Company SoGoNo's dance piece “Bird Suite,” which I saw at
Triskelion Arts in Williamsburg on Sunday, April 30, is not just interested in
using birds as a metaphor.
Bird Suite gets into the birdiness of birds, their
feathery idiosyncrasies, their beauty and strangeness. The piece, choreographed
by Tanya Calamoneri, presents, not an abstract but a highly concrete idea of
what birds are. Birds represent the
heights of our lyric inspiration, but also an essential inhumanity. As someone
who lives with both cats and birds, I can easily anthropomorphize my cats;
birds are a distant, different matter.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Birns I am amazed by how little I noticed
birds before I had birds myself, and how much I notice them now, how alert I am
for all manifestations of the avian. We cannot look down on birds. We cannot
look down on them both because they are above us physically and because they
can do the one thing we cannot naturally do: fly. (We can swim much more than
fly, we can keep up with the fish in their motion a lot more than with the birds).
No wonder poets such as Keats and Hardy used birds as symbols of attaining notes
of concord we cannot reach yet embodying a fundamentally different consciousness.
Photo Credit: Benjamin Heller “Bird Suite” starts out with ”Hatch”, in which four performers, Erin Cairns Cella and Christine
Coleman, Dages Juvelier Keates and Mariko Endo Reynolds, d wear blue, feathery costumers, including fluffy blue
headdresses, and are hunched over as if about to hatch out of an egg. Raucou bird calls emanate from above as the birds stretch out of their feathered pods of origin. So
compact and controlled were their bodies I had difficultly believing these were
people at first, or at least anything but small children, but the dancers’
ability to conceal and unfold was convincing of the action of birds and their
ability to foreground or camouflage themselves, to crouch or unfurl, to be
self-sufficient or self-advertising, depending on the circumstances and on
their whims. First cocooned, then gloriously spread out the blue birds established
a tone at once fun, weird, and captivating. Lithe and portable, animated yet
supine, the dancers in “Hatch” evoked ideas of motion existing amid stillness. The four
dancers squat, extend, contort, gyrate, bespeaking both the necessity, the
contingency, and, finally, the insufficiency of motion. As T. S. Eliot put it
in “Burnt Norton”: After the kingfisher's wing/ Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still.”
All the
performers are female, raising the question: Why are girls likened to birds? Perhaps
it is their voices? I cannot see any other reasons why birds are more female
than male. If anything, my male parakeet sings more concertedly than his female
counterpart. It is probably, indeed, a comment on the way the identities of women,
more than those of birds, are culturally constructed. Indeed, ‘Bird Suite”, if
it wanted to, could have gone into issues of gender as well as language, and
Calamoneri’s previous work such as “The Art of Memory” has been cogent in its
intellectuality, but Calamoneri and the SoGoNo performers preferred to
concentrate on the spectacle, the phenomenology, of birds themselves, leaving,
of course, these sorts of inferences to be drawn from them.
Photo Credit: Julie Lemberger, Adam Amengaul
Different parts of the suite had different emphases. “Catbird Sonata”
performed by Heather Harpham, emphasized the lyricism of birds, the way they
are torch singer’s vocalists: sound over shape.
P
hoto Credit: Julie Lemberger
“Aviary,” a solo performance by Cassie Tunick, solicited
images of freedom and captivity associated with birds; at one point, Tunick
holds a cage up to the audience, reminding us how we imprison birds ostensibly
as a way of nurturing them even as we celebrate birds as a major trope for
untrammeled liberty. The surface red eroticism of “Flamingo”, performed by
Cella and Keates, with its overt references to Las Vegas showgirls, contrasted
with the subtler yet dapper white eroticism of “Ain't No Swan Lake,” performed
with both dazzle and understatement by Coleman. Keates, Reynolds, Cella, and
Soraya Odishoo, who also did the sound design for the piece. Just as the White
Queen in Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking
Glass ends up being more alluring then the red, near-narcissistic
perfection became more exciting than gaudiness. But the red might perhaps have the advantage of greater discursivity, bringing issues out into the open.
Even before the overt references to “Swan
Lake” and “The Firebird” I had thought of classical ballet, how different a
form it was from what we were seeing here, with its modern, postmodern, and
Asian influences, yet also how the two forms were, at a distance, comparable,
measurable across the same spectrum. Why the birds/ballet connection? Why do at
least two major ballets center around birds? For one thing, birds are natural performers.
They are decorative, elaborate, flamboyant, strutting their stuff. In both
voice and appearance, birds cry out for attention. They also, as far s
land-base creatures are concerned, have unusual forms, do strange things with
their bodies: birds as residual, Lilliputian dinosaurs, cold-blooded others,
which our bodies at their most trained and prehensile can only faintly approximate. The dancers were so good, so exhilarating, they at times defied gravity, but we will always be more bound to the earth than our feathered friends.
Photo Credit: Adam Amengual (for both) The lighting ofAndy Dickerson, the
music that included original compositions by Odishoo and Danny Tunick as well
as recorded songs, and the costumes by Mioko
Mochizuki all added to the delightful and pertinacious quirkiness of “Bird Suite.”
The costumes were especially good at addressing the difficult question of how
faithful, how 'mimetic' humans in bird costumes should be? Should they try to 'be’
birds as much as possible, or, to refer to T S. Eliot again, should they be
like the cats in “Cats,” who, whatever their virtues are in no danger of being mistaken
for a cat even by the most dimwitted dog or rat. The costumes here, on the
other hand, avoided silly approximation or caricature in going at least halfway
in making the performers look like birds, certainly suggesting the extravagance,
the vulnerability, the otherness that we see when we see birds.
There is
joy, fun, glamour irreverence here; but also a serious effort to understand the
mystery of birds, to use human bodies in performance to reflect in what it must
be like to be a bird. The Triskelion space added to the enjoyment by its
placing the audience in proximity to the dancers and with ideal sight lines.
But it is still good that "Bird Suite” should be seen again at a larger
space in Manhattan this fall! I highly recommend it; this is the kind of dance piece
I would see angina and again to appreciate Company SoGoNo’s winning comprehension
of the incomprehensibility of birds.
