July 12-14, 2010
Rosie Herrera is a bit of a magician. She transports us into surreal, ridiculous, and unexpected places and jolts us with little surprises before we even have time to guess what’s coming next. She twists our emotions, our expectations, and our associations. With a skillful sleight-of-hand, she can turn the seemingly benign piñata—parties! candy!—into a darkly symbolic object, carrying disappointment, disillusionment, and violence. Or perhaps she just exposes what is already there, in the image, in us.
A Festival favorite from last year’s Past/Forward concert, Herrera has been invited back this year with the popular Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret (2009), set on her own dancers this time rather than ADF students, and the World Première of Pity Party, commissioned by the ADF. With a skilled eye for the theatrical, Herrera transforms the Reynolds Industries Theater to create vivid and striking images for her work.
I was excited to see Various Stages of Drowning again, and was relieved to find the moments preserved in my memory still fresh and full of life. Besides the hilarious Titanic scene, where a drag queen lip-synchs to “My Heart Will Go On,” smashes a block of ice to the floor and “swims” off stage in a wet suit and flippers, I found myself noticing the darker veins that underlie this work. Tinkly, cutesy music plays as a tiny woman (Ana Mendez) in a short, puffy pink dress giggles and blows kisses. Three men in bow ties carry her around the stage where ten birthday cakes sit atop tall stools. The men position Mendez above a cake, lowering her gently down. “Ay!” she squeals, giggling, as the icing oozes from between her legs. As she is carried from one cake to the next, the mood turns sinister; Mendez begins to scream in protest, crying, as she is roughly dropped into each cake. It becomes hard to watch this violation, hard to watch her helpless desperation. Immediately after she is dragged off stage, a young child—two years old, perhaps—is wheeled through the ruined cakes in a bathtub. The juxtaposition of the child’s lightness and innocence with the violence just done to the woman takes one’s breath away; it feels overwhelmingly ominous—and yet, tinged with hope.
As Pity Party begins, the curtain opens to reveal a wall of shimmering gold tinsel, hanging ceiling to floor at the back of the stage. The now-classic love ballad, “A Total Eclipse of the Heart,” plays, belted out by one of the performers and a man from the audience. The dancers fill up the drama of the song with intentionally angst-y gestures and facial expressions, pounding their fists against their thighs and clutching their hair. This over-the-top expression of emotion is countered by subtler scenes: one of the performers, Liony Garcia, bobs for Barbies, lifting the dolls from a bowl of water with his teeth and distributing them to the other dancers, who cradle them solemnly and mournfully.
Pity Party, like Various Stages of Drowning, shifts swiftly between celebration and grief, the ridiculous and the deadly serious. The performers pose in a sultry tableau, holding suggestive smiles that eventually begin to droop, until they are all weeping. Piñatas, imbued with memories of child-like excitement and anticipation, float just out of reach of the performers, who swing blindly for them; indeed, they swing with such commitment that it becomes clear it is the swinging itself that is the point, despite its futility. Later, when one of the women breaks up a dance party, blindfolded and swinging a bat, the other dancers direct her to a piñata on the floor, which she proceeds to pummel to death. The violence of this scene is palpable, as the performers’ encouraging shouts become stares of horror, and the woman with the bat swings until she is too exhausted to continue.
Although there are still a few rough edges in Pity Party, Herrera draws us easily along with her quirky touch and sense of humor. It is clear that just beneath the outrageous, glittery surface is something true, something honest. Herrera seems to suggest that perhaps the glitzy veneer is true, too. It is part of Herrera’s magic that she can offer up a landscape that feels so deeply familiar, so human, for all its strangeness.
Anne Morris
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