Beast Trio by Isa Bowser (Hard ground on steel plate)
Pounding and relentless percussive recorded music looping over and over. Maybe 8 dancers moving so slowly and with so much fluidity, never stopping, not speeding up. Their bodies forming tableau after horrifying tableau depicting abjection, violence, pleasure, sexual deviance, derangement, joy, and rage. Intermittently, throughout the piece the dancers would shift into fast, gyrating, repetitive movements in complex patterns and configurations. This thrusting, bouncing, shaking movement was in direct contrast to the honey-spilling slowness of the rest of the piece. Naked bodies, pulled, carried, stretched, sat on, ridden. Clothing removed and put on imperceptibly as we watched another area of the stage. A strong feeling of overwhelm, anxiety, stress, and fight or flight in my own body the whole time. Also felt like a kind of trance state, stretching and contracting time and space. Heightened sensitivity, hyper awareness, wishing I could look away at times, on the edge of it being too much and at that very moment it would diminish in intensity just enough for me to keep watching. A balance of reciprocity in the inflicting and inflicted upon violence. Penises shaken under dresses, grabbed and yanked around. Full frontal nudity, male and female bodies. Bodies painted blue, gold, a world of grotesque, of violence. Then moments of playfulness, that almost didn't seem real. I spent a lot of time de-objectifying the dancers in my mind, reminding myself that it was a performance, that they had trained and rehearsed to be able to do these things, and hoping they were being taken care of in the process.
The elements of immersive, time bending trance as well as the strong sense of world-building are things I found so artful and exciting about this piece. The kind of intensity of experience evoked by the deep dedication of the performers both physically and emotionally really brought me as a viewer, out of my mundane experience and into a heightened state of awareness. There were powerful political implications of the movements and tableaus created by these dancers of varying genders and races. Knowing the company is based in Brazil gives me some context for the way it may be speaking to colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism in ways similar yet distinct from the ways we struggle with those structures here in the U.S. I am also interested in how our cultural realities are reflected and challenged through art and performance andwas a profound example of a viscerally potent performance work bringing us closer to the complexities of our cultural realities.