Arts
Left with a whirlwind of emotions
View(s):By Annemari de Silva
‘Pluralism’, a contemporary dance performance presented by the Mesh Dance Theatre on April 5 and 6 at the Park Street Mews Stables.
I have had the pleasure of watching three out of four productions by Mesh Academy of Dance and while I would readily write a review of their work, I hesitated to do so with Pluralism. I wanted to preserve the feeling I walked away with on that Friday night and not interrogate it. But if an honest, personal reaction will suffice, here it is.
I was floored by ‘Pluralism’. Completely carried away with the entire spectacle, experiencing it from my gut and not from my mind, my responses were visceral and cheesy as this might sound – I was brought to tears at one point. I genuinely did not believe contemporary dance, of all things, could do that. Mesh Dance Theatre’s performance showed me that perhaps it is specifically contemporary dance that can do that.
‘Pluralism’ was by no means the Academy’s most abstract work. It spoke identifiably of activism, migration, gender, and, overarching it all, the tension between conformity and resistance to it – the very essence of pluralism.
Working in activist circles, the first piece resonated strongly with me. It was haunting and devastating watching the dancers go through the motions of groupthink and defiance, the repercussions of refusing to participate or of just being different, of finding themselves tied up even by their own actions. At one point, the dancers lined up, running towards the audience, hurtling names of activists and artists and the dates they were killed or died. Ranging from Sojourner Truth in the 1850s to our own Richard de Zoysa in 1990, the audience was confronted with the real-life consequences of what the dancers’ bodies communicated a moment ago. As the dancers gradually moved to run in circles amidst the cries, the audience was overwhelmed by the chaos of death and a life of hitting yourself against the brick wall of society. I was in tears by this point.
The show then moved on to a duet by the choreographer, Umeshi Rajeendra, and dancer Hope Rajasinghe. The two lone dancers, dressed in minimal black, moved in slow, laboured motions, making an agonizing journey across the stage and taking a visible toll on their bodies. At times the movements were fluid, graceful, and pretty to watch; at others, it was difficult to see them pushing their physical limits and exhausting themselves. The few periodic moments of restful, minimal movement were solace to the observer – but only momentary, as the dancers launched again into a sequence, as though rest would never really come.
The final piece relied on costume in a way that Mesh Dance Theatre’s other performances have not. The piece began with the binary: two groups, engaged in ‘male’ and ‘female’ movements in their ‘male’ and ‘female’ costumes. The dancers then returned, making the journey of mixing costumes as well as movements and finally culminating in a completely queered sequence where the former gender signifiers mean nothing anymore: they are ‘costumes’, not necessarily correlated to the persona of the people wearing them.
Considering ‘Pluralism’ was less abstract than her other work, I wonder whether Umeshi Rajeendra wanted the audience to come away with their thoughts provoked and reflecting. I am sure they did. For me though, as the lights turned on to signal the end, my heart was still stuck in my stomach and my head still dizzy from the whirlwind of emotions the dance took me through.