Moving inspiration

Why the Bates Dance Festival is really about me waiting tables

By Tanya Whiton

The Bates Dance Festival runs from July 20 through Aug. 17, on the Bates College campus in Lewiston. Call (207) 786-6161.

STRETCHING THE DEFINITION OF DANCE: performers from Jane Comfort’s troupe.

August, a few years back, I was waiting tables during Sunday brunch at a local café with a feeble air conditioner and an aggressive, inadequately caffeinated mob of patrons. It was about a hundred degrees, my pants were saggy, my hair was frizzy, and I’d slept for approximately four hours the previous night in my equally steamy apartment, following a long dinner shift.

I smelled like eggs. My skin had the sweaty pallor of raw bacon. My entire section was full of young dot.com execs only a few years older than me with cell phones twingling next to their empty mugs.

Enter the beautiful sexy dancers from New York.

Right around 11:30 a.m. (in waitress hell, it’s always 11:30 a.m.) Bates Dance Festival Director Laura Faure and a crew of the most gorgeous people I’d ever beheld commandeered an eight top and sat there radiating confident physicality.

“Hi,” Laura, a café regular, said. Sensing my curiosity, she added: “These guys are with Rennie Harris Puremovement.”

The seven beautiful sexy dancers smiled up at me, their brown skin glowing, their braids and dreadlocks a-bounce. For a moment, I was so captivated that I forgot my own misery. Then I looked down at the ketchup stain on my T-shirt, at my apron and sneakers besmeared with maple syrup, yogurt, and raspberry jam.

“Hi,” I said back, a gulf opening between me and them, into which poured all of the mingled envy, fascination, adulation, and awe I’d felt for dancers since I pulled a muscle doing high kicks after my mom took me to see Flashdance. “Um. Do you want some coffee?”

Addled by heat, lack of sleep, cranky customers and a desperate sense of frumpiness, I botched every step of the dancers’ breakfast. I forgot their drinks, their side orders of toast and fruit, extra orders of pancakes, refills on coffee. Both line cooks hollered at me, and my fellow servers were too swamped to bail me out. An ordinary morning became a nightmarish swirl of small errors that made it impossible to complete any of the mundane series of mini-tasks that add up to a satisfactory dining experience.

When it finally seemed as though Rennie Harris and company had all of their breakfasts assembled before them, I apologized for my ineptitude. Forks in hand, they smiled up at me again. “Hey, no problem,” one dancer said. “Ah, shoot,” said another. “I think you forgot my orange juice.”

I went down into the basement, swabbed my face with a dishtowel, and cried.

One of the psychological hazards unique to waiting tables is viewing everybody else’s life as hopelessly glamorous in comparison to your own — after all, they’re eating out. You’re slinging hash. Or risotto. Or foie gras. Another is the occasional insidioos voice of doubt suffered by writer/dancer/actor/waitpersons everywhere: Am I really doing this to support my work? Taken together, these two toxic thoughts can bring even the sunniest server down.

Now, several summers later, after interviewing numerous dancers and writing about some of the hazards unique to their profession, I’ve gained some perspective. Dancing professionally, I’ve learned, is grueling: the pay is low, the hours are long, risk of injury is high, and people yell at you. Many of the dancers who come to Bates Dance Festival, teachers and students alike, are enjoying a rare respite from the dailiness of daily life. Most of them remember struggling to keep dance as a central concern while doing other jobs to support themselves. But at the three-week festival, the emphasis is on creating new material, honing technique and collaborating with other artists. Faure, as curator, brings together a multi-talented roster of choreographers, performers and musicians to create an environment in which work equals art, not simply a paycheck.

In spite of my slightly less romanticized vision of dance and dancers, I can still be overcome with a potent combination of jealousy and amazement when I watch a performance. Though I know being able to fly through the air, support one’s own weight, spin, leap, and lunge with ease requires endless repetition of mundane technical movements; though I’ve heard that the life of itinerant companies is often unglamorous and trying; though I’m aware that dancers and choreographers occasionally suffer that insidious voice of doubt that sent me sniffling to the basement, I can’t help but think that they’re having a better time than the rest of us. After all, they’re dancing. There is no doubt in my mind that dancing — at its best — is the most visceral and joyous of the disciplines. The body can say with a few eloquent gestures what I can only ever approximate with words.

