The words of the stories come back at us again and again — spelled out, chanted, projected as manuscript pages. Enhanced and drilled in, they grow weaker, distant, instead of more affecting.
All the characters seem to be played by more than one performer, and all the dancers take more than one role as well as constituting an anonymous chorus. The three stories overlap. The suicide rolls toward the waterfall; the murder victims do the same movement. The dog howls after the murder; eventually everyone howls in chorus. The interrogator’s accepting but noncommittal “All right” is absorbed into a concluding prayer. “Thy kingdom come . . . this is the way the world begins . . . All right.”
Chapel/Chapter is a piece about reflection. Events that have happened in the past refract into present lives, splay back into memories, fuse into new images and sounds. The music could be Hispanic or Arabic or mediæval plainsong, the room a dance club or a synagogue.
The stories at the heart of Chapel/Chapter are the kind of thing we hear every day in the tabloids and dismiss. Maybe Jones is suggesting we shouldn’t dismiss a gratuitous killer, or blame a parent who can’t cope for offing his troublesome kid. Maybe he wants to include them all in a global act of conscience and forgiveness.
How do we feel about suicide? About a parent’s responsibility for a child gone bad? About salvation? If Jones poses these questions, he offers no answers. There is no good or evil, no blame any one individual can take on, no sign or song that gives absolution to any group. Jones’s consolation seems to lie in the dream of universality and the relinquishing of absolutes. You have only to believe.
SOLEDAD BARRIO: Noche Flamenca’s stories
also offer no moral judgments. |
Noche Flamenca’s stories also offer no moral judgments. For those of us who don’t speak Spanish, they don’t even have words. Friday night at World Music’s Flamenco Festival at the Cutler Majestic, singer Manuel Gago was lamenting, accompanied by guitarist Eugenio Iglesias. He howled and sobbed, his body compressed, his head bowed. Although he skirted hysteria several times, he never lost the song. Without knowing what it was about, I heard something more than personal tragedy, something that seemed like pure pain.The storytelling of flamenco serves only as kindling for a conflagration of feelings. It’s the pain — or fury or despair — that they sing and dance, really. Maybe they even don’t care any longer what caused their distress, so long as they can cherish it and relight its fire.
Soledad Barrio enacted a woman’s liberation in La mujer del mar, which is based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Lady from the Sea. Barrio’s character finds satisfaction in neither a traditional marriage nor a passionate love affair, and she chooses to go on alone. The story was economically and clearly arranged by artistic director Martin Santangelo, with Barrio symbolically donning and then ridding herself of a dress and a wedding veil. Juan Ogalla danced the romantic husband; Antonio Jiménez was the sensuous lover.
