360 ARTS

Choreographer Toni Bravo asks big questions in a jewel-like garden setting

At the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, the audience follows as dancers create thoughtful tableaux amongst the statues

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, May 28, 2009

Toni Bravo has a lot of questions, questions about how we treat the Earth, how we treat one another and how we feel — or perhaps how we don't feel — a responsibility to care for our planet's environment.

'We tend to think we're the most important thing on this planet and we can exploit nature to our benefit,' says Bravo, one of Austin's most seasoned independent choreographers and dancers. 'But if you believe there is a heaven, or an afterlife, what is that afterlife going to be like if we're destroying this world were in now? Shouldn't we be taking into consideration that we are just a part of this world, not the owners of it?'

And Bravo's questions don't stop.

'How does faith lead us to focus on the next world but disregard the one we live?' Bravo asks. 'And what will we miss that we've left behind? This (dance) is rooted in my worries about how we our mixing our sense of responsibility toward our planet with our different faiths and beliefs in an afterlife.'

Bravo isn't focused so much on specific answers to any of her questions. Rather she's turning them into a site-specific dance performance at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, the bucolic six-acre park that is home to 56 lyrical and sinuous sculptures by Texas great Charles Umlauf. 'If There Is a Heaven' is the fifth dance theater work Bravo has staged among Umlauf's romantic statues of animals and people.

Bravo, who teaches at Ballet Austin, has enlisted 25 local dancers, including some from Ballet Austin and Ballet East Dance Company, for the expressive hour-long piece that asks the audience to move through the sculpture garden from one place to the next as dancers stage different scenes among the statues. Scenes represent different archetypical figures: the dreamer, the warrior, the herald, the joker, the explorer, the lover. A drummer leads the audience on its way, and the finale explodes in video projections.

'It's a procession,' says Bravo, who was born and raised in Mexico. 'A bit like the traditional funeral processions some cultures have.'

Bravo's not suggesting we start mourning our circumstances quite yet, though.

'I think we're missing the chance to keep this world healthy,' she says. 'That's why I set (this dance) in a place of total inspiration. The (Umlauf) is a place of great natural beauty and artistic beauty. And when the audience winds its way through garden and along the pathways, it looks like a school of fish. It's just magic.'

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

'If There Is a Heaven ... '

When: 7 p.m. Friday, 1:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum, 605 Robert E. Lee Road

Cost:$10 ($5 students, seniors and children)

Information: 394-1202