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Tea in the Sahara, by recent Columbia College graduate Katja Brown, began the evening with a rather simple tale convincingly danced by Brown, Nancy Baumgarten, and Elizabeth Spatz. As El Bakkar’s reedy, nasal, Egyptian-flavored music begins to wind about, the three women, in long white skirts and high-necked white blouses, step gingerly onstage. Their prim looks are in uncomfortable contrast to the exotic music and its feeling of heat and mystery, but they seem enthralled by the scenery (invisible to us). One begins to dance, and the others, shocked, stop her, yet soon they are all twisting and spinning giddily, as male voices wail passionately along with the sitar and congas. But it is the Sahara, after all, not a garden party, and they’re horribly overdressed. The music stops abruptly; we hear relentless winds sweeping across the dunes as the women stumble across the stage, half-crawling, panting, pulling at their blouses, hiking up their skirts, until they collapse in a heap, arms outstretched, perhaps toward some mirage. That’s what happens when you go to the desert looking chic.
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The final piece, Samsara, the Wheel of Life, is shrouded in mostly obscure imagery yet has a dramatic, even epic sweep. It is performed by Abiogenesis, a “movement ensemble” (why movement and not dance?) composed of choreographer and founder Angela Allyn, Doris Difarnecio, Christine Lesser, Jules O’Neil, Yvette Rodriguez, and Shelley Wilson. The music is by Jean Michel Jarre, except for a stretch by an unknown musician. One after another, the six women, naked, their bodies and faces powdered, roll backward across the stage, nearly hidden in clouds of billowing smoke. After the wave of bodies disappears offstage, the women reappear in loose dresses and turbans. Projected on a screen behind them is a newspaper photo, magnified, focusing on a poor woman’s frozen cry, her fist raised; others like her are in the background. The dancers crouch and stumble before this image, seemingly overcome by their burdens and oppression. Three fall; the other three drag them offstage. One woman resists and gets away, but she is subdued by another.
