I already had some ideas about what I was getting myself into when I showed up to see Phó Malpica: The Last White Elephant at La Tee Da Alley earlier this evening. I had read the description posted on Phó Malpica’s website (http://phomalpica.blogspot.com), and I’ve known Angela Christina Lopez for some time now (full disclosure: we went to the New York Summer School of Dance together in 2002). Not that any of that quite prepared me for the experience of seeing - nay, witnessing - the event itself.
If I have one complaint about the performance, it would be regarding the program notes (also on the website). These notes give me a window into Angela’s process. While interesting and even illuminating as a fellow choreographer, as an audience member I found them to be something of a distraction - limiting, perhaps. They didn’t -couldn’t - do justice to the complexities of the work, its multifarious images and implications. Part of the great beauty of Phó Malpica is that through its ambiguity, by shuffling and re-shuffling specificity and confusion, I experience one of the great mysteries or paradoxes of life: that the specific can be universal, and that the universal is made up in fact of many specifics.
I envy Angela’s bravery as a performer. It takes guts to let so little speak for so much. The opening stillness lasts a long time. When she finally moves, it is to snake her torso side to side, at first imperceptibly, but eventually with a commanding power achieved by pairing sinuous, smooth sequentiality with the visible muscular effort of her naked back. This undulation eventually torques and twists Angela’s body toward the audience, revealing tusks and a gauze covered face supplementing a costume otherwise consisting of half a wedding dress and veil. Her trajectory in space consists of a slow and deliberate progression from “upstage” to “downstage.”
Other salient movement images include a shaking claw of a hand, a precarious balance assisted by the lightest touch against the brick wall of next door, a bound foot tentatively lifted, and the continuous arching, twisting spine and head. When Angela lifts an arm in what appears as an elephant’s trunk, I cringe. My concern is that this well crafted performance will suddenly veer off its carefully trod line between abstract and representational, diving headfirst into the literal. My concern is unfounded. Trunk-like images continue to appear briefly and occasionally, but the effect is of an echo or gesture toward elephant trunk rather than a literal representation thereof.
Most of the performance includes video projection. The space is long and narrow, and the video hits everything everywhere: both walls, white curtain, performer. It is difficult to determine what the video images are. Based on foreknowledge of the source material, I presume the yellowish tubular somethings are elephant tusks, though they could easily be bananas from where I stand. The first image I see with any clarity is an old snapshot of a young man. Though I see him clearly, I must imagine that it is a trophy photo of him and the elephant he poached. As the dance moves forward in space, the projected images suddenly hit Angela’s skirt just so, and I see everything: piles upon piles of tusks. At this distance she returns to her backward facing. I see a duet between performer and her enlarged shadow self.
Bending forward, rear toward us, Angela removes her headdress. She moves past the upstage projector, effectively breaking the fourth wall and invading what has hitherto been my “safe distance.” Her painted white face is deathly. Images of terminal illness invade my thoughts, lending to comparisons between our species’ lack of respect for nature and our own impending doom. The movement has grown in size and intensity, but maintains an elastic, sinewy quality that lends itself to building tension but not its release. At its most aggressive the movement is a single stomp or fingernails dragged across the brick (adding to the anxious electronica).
I don’t like seeing Angela retreat upstage, perhaps because I sense it means resignation to the state of things, perhaps because I know it means the end. I’m struck by noticing that the largest single gesture in space is her lifted leg as she mounts a half-wall in exit, leaving as swiftly and silently as she came. I am left with the majesty of a narrow alleyway in Allentown and the memory of how she filled it. I am grateful for that.
