XL cover story

Angels in our midst

Choreographer Sally Jacques celebrates beauty in a time of suffering with an aerial performance on the shell of the Intel building

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, May 31, 2006

As wispy clouds slide across a glassy summer sky, choreographer Sally Jacques stands before the abandoned concrete shell of the Intel building and gazes skyward, arms crossed, watching for angels. And here they come: Two aerial ballerinas, in rappelling gear, gliding down from five stories high.. They swing and sway and spin and swim in the air, sometimes laughing for the fun of it all, as they fly around the ugliest hulk of architecture in downtown Austin.

Jacques' angel-acrobats — a blond sprite named Laura, a tall gazelle named Nicole — drop down, down, down to the second floor, until they face a rectangular portal that's strung with horizontal lengths of wire. Then they improvise. As Mozart's "Laudate Dominum" plays over portable loudspeakers, the dancers dive into the wires, dance across them, splashing themselves across the cords like quarter notes on a giant page of blank sheet music.

"I wish I could be up there, too," Jacques says softly, rubbing an aching shoulder, surrounded by so much concrete and wire and rebar. "I want so much to be up there with them."

Sally Jacques — artist, activist, humanitarian and longtime Austinite — is forever yearning to fly with the angels. Both her life and art affirm her deep-seated conviction that the beauty of angels must prevail, that it somehow endures in times of war and suffering, that it lives within us and in spaces we do not know, that it exists even in death.

Jacques dreams, and thus believes, that we are surrounded by angels. There are angels of compassion, angels who bear witness, angels of deliverance, angels of knowing. As an artist, Jacques has been (for the past five years, at least) all about introducing these angels to us through ethereal and acrobatic performance art — avant-garde dance pieces that touch upon themes of mortality and ascension, harmony and hope, grief and grace. Her latest work, "Requiem," begins a three-week run at the Intel building on Wednesday.

"There's something deep inside all of us — and I think we saw that a lot, in Katrina, when people rescued strangers and pets from rooftops — that wants to feel an incredible sense of connection," says Jacques, whose pieces are about nothing if not connection. "Whether you want to call that God, or spirituality, or beauty, it's there. And it's bigger than the things we define as our lives. It's bigger than the job, bigger than the house, bigger than all those things that swallow our soul."

Jacques's approach to performance art is fanciful, collaborative and site-specific. She creates only one or two major works a year and goes out of her way not to repeat herself. Each year, Jacques seeks out a special space — Barton Springs, or an abandoned warehouse, or an empty field or the Capitol Rotunda — and then creates work designed exclusively for that environment. And when the work is done? It's brushed away, gone forever.

In pursuit of that ephemeral beauty, Jacques and her troupe — Blue Lapis Light — are all over the place. She'll dangle her dancers from bungee cords or have them scale 50-foot sheets of cloth. She'll write parts for skateboarders or Tibetan monks. Or she'll let us sit a long time with a simple prop — a large silver ring, suspended in mid-air — as a symbol of planet and spirit and community and possibility.

"God is within us, but we don't get it. And so we reduce things, so we can understand it," says Jacques. "But what I like to ask is: What if we don't reduce it? What if we just hold out for the magnificent possibility that it's so vast and so mysterious, so that all that matters is how far can we fly while we're in these bodies? That, to me, is interesting. That's the big wow, for me."

Prayer

Sally Jacques is fascinated by mystery — and it's no surprise, given her life story. Her mother was Indian, partly of Iraqi descent, a native of Calcutta. She knows nothing at all about her father, a man she's never met. Jacques spent the first eight years of her life in an orphanage in England. She winces, talking about it. The orphanage was a severe experience.

"All of us who lived there had to find new ways to live and breathe," says Jacques. "Mine was, you know, talking to angels. It's my earliest memory. I would pray so hard to get out of there that I could not understand, when I awoke each morning, why I was still there.

"I worked at prayer, though I didn't really understand what it was to pray. I mean, I just knew to do it. Nothing was ever taught to me in that way. But I had a sense of something greater than myself, something that brought comfort to me."

Jacques recalls this, with great hesitation, while sitting on a black gym mat on the dusty ground floor of the unfinished Intel building on a bright, steamy morning. Inside, a breeze blows cool through the concrete shadows. It rained last night and — somehow, for it seems to defy nature — delicate curtains of shimmering water are still streaming down the sides of the abandoned building.

Although she's lived in Austin on and off since the mid-1970s, Jacques still speaks with a British accent —and in her eyes and her manner is a strong suggestion of her Eastern roots. Jacques has a dancer's body: trim, lithe. Dark hair pulled straight back. She tugs at her leg, just to stretch a bit.

