Paula Josa-Jones

The Boston Phoenix
September 18 - 25, 1997

[Dance Reviews]

To the bone

Josa-Jones's tales of woe

by Marcia B. Siegel
Some dance makes its strongest impact as a reference to other things. I'm thinking, for example, of Loie Fuller, the turn-of-the-century "Fairy of Light," who looked like a sturdy farm girl but captivated the artists of Paris with visions of living fire, flowers, and clouds. Electric light and yards of silk were Fuller's medium. Her dance must have taken stamina and muscular control, but her dancing presence disappeared into countless Art Nouveau swirls and serpentines, our only conduit to her now.
Paula Josa-Jones seems to belong to this breed. Her work theatricalizes states of terror, madness, and loss that the audience knows or dreads. You may shiver in recognition, even experience catharsis, but you can't scrutinize the work too closely for its dance values. All four pieces Josa-Jones showed last weekend at Boston Conservatory theater offered essentially the same movement ideas; they asserted themselves as stage happenings rather than developed choreography.
Josa-Jones's intense solo Ofrenda, which opened the program, modeled the approach. Standing in one place, her focus fixed on some outside target or plunged inside herself, she angled her arms, one move at a time, into changing shapes. These jagged rearrangements sometimes instigated a folding or arching of the torso. Her groping arms and collapsing/expanding body would imperceptibly push a leg out into a lunge or a small pivot; eventually she crossed the back of the stage, then came down to one corner. Along this basic path she continued this movement. One round of gestures in slow motion would signal a change in the dynamics, from jerky to bouncy to flingy to overstretched to shuddering.
I thought the piece might have been about the phases of someone's anxiety, but as the gestural vocabulary developed, it didn't lead Josa-Jones or me on to further insight. The other pieces ostensibly had different themes, but they all portrayed women (and a man in the last piece) as self-absorbed, distressed, involuntarily carried along by their nervous tension yet somehow hindered from actually traveling in space or changing to any other mode. I guess the audience identified with this typology. It watched with somber attention; during one piece there was loud weeping.
For me, Josa-Jones's narrow range reduced The Yellow Wallpaper to a psychological portrait. The dance, which was receiving its Boston premiere, has three women in tattered yellow tulle gowns gesturing oddly, careering around three chairs, playing obsessive games, riffling through books whose words they can neither see nor pronounce.
The Charlotte Perkins Gilman story, a classic of 19th-century feminist literature, is far less one-dimensional or alienated than Josa-Jones's projection of psychotic states. The storyteller does descend into madness when her doctor husband prescribes a rest cure for her nerves, but through her, Gilman was exposing an insidious web of social and clinical cruelties to which women all too trustingly submitted themselves. Josa-Jones only puts the pathology on display, like those public examinations of hysterical patients that doctors used to stage in the name of medical education.
Josa-Jones and Tonya Lockyer explored the glamor of death in Light and Bone. Again there were puppetlike characters, jerking their arms around their bodies almost without volition. As in The Yellow Wallpaper, the victims played macabre games, dressed and undressed, embraced and fondled each other spoon-fashion. One stalked the other in spooky black lace. Both of them got into a shroudlike dress together. One danced with a skeleton on film. Projections of bleeding wounds were cast on their bare chests. They cringed against huge pictures of decomposing bodies and sculptured saints. Publicity releases identified Josa-Jones's source as photos of Mexican mummies, but the dance had nothing to fling in the face of death except its lurid necrophilia.
Josa-Jones's costumes, all by different designers, followed the convention of shopworn elegance. Shreds of dirty trimmings and wilted bows decorated garments whose original use could no longer be identified, garments being worn as if their owners had started to put them on but then had forgotten why they'd taken them out of the closet. The last piece, Tongue, paraded more of these duds on grotesque mannequins from the Renaissance. A John Donne love lament got declaimed. People sagged and were hauled off by their partners. Comedy, Josa-Jones seemed to say, is neurosis with music.