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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2008 > October > 13 > Entry
BAM Festival reviews: ‘No Boundaries’ and ‘Delta Rhapsody’
Historically black women have had to fight for control over how their bodies and their lives get written into history. Two shows presented in Pro Arts Black Arts Movement Festival — Gesel Mason’s “No Boundaries” and Nadine Mozon’s “Delta Rhapsody” — helped bring black women and their bodies into view on their own terms.
The range of choreography in Mason’s show last week at AustinVentures Theater works to explode any easy categories of “black dance.” Two pieces, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s “Bent” and Reggie Wilson’s “Seeline ‘oman,” rewrite bits of history, but from different directions. In “Bent,” Mason first appears in silhouette, an Afro wig and bellbottoms rewind time.
Dancing a breakdown, Mason slouches, settles into her torso, then reaches out. Partnered with George Clinton’s “Maggot Brain,” “Bent” returns blackness to hippie counterculture, a historical moment too often literally whitewashed.
Wilson takes one of culture’s most frequent references to African American life, the spiritual, and places it in a broader context. There is no Alvin Ailey here. “Seeline” begins with Bessie Smith, but the Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir overtakes her. A female soloist’s voice burst upward; Mason walks, pushing a grocery cart or skimming a small wave — a series of arm dances. The voice hurls upward: Mason changes clothes, puts on make-up. Tiny dances of labor and life undo the fixation on the scream, the outburst, the ecstasy of the African American spiritual. Later, on a darker stage, Mason will do the space-eating movement the wail called for earlier, but in the dimness, the openness in the middle of a circle of candles resonates more. Still not everything can be seen.
David Rousseve’s “JumpBroom” deserves a review all its own, as it connects the lynching of a black woman after trying to marry her slave husband to a lesbian couple’s halted attempt to marry today. First Mason swings limp and twitching from an unseen rope, and then crawls across the stage, feet bound, reaching for another woman’s sleeping body. As the two stories are told by recorded voices, the impact of words on bodies, laws on bodies, creeps into the theater.
In “Delta Rhapsody” Saturday at the Off Center, Nadine Mozon, as the campy cabaret performer Delta, gives everything and more. Mozon, who wrote and performed the show (Madge Darlington directed), arrives in a flurry of white feathers — a white boa is Delta’s favorite prop. Mozon plays deftly with her words, her stage environment, and her audience. Delta’s monologues, half earnest self-help, half poetry, make theater through their attention to rhythm. Mozon knows when to let words flow and when to make them pitter-patter. As Delta grows increasingly drunk, Mozon’s body spreads out. She sprawls over a wooden stool, and then falls, giving her funniest line from the floor. Looking up through mussed hair, she says, “Well, since I’m here.” The audience laughed uproariously throughout the show, following Mozon on her trip through Delta, from knock-knock jokes to a mid-show reincarnation of a Katrina evacuee Delta met in Omaha. The woman’s story fit a bit oddly into the cabaret act, but Mozon’s portrayal had honesty and specificity in its storytelling.
Both Mozon and Mason shared programs with local performers. In Mason’s show, Houston’s Sandra Organ danced a solo that felt simple in its progress narrative of black life in Houston. Leigh Gaymon-Jones solo was a slow reveal beginning with a backwards walk, climaxing with a turn forward on the floor, limbs unfurling. Almost shy details — a heel drag, foot flexed in reticence — texture the story of a body expanding. The second half of Saturday’s Off Center show featured The Austin Project Performance Company’s “American: love out of context.” (Clare Croft is a freelance dance and theater critic.)
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