"Everything started off big for me," she says, talking about the orphanage. "I didn't have any concept of the insular nuclear family. I lived in a big environment, had a big family. I didn't have any set boundaries. So when I (finally) went to live with my mom, and her new family (in England), that was a very alien concept to me. And I never really found a way into that.

"But the advantage of that experience, for me, is that I have a consciousness about the global world, about the expansiveness of being a human being in these times, I think in all times," she says. "Technology and media does something similar, in the way it can bring the world into everyone's room. I mean, it makes it difficult to ignore Darfur, or Iraq. So in that sense, we're becoming closer, connected to each other. It encourages an awareness that you're not just a country, not just a family, but that you're seeing a greater picture, the greater painting."

Similarly, Jacques and her dancers don't deflate the idea of family; they elevate it. Blue Lapis Light presupposes World Family, the universality of suffering, love, a yearning for connection. For all its acrobatic flair, there's a lot of delicate touching and reaching in Jacques' work, suggesting an intuitive need to step toward others in kindness and consolation. That impulse is something smaller than "nuclear family" — and at the same time infinitely larger.

Jacques has worked a lot with scaffolding and platforms over the years, taking stark, industrial props and turning them into something almost sacred. In one routine — from 2005's "Whispers of Heaven" — her four featured dancers, women in white, appear on a split-level platform and proceed to define harmony, unity and equality through movement that blends theater and dance.

We see them first in the identity of their own space, but the dancers' expressions suggest they can't exist apart from one another. In a spirit of consolation, they reach up, step down, share space, trade space, embrace space that's unfamiliar to them — all the while looking each other straight in the eye.

The piece is delicate, sincere, triumphantly democratic, and all about family. It's an open door to reflection. And it's devastatingly beautiful.

"In the biggest sense, it's all about the prayer for beauty and peace on this Earth," says Jacques. "That's the biggest thing for me."

Requiem

The first 911 calls came in about a month ago. They were placed by workers in Austin's downtown office towers — people who glanced out the window and thought they were witnessing a suicide in progress. Hurry! There are people on the top floor of the Intel building. They're right at the edge — and they look like they're going to jump! Wait! Here comes a woman with rope! I think she might be trying to hang herself.

Nah. It was just Sally's angels. Getting ready to fly.

In her long career of producing site-specific work, "Requiem" looks to be Jacques' most ambitious project, at least in terms of sheer scale. It's bursting with theatrical potential, yet fraught with rush and risk. One of her ensemble players fell during a rappelling rehearsal two weeks ago — necessitating a genuine 911 call and reminding everyone, including a dozen grim-faced dancers, of the perils of spinning and flying on bungees and ropes, 80 feet above concrete, without a net.

"By the time the audience sees the performance, we're very comfortable with it," says Nicole Whiteside, one of the featured acrobat-angels in Blue Lapis Light. "By the time I'm climbing up an entire length of cloth, it doesn't feel dangerous, because there's intention to it. It's very precise. I wouldn't say we're fearless, but we dispel the notion of danger. Personally, I'm (more) focused on finding the grace, finding room between spots and performing."

Jacques didn't know she had permission to use the Intel site until the first week of April; her team of dancers and riggers and designers had only eight weeks to conceptualize, create and realize a finished piece of performance art. Clearly, this piece will be rewritten right up to the moment of performance. But its theme and intent is crystal clear.

"I really want to do a piece about mourning and prayer," says Jacques, sitting in the shadows of the Intel building in early May, the hum of traffic and the tweet of birds in the background. She says the first drafts of the piece have been created from her own dreams. "I knew from the start that this piece would be called 'Requiem,' that there would be themes of ascending and descending, and the angelic presences in one's life.

"But I've also been thinking about Katrina, dreaming about the Titanic. This structure is going to be demolished at the end of June, you know, and turned into a federal courthouse. And I just went from there."

Jacques thinks about the building first, not the dance. The point, she says, isn't to bring set routines to a new space — but to listen to the building, the story of the environment, and design work in harmony with it. For "Requiem," this means Jacques and dancers have had to scrap so many of her most appealing routines, to throw away props like rings and skates and scaffolds.

Instead, everything's new . . . like angels who spin in the sky like quarter notes against a blank sheet of music. What's more, Jacques is intensely democratic in the creation of these pieces. Her featured quartet of dancers — Laura Cannon, Nicole Whiteside, Theresa Hardy and Andee Scott — script much of the movement themselves.

