Acts of subversion

my three nights at the theater

Any time I sit in an audience and watch a play, a dance performance or musical, it feels subversive, like the audience is in cahoots with the performers in an effort to resist oppression. 

The performance of art is a huge counterweight to the ugliness and the incompetence that plays out in the “theater” company of misfits that seem to run our nation just 8 miles south of where I am writing. Those flexing power in the Executive branch are acting out some kind of role-play where everyone competes in contests for the most obsequious, most cruel, and best Orwellian sound-alike. Some in the national audience are no doubt exhilarated. I find it troubling and frightening. But there we are.

As I sat in three audiences Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I thought of all the audiences in the DC area this weekend who took in a creative endeavor of any shape or size. Does anyone else see attending and supporting the arts as an act of resistance? There is an indefatigable light generated in the darkness of the theater as we dare to build a community together around a shared experience undeniably good and true.

Thursday night: Sound of Music. The Barrie School is a private pre K-12 school with a vibrant arts program. Our friend’s daughter — Syd Riva Clement — played two roles: the Mother Abbess and Elsa Schraeder. For those familiar with the movie, you might not recognize two songs that were part of the stage version. One of these is “No Way to Stop It” in which Elsa and Max try to convince Captain Georg von Trapp to forget about everything going on around him, to be flexible and convince the encroaching Nazis that he is their ally. Elsa chooses self-preservation by aligning with the authoritarian regime—an eerie echo of today’s political climate, where democracy, the rule of law, and the legacy of the Great Society are all under siege.

Adding another layer of resonance, the production features DEI casting: Maria is African-American, and the seven von Trapp children are ethnically diverse — enough to make any anti-woke crusader’s head spin. There is no way to leave the theater without humming a tune and feeling more than a little buoyed by the spirit of this new generation of students and citizens.

Curtain call, Barrie School’s production of The Sound of Music. Photo: Busy Graham

Friday night: Sutradhar Institute of Dance and Related Arts (SIDRA) at the Black Box Theatre in Silver Spring. Sutradhar’s founder Nilimma Devi won the Lifetime Achievement Award  from County Executive Ike Leggett in 2012, the same year my spouse Busy received the Lifetime Impact Award. Wishing to support this great organization that has benefitted so many of our friends and their children in transformative ways, we bought tickets.

At any point in the next hour or so there were two or four or six young female dancers -- Maya Devi, Sophia Steckler, Dora Slane, Riya Devi-Ashby, Leela Brennig and Priya Tapia Pereira -- moved in a choreography that transcended dance. Their movement was fluid, often synchronized, sometimes in counterpoint — at times grounded, stamping with bells, and at other times ethereal, with arms and hands unfurling as if from the soul, reaching toward a wonder beyond this world. It was mesmerizing. 

Riya Devi-Ashby in Yogini Photo: Busy Graham

Scene from Yogini Photo: David Haft

The final dance was titled Yogini, a reference to the mother goddesses throughout South Asian history. The performance was prefaced by Anila Kumari, Associate Director of SIDRA and choreographer of Yogini. Here is an excerpt of her statement that captured the mystery and power of the performance:

You can take lemon by itself, and it is very bitter. Yogini…speaks to something in the heart about this struggle when we have only bitter things – a genocide, starvation and our environment under threat. Just to name a few things...

How…to have peace? It comes through the honey of our community, our friendships and our life. I can see the fierceness of the goddess, the fierceness of Dakini in the Tibetan mask, but really the dance is about the sweetness of love. And can we drown ourselves in love, so that even evil ceases to give us bitterness?

Saturday night: “Juxtapose: A Theatrical Shadow Box” performed by Happenstance, a visual poetic theater quintet -- Mark Jaster, Sabrina Mandell, Gwen Grastorf, Sarah Olmsted Thomas and Alex Vernon. We have seen this remarkable troupe perform many times before. Always impressive and memorable.

Program notes include the following description which captures the inspirational sparks of this eclectic adventure: 

[This piece is]  “…inspired by the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell, the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) and Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle), nostalgia, ephemera, mass-extinction and the Anthropocene, discovery, creation, play, attachment and letting go. Its aesthetic elements…nod to a time of looming instability. It could be now, or between the wars, here or abroad.

Joseph Cornell shadow boxes (an inspiration for “Juxtapose”) are featured in The Simpsons, Season 20, episode 9, “Lisa the Drama Queen.” Coincidentally, Mark Jaster’s first introduction to Cornell was as a high school student, visiting a museum exhibit of Cornell’s work.

The soundtrack, impeccably timed to the movement, combines nostalgia (Poor Butterfly Fox Trot, Stardust), classical mood pieces (The Planets, Tales of Hoffman) and vivid sound effects. So much intelligence, collaboration, and brash creative vision compressed into 75 minutes is a marvel to witness.

The surreal environment, the stunning sleight of hand, the story full of mysterious encounters, some funny, some tragic, some absurd. Why is the world like this? At the end the quintet sings “Stairway to the Stars” with earnest and bright hope. What else can there be? Climb every mountain, ford every stream, right?

MARIA: (Crosses to L. of CAPTAIN) Georg, I know that mountain as well as I know this garden. And so do you. And once we’re over that mountain, we're in Switzerland.

Yogini…the fierce power of love to bring peace over the bitterness of evil.

Let's climb that stairway to the stars
With love beside us to fill the night with a song
We'll hear the sound of violins
Out yonder where the blue begins.

Think of it: dance, music, art in every jurisdiction and in all venues large and small, too numerous to wrangle, downsize or suppress by diktat.  

For all the plays, concerts, performances, in this time and the next…Gaudeamus omnes. 

Let us all rejoice.

Happenstance Theater’s “Juxtapose” Photo: Leah Huete

Notes:

For information about Sutradhar Institute for Dance and Related Arts (SIDRA)

https://www.dancesidra.org/

https://www.facebook.com/dancesidra/

For information about Happenstance Theater 

https://www.happenstancetheater.com/