Aina Alègre’s web bio says her choreography looks to re-imagine the body.
But for me, a spectator of her choreography, she’s re-imagining dance. Her blazon reads “Every move that fits”.
“Fits” is the operative word.
I first noticed Alègre's particular ability to fit together fragments, phrases and sequences of different movement genres in R-A-U-X-A, a solo piece, where I was tickled to feel what I thought of as Qi gong “standing meditation” fit into a common strand of sound and movement energy she calls “hammering”.
In her 2022 creation This is not “An act of love & resistance, a dance performance for nine around the concept of air/breathing, Alègre seems to double down on the fitting. With fragments, phrases and sequences of movement genre, she fits together people by winding them into processions, parades, marches, solos, groups doing break, ballet, modern and contemporary, expressionism and formalism, canned and live music and three slide trombones one French horn. There’s no homogeneity, no heterogeneity, nor does the piece gel. This is not “An act of love & resistance fits. Because it fits, it “happens”.
For me, the piece happens because in the fitting process each performer and each movement fragment, phrase and sequence is chosen for energy generated and/or exposed rather than for its genre or style (movement form). It’s this selection criterion, a granular focus on energy created and released rather than visual or narrative or symbolic logic that’s unique in Alègre’s success.
In R-A-U-X-A, the energy criterion is around “hammering”. In This is not “An act of love & resistance” I think the criterion for animating Alègre’s concept of circulating air might be called “leaf in the open air’, the oscillating energy of iterative shiver and stutter of things moving in the environment.
Imagine the selection process as your fixing a criterion/concept firmly in your inner eye. You then sit down in front of a huge box garishly branded “Dance Performance”. Inside the box are thousands and thousands of pieces of movement: fragments, phrases, sequences. The pieces are all identifiable by somebody somewhere; some are embedded in narrative logics, some seem even to “naturally” go together, like in a picture puzzle: blue must be water, might go with curl of a wave; pale blue, sky, fluff of cloud; hands, fingertips touching, above the head, in front of the chest, ballet, tradition; hip twist, Indian dance, break, urban pace; top body sweep, qi gong; inside body whirl, ball room... You take a deep breath, pour yourself a nice cup of, say, organic mescal-flower tea. You push aside logic and pick and choose according as to how a piece reflects the energy you want to reveal or radiate. Then, very patiently, guided by the senses of your inner eye, by trial and error, you select each piece according to how the energy bits fit with each other in the frame of your concept.
If the fitting process seems a bit like making a magic spell, and if Aina Alègre’s This is not “An act of love & resistance is any indicator, making the dance happening happen is also a matter of competent but ordinary stagecraft and tools.
Performers with sound enter from the back of the auditorium; a pellucid screen divides the stage into common and private space. Musicians and dancers turn and glide among each other while slide trombones pump and a French horn breathes from the brass loops of intestine over a base of shifting light qualities and intensities, melodies and harmonies. Stage and tools aid in keeping the concept energy coherent, guide spectators towards the experience of what is happening.
The freshness and originality of both This is not “An act of love & resistance” and R-A-U-X-A, along with their resemblance to other quality dance performance suggest that “fitting energies” has a future in dance performance creation.
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