In studio rehearsals, Jacques is the antithesis of the lordly director who commands "Go there! Count four. Do this!" Instead she'll ask her dancers: "What does that feel like? What's natural for you?" And she listens to what they tell her. As her friend José Bustamante observes, Jacques doesn't feel compelled to dictate movement. Instead, she introduces a prop or a vision that is a starting point for dancers to create their own.

"Sally encourages me to voice my ideas, or to try something ridiculous or to just go for what delights you — and to see the value in that," says Whiteside, who came to Blue Lapis Light four years ago with a formal view of dance. "Sally's guidance is always along the lines of, 'Go deeper, go inward, get to the root of feeling.' She's more about the aesthetic than codified language. Formal ballet starts from the outside and works in. Sally thinks from the inside out."

Demolition

When Katrina hit and refugees started pouring into Austin, Sally Jacques — like so many Austinites — volunteered for a month at the Convention Center. She spent a lot of time with elderly people, talked with a woman who watched her mother die, connected with people who had just seen their entire lives washed away.

"Most of these people, who'd lost everything, still had a really strong sense of their spiritual connection. And I thought that really, really remarkable . . . It's easy, when you have everything, for life to bypass you. But sometimes, when things fall apart — when life gets demolished — it can reveal something greater in yourself than you can imagine."

Jacques' social conscience and her life are intertwined as one. For the past several decades, she's traveled the world in the name of humanitarianism — demonstrating on behalf of women and children at the United Nations, visiting refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia, participating in the weekly "Women in Black" peace demonstrations at the Capitol.

Jacques grew up in the John Lennon generation, so it's no surprise that his "Across the Universe" was featured prominently in "Whispers of Heaven." No surprise, either, that socially conscious songwriter Eliza Gilkyson's "Requiem" — performed by musical director Tina Marsh, accompanied by cello and piano — will appear in Jacques' new work.

Jacques lives simply, by choice. Her car is an ocean-blue compact with a peace sign on the bumper and a dent in the door. She lists the activist Alan Pogue and Save Our Springs Alliance environmental advocate Bill Bunch as heroes. Rescue is a common theme for her, whether it's AIDS survivors, Muslim orphans, Katrina evacuees or animal rescue. Four of her pets — a Belgian shepherd named Bella and three cats — are rescue animals.

"There are millions and millions of people in this world who can't eat or don't know how they're going to eat, how they're going to feed their babies, how they're going to get health care. Millions," says Jacques, the splatter of falling water hitting concrete behind her at the Intel building. "It's greater than it ever was. And I do not in my heart understand why — when there's enough food, when there's so many gifts that we're given, inherently, by nature. Nobody should go to sleep hungry."

Jacques' global conscience began to crystallize at 17, when she left home and embarked on a seven-year ramble in the 1960s and 1970s. She hitchhiked with artists to Southern France, to Morocco, across the no-man's land of northern Greece and into Turkey. She worked as a model, built puppets, created dances with friends on deserted beaches. "I went where the wind blew," she says.

"You can't look, or walk, in the streets of Europe without history speaking back at you — without the monuments, the paintings, the poetry and the passion," says Jacques. "Europeans are always flinging that at each other. There's big, informing power when you visit a place like Spain, in the Franco era. You get a sense of war. A sense of torment in the world."

Mary Berwick, one of Jacques' peers in Austin's peace community, recognizes the passions of her friend in the Blue Lapis Light performance works. Specifically, she sees "an awareness that there's more to life and our living and humanity that's not visible to our senses. Something beyond the senses. Call that intuition, or an awareness of something greater than ourselves. And the invitation to come closer to that."

Like many of Jacques' friends, Berwick suggests that the death of Sally's mother three years ago has had a profound effect on her work and her themes. The choreographer is the first to agree. But she'd also say that war and death in Iraq have affected her as much. Jacques is incorporating all of this into "Requiem," a work about angels who inhabit a landscape of love and connection, mortality and demolition.

"One of the things I'm trying to do is befriend mortality," says Jacques. "We've become afraid of mortality, I think. That's why we gather things, or try to make within our life a sense of order. It's our way to defy mortality. But death is really just a step off into somewhere else. It's not final to me.

"There are these lines in the Mahabharata, where God is asked what is the greatest wonder. The answer is: 'Each day, death strikes, and we live as though we are immortal. This is the greatest wonder.'

"That's why I always come back to beauty. I know it exists. It's not on an intellectual level. But in every part of my being, I know it exists."

bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967