“Now that Separateness is Unassailable” Public Dance Performance
Date and Time
Apr 28, 2019 6:00 pm
Location
Brookland
625 Monroe St NE, Washington, District of Columbia, 20017
Apr 28, 2019 6:00 pm
Brookland
“Now that Separateness is Unassailable” is a 30 minute multimedia dance theatre performance that deconstructs the borders that separate loved ones. In their desperate longing to breach the cultural and geographic separations that divide them, two women from opposite ends of the globe, melt and bend time with the warmth of love they share, in the process shifting the duration of their days apart. Their homesickness for one another drags the duration of simple tasks such as eating an orange or applying lipstick. Meanwhile, reaching for one another accelerates an eternal journey across the globe. The two women appear live on stage and, at times, one of them is seen only on screen, enhancing their absence. Then, the two women transcend the screen and springing to life on the stage. The two performers attempt but fail to connect, until the end when they reunite in a playful, wistful dance. Their persistence earns them passage to one another, and the piece finds them reunited, drinking each other in, as if for sheer survival of their parched hearts. Ultimately, love survives the borders.
“Now that Separateness is Unassailable” was born of the collaboration between dancer/scholar Rosalie Purvis and dancer/scholar Dr. Debaroti Chakraborty and members of the Kolkata based performing arts Collective Chaepani. Ms, Purvis has collaborated with Chaepani on several projects including “Root Map,” which they performed with local artists on multiple international borders on a play that crosses politically imposed obstacles. Their present work negotiates cultural difference and translation between the company’s respective urban surroundings of New York and Kolkata. The performers share both intimate emotions as well as daily routines revealing fundamentally different Eastern and Western attitudes about attachment, artifacts, and rituals of consumption. The artists explore the intimacy of intercultural relationship through dance, video and a layered audioscore that includes texts from Indian and Latin American literature, excerpts from Esther Perel’s podcast about relationships, music from Sweden, France, Brazil and India, incorporated and manipulated into an original sound collage designed by James David Jacobs. Singer Somdutta Roi provides a haunting vocal score as she and her singing weave around and through the space, at times dividing, at times inspiring and then finally connecting the two women on stage.
The pieces has been performed in India in several venues in Kolkata. It has also been shown in India at Samsi College in Malda which is right near the Bangladesh border. In the U.S. the piece has been shown in Ithaca (NY), Philadelphia, New York City and Portland (OR).
