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Race, sexuality at the center of fest's opening works
Lucia Mauro; Chicago Tribune
March 12, 2008

The "body-based artists" featured in "Choreographing Coalitions: Dancing the Other in the Self" push themselves beyond dance to address socially relevant issues channeled through personal experience. Curated by local choreographer Peter Carpenter, the monthlong festival at Links Hall explores how these artists use their bodies as catalysts for change in matters of politics, race and gender identity.

What sounds like a monumental goal managed to unfold on a small but intense scale. Race and sexuality encompassed the festival's three opening works.

Washington, D.C.-based Gesel Mason presented her solo, "No Less Black." Against live narration by Toni Asante Lightfoot, Mason sculpted and contoured her body with her own hands. When her fingers unexpectedly splayed, she quickly restrained them.

The image symbolized her belief that black dancers can stretch beyond a jazzy, athletic or praise-dance aesthetic common among contemporary African-American choreographers.

However, more than the movement the spoken text potently revealed Mason's dilemma: "Am I black enough?" She questioned whether she should be angrier, or speak ebonics or trace her ancestry back to Kunta Kinte. Is it possible to like R&B and Rachmaninoff? She wondered aloud how she fits into, and how she can escape, ingrained perceptions of her race.

In "Jumping the Broom," a grueling solo choreographed by David Rousseve, Mason portrayed a bound slave woman in a tattered wedding gown. In the work's context, her heaves, gasps and seizures proved more effective than carefully shaped dance variations. She performed to a recorded narrative by a former male slave recounting the prohibition on slave marriages. When the master found out he had secretly wed his love by the tradition of jumping the broom, the bride was whipped and shipped off to be sold. Mason delivered that moment of pain and anguish from a place so profound, she could no longer utter words -- only guttural moans.

Mason also posited her historic character's injustice against the gay-marriage debate -- a relevant topic, but one that got shortchanged in this solo. She can still probe deeper.

Darrell Jones, a Chicago dancer-choreographer, and three club-influenced dancers showcased excerpts from his "Third Swan from the End," a full-length plunge into the gay-black underground world of voguing. The complex vogue subculture is more than striking a pose in diva clothing. As shown in the layered, stream-of-consciousness vignettes, Jones extracted the form's combativeness, humor, pain and power.



"Choreographing Coalitions" runs through March and features different artists each weekend at Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield Ave. Performances: Fridays, Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7 p.m. Tickets: $12-$15. Call 773-281-0824.