AMERICAN SPANISH DANCE FESTIVAL
at Northeastern Illinois University July 10-12 and 17-19
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This small company turned a potential weakness into strength by making this performance seem a personal exchange between itself and the audience. David Harris, the company’s musical director and vocalist, narrates and translates the texts in a comfortable, natural tone. He doesn’t overintellectualize the historical narrative or pontificate on the songs’ translations but gives them an accurate yet contemporary cast. When talking about a woman’s dilemma choosing between two lovers in a song, “Dos amantes tengo mama,” he quips, “It’s the same old problem.” The woman’s choice is between the man she loves, who is poor, and a wealthy man she doesn’t like. Harris even joins the dancer (Judith Brin Ingber, also the choreographer) when necessary: he’s the groom to her bride in Moroccan Wedding Suite.
The Middle Eastern influence is very evident in this dance, in both the choreography and the costuming. Dressed in a long black dress glistening with golden highlights, Ingber is resplendent as the bride-to-be, wearing part of her gold-coin dowry. Her expressive face glowing, sitting with her robe spread magnificently around her, she bends her torso back and forth or to either side. Her hands make little half circles, or flatten against the air, or draw things in toward her, or mime playing the drums. She brings them to a pause, crossed under her chin, framing her face demurely but proudly. Later she crosses them down toward the ground in front of her. Once she rises to a standing position, the music takes on a livelier beat and she shakes seductively in a sedate belly dance.
Ingber portrays the mother’s loss–cradling her bundled infant with a fond protectiveness, spitting out the pacifier with fiery defiance at an imaginary Nazi. The bundle, while obviously meant to be a baby, also oddly and poignantly recalls the uprooted victim’s bundle of prized possessions. And when Ingber struggles with her invisible Nazi adversary, the bundle comes apart and releases a torrent of pacifiers onto the stage. Countless artifacts, countless victims. As she spreads the cloth of the bundle over the pacifiers, it becomes both baby blanket and shroud. When she lifts it up and ties it around her waist, its other side is blood red.