After witnessing the way a troupe of dancers can alter the chemistry of an entire room simply by the way they inhabit their bodies, I became determined to see more, learn more, and understand a little bit about the unique interaction between physicality and narrative. The Bates Festival offers an annual opportunity to sample a wide variety of approaches to movement, meaning making, and music: ballet, flamenco, modern, contact improvisation, Pilates, and yoga are paired with live instrumental accompaniment and the occasional lecture, as well as an introduction to some of the luminaries of contemporary dance and performance.

Faure recruits the kind of artists who are not only expanding on the definitions of their form, but who also make deliberate statements about the human condition. Political concerns are the foundation and backdrop for many of the featured performances at this year’s festival: a need for racial diversity, non-violence, and freedom from the oppression of poverty and prejudice is articulated through multiple mediums.

Movement, language and music intersect in “Asphalt,” a collaboration between director/choreographer Jane Comfort, writer Carl Rux Hancock, DJ Spooky, and singer Toshi Reagon that premiered in January at New York’s Joyce Theater. The piece, which will be showing Friday, July 26 and Saturday, July 27, takes Comfort’s signature dance theater a step further into postmodern interdisciplinary performance. Comfort and her eight versatile dancers are known for a very flexible approach — their idea is that all physical expression is significant, and they incorporate everything from sign language to boxing.

In this current work, based on a short story by Hancock, a young disc jockey reconstructs his past and transcends his present through music. DJ Spooky, composer of the soundtrack for the critically acclaimed movie Slam and pioneer on the “illbient” scene, contributes the instrumental score. And Reagon, daughter of Bernice Johnson Reagon (founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock), lends luscious vocals to the mix.

West Coast dancer/choreographer Robert Moses and his company, Robert Moses’s KIN, will be making their East Coast debut with a collection of new works, Friday August 2 and Saturday, August 3. As ethnically varied and technically diverse as any troupe you’re likely to see, KIN represents Moses’s vision of dance as a way to expand on the concept of human connections, investigating the familial links between people of all races. In a recent piece, Moses invited several fellow choreographers to create dances for him, and then bridged them together into an “autobiography,” influenced — as all stories are — by the ideas and presences of other people and their respective aesthetic and cultural backgrounds.

As a dancer, Moses is known as a ferocious and fearless mover, who can transition effortlessly from being a virile, edgy male presence to blending in with his dancers to become a poetic and elliptical human form.

Japanese-born husband and wife team Eiko and Komaýhave been creating “living sculptures” in the United States and abroad since 1976. Forerunners of the synthesis between performance art/environmental art and dance, their site-specific pieces are often expressly political. Their new work, “Offering,” to be staged Sunday, August 4, outdoors on the Bates campus, makes comment on the pandemonium preceding and following the attack on the World Trade Center. Drawing on natural forms, and using their bodies as shapes, rather than as physicalized representations of individual consciousness, Eiko and Koma make work that is simultaneously lyrical, poignant, and painful: their vulnerability becomes a metaphor for the collective vulnerability of people living with violence.

Other festival highlights include faculty concerts on Saturday, July 20, Friday, August 9, and Saturday, August 10; pre-performance talks with New York Times dance critic and historian Suzanne Carbonneau; panel discussions on global exchange within the medium and a showing of student works. Also, festival accompanists Peter Jones, Tigger Benford, and others give a free concert of original and improvised music Tuesday, August 6.

So, though I didn’t realize it at the time, Rennie Harris Puremovement’s kinetic beauty and voracious appetites had a profound effect on me. At the end of my shift, after a couple of Bloody Marys and a nap, I recalled the way I’d felt in their presence before my schmelt-down. I’d forgotten my own temporary unhappiness, my aching feet, and the clown on table three who’d told me his entire breakfast order with a mouthful of cinnamon bun and then stiffed me on the tip. I knew that at some point I’d no longer have to wade through a thousand egg orders a week to support my real life, my other life. May that day come soon.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.