Happy Island (2018) by Dançando com a Diferença, directed by La Ribot
a review by Cristina Morales*
Dançando com a Diferença is an inclusive dance company based in Madeira (the “happy island” of the title), made up almost exclusively of dancers with disabilities. The direction and choreography of the piece are carried out by La Ribot, and those who bring it to the stage are nothing but enthusiastic professionals. Put aside all the institutional and institutionalizing messages about integration through art. The objective of the Portuguese company is to carry through an aesthetically impeccable show. They have no interest in instructing us with drivel about democratic coaching and diverse societies. Happy Island is a contemporary dance piece in line with its time. It is inserted within the best tradition of dance-theater and this is how we should treat it – not otherwise.
Happy Island (2018), by Dançando com a Diferença, directed by La Ribot. Photo by Júlio Silva Castro.
The images that are projected on the screen at the beginning of the show catapult us into the heart of a forest mired in mist. It seems like autumn, or perhaps the dawn of any other day. While a dancer dressed in gold tights (Bárbara Matos) poses, static, illuminated exclusively by the light of the projector, the silence is guillotined by a devilish piano solo. At some point the sound slightly slows down and the dancer, as if in a ritual, offers the feather headdress that she was holding reverently to the second dancer to appear on the scene (Maria João Pereira). Arriving in a wheelchair at the center of the stage, wearing a snakeskin attire, she does not seem to pay attention to the feather headdress that is offered to her. She moves with a tremor that is both light and incisive, as hypnotic as the rhythm set by the piano (Francesco Tristano's work). Meanwhile, behind her, on the screen, the Atlantic forest begins to come to life. The trees, caressed by a light breeze, are recorded from very different perspectives. It reminds me of some scenes from Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon, in which nature imposes itself, indifferent and sovereign, as a determining part of the work (Raquel Freire signs the beautiful video). The music, the images and, above all, the movements of the dancer transmit a great restlessness, which reaches its climax when the performer undertakes a very personal fight against the wheelchair. She doesn't want it, she has to get off. She has decided to renounce it and return to a primordial state, so as to move as nature imposes: like an august serpent. Immediately afterwards, she studies the crown of feathers and, bravely overcoming an initial fear, she puts it on herself, which gives her and those of us in the audience a bit of respite.
The piano, which until now has never gotten quiet, stops, and a deafening silence invades the room. A new performer (Joana Caetano) enters the scene. She is wearing shimmering silver knickers and approaches the snake woman. Another piano composition, this time by Jeff Mills, with insistent bases combined with round bell sounds, accompanies the duo. The snake woman is now very busy painting with a black marker the naked skin of the newcomer on the scene, who, martially, repeats the same choreography over and over again through space, endowed with an excellent geometric obsession. We will see the dancer in the golden tights pass in the background, as she indicates with one finger, the sky and the earth, alternately. A new performer (Pedro Aleixandre Silva) will also appear who jumps with a photographic reflector in his hands as if it were a parachute. And, finally, our last protagonist (Sofía Marote), who crosses the scene as if she were going to put out a fire by grabbing the bottom of a voluminous red dress. The mechanical emergencies push our gaze to the screen. Among the trees and the mist, human beings emerge, frolicking. It seems that they are back from a spree, by now at dawn. The images resemble those of a horror B-movie, apparently heralding in a catastrophe. The film takes more and more prominence to the point of completely conquering the stage. The audiovisual part of the piece is, without any doubt, one more character in the work. It can be decorated with the merit of having aroused serenity after half an hour of stormy movements. The piano now playing is warm and rhythmic and accompanies the only performer left on stage, the one who (we'll discover right away) wasn't going to put out a fire: she carried the fire inside her. The unmistakable saxophone of Archie Shepp, master of free jazz and champion of the fight for the emancipation of African-Americans starts playing. The air in the theatre suddenly changes. The power of Sofía Marote's music and interpretation turns the restlessness that had reigned until now into pride and desire. The desire for freedom and self-determination can be read in the defiant movements of the performer, who, again in a scrupulously geometric solo, licks her hand and slaps her genitals, following the flourishes of the saxophone with her hands and legs. She emphasizes with her dance the "Set me free!" message that the singer (Jeanne Lee on the song Blasé) repeats ad infinitum. We are in the most intimate moment of the show, which will be followed by that of the dancers taking the floor, a must in dance-theatre, and they will do it on the screen, in that humid forest and with that after-hours costume (so well chosen, by the way, by the director herself). They will tell us about how they experience dance, having come to it from the non-normativity of their being in the world, but also about their unsatisfied sexual desire and their will to do things - and lack thereof. We will return to the happily confused situation between fighting and lubricity, and there will be more and more characters that, at times, remind us of the zombies of the filmmaker Lucio Fulci; their wandering is slow but the course is clear: they are about to start a orgy. The dancers on stage get infected by what the images propose and roll around seriously on the linoleum.
The last part of the show takes off from the atmosphere that until now had characterized the piece. The music has stopped determining the action. The stage space is dark and on the screen we see a sequence of a road that runs through an endless tunnel. Only when Pedro Alexandre Silva puts his reflector into action does the darkness vanish. The emanated glow chases another dancer, the golden Bárbara Matos, who at first tries to escape the light by looking for hiding places in the stalls, but who later, either tired of the chase, or perhaps because she has taken a liking to it, stops, gets within range of the beam directed by his partner and, finally, poses for him. Hypnotically, we see Madeiran landscapes on the screen, shot from a car driving along a winding road. All the performers of the piece have returned to the stage, each with a reflector like Silva's in their hands. They are not in a hurry. Little by little, they sit, glued to the screen, illuminated by its light, and remain silent. Thus ends the one-hour ritual that is Happy Island.
Anyone who wants to see a political message or a kind of lesson on disability in this staging is missing the mark. Restlessness, anger, laughing about oneself and desiring personal sovereignty are truly universal themes. The Portuguese company puts on stage a passionate and successful show that merges dance with other artistic forms that, far from distorting the former or the latter, enrich it and make it more complex.
*
Cristina Morales (she/her) is the author of the novels Lectura fácil (Easy Reading, 2018), Terroristas modernos (2017), Últimas tardes con Teresa de Jesús (2015) and Los combatientes (2013), as well as the collection of short stories La merienda de las niñas (2008). Easy Reading was awarded with the Premio Nacional de Narrativa 2019, the Premio Herralde de Novela 2018 and the Prize for Contemporary Literature in Translation 2022 for the German translation by Friederike von Criegern. In 2012, she received the Premio INJUVE de Narrativa of the Spanish Government. She was recipient of the scholarship at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2021 and in the same year got voted among the 25 most important authors under 35 by Granta magazine. Cristina Morales studied law and political science with emphasis on international relations. She is a dancer and choreographer with the company Iniciativa Sexual Femenina, producer for the punk band At-Asko and archivist and difusora de mugrelindas of the collective BachiniBachini. Furthermore, she works as a dramaturg for several theatres and companies in Spain.
