Published in Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine, Winter Issue 2008
Shivers and awe: such dueling sensations were prompted by a camera’s slow pan along the surface of seeming corridors of ice. The shimmering walls, composed of a blue at once beguiling and ominous, begged us to imagine a time before National Geographic Specials, an Arctic landscape as seen by black explorer Matthew Henson who discovered the North Pole as a member of Admiral Richard Peary’s expedition in 1909. Unfolding on a triptych of screens, these ultra visions greeted audiences who saw Cast No Shadow, the collaboration between filmmaker Isaac Julien and choreographer Russell Malaphant at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater as part of its Next Wave Festival this past November.
Julien, aided by his cinematographer Nina Kellgren, unfurls a journey that subverts beauty of place to reveal collisions of race, politics and the eternal dislocations of the mind and spirit. Having honed his mastery of the tableau vivant in shorts and feature films (This is not an AIDS Advertisement, The Attendant, Young Soul Rebels and 1990’s mesmeric Looking for Langston), the filmmaker’s skill for unspooling seductive images is surpassed only by his ability to make their dark edges linger in the subconscious.
Could Julian’s bold vision meld with live dance? In the evening’s first part, True North, the alliance felt uneasy: those three screens loomed over a trio of men (Alexander Varona, Kyoung-Shin Kim and Riccardo Meneghini) who embodied turbulent cascades of water with crouches, swiveling turns, hand clasps, embraces and lifts that hoisted them aloft in pieta-like compositions. Film morphs into flesh in the person of Vanessa Myrie who’s first seen onscreen trudging across snow-kissed fields before she materializes on stage as a ghostly apparition ethereally gowned by Ursula Bombshell; both witness and stand-in for Henson, Myrie’s androgynous presence forged a connection between film and live performance the rest of True North failed to exploit. The sound of dripping water and voiceovers taken from Henson’s journals enhanced atmospherically, but the anticipated magic—the fluid dissolve from film to live imagery—never arrived; I found myself consciously shifting to absorb first one medium, then the next. Malaphant’s contributions felt an afterthought, possibly because his work came later—True North initially premiered in 2004.
The middle section, Fantôme Afrique, embraced the power and pleasures of pure cinema: clips of Quagadougou, the capital of the African nation Burkina Faso, pricked our senses like subliminal flashes: vintage film posters, shots from touchstone films of the radical Pan-African cinema’s golden age; careworn movie houses and the townsmen who populate them, their rapt faces flecked with light from an unseen screen. Elsewhere, there’s the bustling life of the town, and such Pirandellian touches as the late sight of a film crew shooting footage we’ve seen at earlier points. A study in change and perception, Afrique shows how cinema’s Dream Machine manipulates the social realities of foreign landscapes for mass delectation, sustaining myths and lies as it casts a selective blind eye.
Fantôme Afrique eschewed live dance. On screen Vanessa Myrie wafts Garbo-like across the landscape, but the human heart of Afrique is Stephen Galloway (choreographing his own dancing) as a shamanistic indigent whose haggard, incendiary face grabs, and holds our attention from beginning to end. Unleashing a ziggurat of chain-steps, undulations and, in a memorable image, a slow crawl across a sun-cracked field of earth, Galloway forcefully delineates timeless paths of civilizations rendered obsolete in the name of progress.
That looming question—will film and dance coalesce into something exhilarating, something new—finds its most satisfying resolution in the final third. As the curtain rises on Small Boats, the three screens are now one as a lone camera panned along rows of literal small boats under a vivid blue sky, their bright colors worn pale by the sea. The audience gasped at the coup de théâtre that followed: a trick of light disintegrated the screen image before our eyes, revealing a mass of dancers spinning, churning, floating in dim shadow, a briny inferno subtly enhanced by Andy Cowton’s score.
Here the visual imagery propelled Julien’s ongoing dialogue with issues of migration and relocation. Sometimes they jarred subtly, as with the presence of the dark-skinned Vanessa Myrie serenely strolling against a backdrop of white sand (a repeated visual symbol from True North: incongruity on a blank canvas/ethnicity in a white world) or ominously, as the camera stares at Mylar-covered bodies on a Sicilian shore while vacationers frolic a few feet away.
Malaphant’s movement reconciled migratory struggles poignantly; often arms sliced the air in spectral desperation, the disenfranchised locked in a futile battle for survival. In Boats, much of the choreography echoed that seen in True North, but here we see the movement recast on the screen; the mirroring enhanced the immediate story of Africans who attempt the perilous trek across water to Italy and Spain in hopes of better lives by conjuring myriad historical associations—the plight of refugees or the wages of slavery, to name but a few.
There was stunning footage of dancers rolling up the cylindrical stairs of the Hotel TK in Palermo, before the film dissolved into lighting designer Michael Hulls’ abyss-like replication of a staircase on the floor of the Harvey stage, followed by lovely angular solos, duets and trios. The visions were painterly, elegant and often sexually coded, as with the sight of one man carrying another through a mirrored ballroom on screen before appearing miraculously in the flesh. The look on the carrier’s face is at once an admonishment and a provocation; as we experience this surreal moment, our minds latch onto the intimacy the look conveyed, the unusual way the carrier clasped his friend’s body and his slow, stalking march out of the movie’s frame onto the stage.
In the final images onscreen bodies poetically float, then sink, to the depths of a murky sea. Again cinema morphed to flesh: through the scrim Malaphant revealed those same bodies caught in a panoramic tangle of hemp ropes, a symbolic web wrought by man-made evils. A sight to summon dimensions of Greek tragedy, and a perfect distillation of Cast No Shadow’s ruling idea: throughout world history man’s utopic quests for discovery—and survival—spurred progress and salvation, but not without heavy costs.
•••
Isaac Julien and Russell Malaphant’s Cast No Shadow
A Performa commission with Sadler’s Wells for PERFORMA07 at the BAM 25th Next Wave Festival, Harvey Theater, November 6, 8—10, 2007
Featuring the Russell Malaphant Dance Company and Vanessa Myrie
Cinematography by Nina Kellgren
Film editing by Adam Finch
Lighting Design by Michael Hulls
Music by Paul Schütze and Andy Cowton
Costumes by Ursula Bombshell