletic arabesques indicate wet
foot, dry foot. An evocative adagio is the prequel to a men’s duet in
silhouette. Flips, struts and dos y dos complete the tapestry’s taxonomy.
All the shapes, so imaginatively conceived, could and should engage us, but they
are held hostage to clogging music the audience cheerfully claps along to, but which is preternaturally
averse to the smuggled-in pirouette or arabesque.
Intended as the single, occasional full-length work for the
ODC gala program on March 8, which is International Women’s Day, it feels like
Cinderella will be going to the ball absent her glass slippers. In the period
we are living through, with the world on fire in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Paris, Ukraine,
Paradise, Port-au-Prince, and the Silk Road (for Kurds with no homeland), why
not remount a piece that carries the heft of, say, Kimi Okada’s stunning and
stirring “Flight to Ixcan,” which references her brother’s disappearance in
Guatemala? A work such as Okada’s could help us to understand that there is
nothing new to fear in the current geopolitical conflagration, including the
mistaken notion that “it” can all go away without those who have fallen prey to
its rapaciousness (as opposed to those profiting from it) stamping their
collective feet and standing up to hasten the fall of the empire.
Toba Singer
