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‘Men Dancing’
displays rangeMen Dancing 2000: 8 p.m. today and tomorrow, Hawaii Theatre. Tickets, $15, $120 and $25, with $5 discounts for seniors, students and groups of 10 or more. Call 528-0506
By Vivien Lee
Special to the Star-Bulletin"Men Dancing 2000," the second all-male dance concert produced by Peter Espiritu's Tau Dance Theater raises more questions than it answers and presents many contradictions. Nine different groups and soloists present a jarring variety of dances, from drag queen strutting to modern dance to jazz to hula. The only unifying factor is the gender of the dancers, but it does not make for any similarity in dance content, style, feeling or intent. So why only men?
(Do men in drag count as men? What is a man?) Is the purpose to show us how diverse men are? If so, the concert is a success.
All dancers, male or female, dance about what is important to them. In this concert, there is some interest in sexuality, but most of the choreographers go beyond gender. The sexuality issue is raised most overtly by The Pleiades, six men in drag (where's the seventh sister?) who perform eight short vignettes in-between each of the other dances. Their "dances" are mostly crude and unimaginative excuses for parading around in dresses, except for one genuinely witty parody of the movie "The Matrix."
David DeBlieck choreographed the only dance dealing with homosexuality. Two men, in separate pools of light, begin by alternately holding their own hands tightly and letting them go, as if releasing a captive bird. When they see each other, they circle playfully at first, and finally, gently touch. They lift and pull and support each other. Hands intertwine. They embrace. There is a sense of equality between the two that probably would not be noticed with a man and a woman dancing the same piece.
What, if not gender, is there to dance about? The concert begins and ends with Ed Collier's Halau Hula O Na Pua Kukui. They dance well in unison, but my favorite part was when, just for a moment or two, they improvised and purposely lost uniformity.
At the other end of the spectrum from The Pleiades, the eight men from Darryl Thomas' Rainbow Dance Theatre in Oregon showed their macho best in a high energy, high strength, and high stamina battle between good and evil. Four men clad in Ninja outfits and four men in camouflage pants and boots kicked, jumped, slid, rolled and crawled in abstract combat with one another. They threw, lifted and caught each other in a whirlwind of exciting, daring motion, all against a backdrop of a projected video game and a rock wall. It was definitely a "guy thing" but it was also visually the most engaging piece of the evening. Ironically, this dance is an altered excerpt from a longer piece whose main character is a woman. She was edited out for the purposes of this concert.
Perhaps Donald McKayle's "Twilight," danced by Gregg Lizenbery, is an example of dance that speaks to a human condition rather than a male or female one. The dancer walks wearily onstage and sits, exhausted, in a chair. It is the twilight time of day, or maybe of life, when you have no energy left, nothing left to give. But something calls him, compels him to get up and pull away from the chair. He focuses on the chair while moving toward and away from it, suddenly full of tense energy. But in the end, he once again sags into the chair, drained.
Our culture is now quite receptive to men dancing on stage, but it is still uncommon enough to warrant an all-male concert. Will it be necessary to hold "Men Dancing 2020," or will men and women dancers have achieved equality by then?
Vivien Lee has a master's degree in dance from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. She teaches creative movement and music in Hawaii elementary schools.
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