Inscriptions

Nicola Hawkins's paper tigers

by Marcia B. Siegel

Nicola Hawkins's dances seem to come in two varieties, as shown in her five-year retrospective concerts at the Tsai Performance Center last weekend. One kind feature ornate comedy where the performers toddle around, trip over each other, pretend they aren't able to stand up, and always have their faces stretched in mock surprise. The other kind transmit spirituality or emotional torment through extremely spare but majestically repetitive movement motifs. All of them say less to my eye than the printed explanations Hawkins offers for them.

The Swim, which opened the program, was a 1920s bathing-beauty joke. Nine none-too-sylphlike ladies in metallic bathing dresses, rubber bathing caps, and goggles rush around, posing provocatively. They pantomime swimming; they simulate bobbing above the surface by tilting their arms, joined at the fingertips, just below their chins. Now and then, they pretend to be scared of something off stage. All of a sudden they "sink" and spend an interlude rolling on the floor in a blue light. Or maybe they're being fish. But then they emerge again and resume their giggling antics.

The Swim was fairly straightforward, though I don't quite get the reason for making a burlesque of what is already a burlesque image in our culture's movies, shows, and ballets. Hawkins's other comedy, Zeno's Picnic (or The Tale of the Hare and the Tortoise), had a trio of women leaping and being frivolously balletic, and a trio of women rolling on their backs and looking helpless. They all batted at each other with their hands from time to time and made faces. An information sheet handed out to the press advised that if the tortoise-hare thing didn't impress me, I could imagine many other pretexts for the dance, including a caricature of the British class system.

Nicola Hawkins makes dances from mental concepts more than physical ones. In this she reveals her background in the English modern-dance scene, which has produced a whole style of earnest choreography that could be done sitting down. Of her group pieces, one dance (The Cloth) is about "our dependence on the natural world," another (Clay Lies Still, But Blood's a Rover) "explores the experience of depression using political terror as a metaphor," and a third (Sahel) "echoes the spiritual underpinnings of West African culture." These ideas look grandiose, even presumptuous, on paper, but they don't come across when transposed into Hawkins's impoverished stage language.

Her solo Sanctum, to Purcell's aria "O Let Me Weep," recalled the old modern-dance-expressive style with a lot of bending and reaching and asymmetry. But it seemed impersonal, showcasing a generic language of grief that probably hasn't really moved people in 40 years.

Sahel, a new work, introduced a group of women. One by one they danced brief individual solos, but then they fell into unison with their companions, and for the rest of the dance they walked in a slow procession, making the same sequence of occult hand and arm movements, sometimes dropping to their knees, then rising again. Hawkins appeared long enough to do a little solo that reminded me of one of those roly-poly tortoises, in pain. The women seemed to have their own communal understanding, but the rhythms of the songs from Senegal that accompanied them didn't affect their dance at all.

Hawkins favors solemn stretches of repeated material, as if to impress the dance's worthiness on an audience without access to the explanations given the press. In The Cloth, two groups of people sit one behind the other on pieces of white cloth and mime paddling canoes. This takes a long time, much longer than one needs to see what they're doing. Finally, they "land" by stepping over the "bow" of the canoes, which two people pull up onto the "riverbank." There's a lot of ceremonious folding of the cloth, a woman kneels on it and is lifted up by the folds. Some time and ceremonies later, all the people pile onto the bunched-up cloth, which has become a raft. I thought alligators were after them, but the notes hinted at a much more terrible environmental doom.