Cherish Menzo emerges on the Vancouver stage with bold, unapologetic choreographic presence in DARKMATTER (2022) presented at PuSh Festival January 29–31. The boundary-pushing work by the Amsterdam/Brussels-based artist is the second of a trilogy, after JEZEBEL (2019) with a third work yet to come – all collaborations between GRIP (a group of European choreographers including Menzo, Femke Gyselinck, Jan Martens and Steven Michel) and Frascati Producties.
The show has already started when the audience enters the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus. The spacious black box is outfitted with raked seats that look down upon a white dance floor where two performers, Menzo and Camilo Mejía Cortés, are resting downstage. Nearly their whole bodies are covered – black jeans, black hoodies and white masks – except for Cortés chest, which is bare. Menzo gently smears black paint across Cortés’ torso, seemingly unconcerned by the audience.
The 85-minute work eases us in with unhurried confidence. In early sections, the dancers do little, but the set (by Morgana Machado Marques) speaks loudly. Strips of white fabric smudged with black paint hang behind the dancers, forming a kind of pool upstage. Lit blue, they look like eerie test tubes in the light. Silhouetted against them, the dancers slowly body roll, opening and closing arms with fists clenched as if dancing or fighting. Tension builds in the score (by Gagi Petrovic and Michael Nunes), distant operatic vocals barely perceptible above industrial noise that gets louder and louder.
Small choreographic choices create an unpredictable, otherworldly feel: the dancers’ silver teeth gleam when they catch the light; milky contacts make their pupils hard to see from a distance; sudden flashes of strobe lights keep us on edge.
Within Menzo’s exploration of the “(afro)futuristic and enigmatic body” (show notes), dancers’ bodies become sites of transformation, holding Black histories, futures and layers of social meaning beneath the surface. Menzo and Cortés vomit black paint – their figures become slick with it – and huge projections of a tongue convulsing draw our attention to the interior and exterior spaces of the body. When Cortés tries to form his mouth around the word “corpse” (the start of a rap anthem that becomes the heartbeat of the rest of the show), his face contorts to mirror the electronic distortion applied to the sound.
There is an erratic, variable dynamic to their movement, extreme slows and sudden bursts that physically manifest Menzo’s interest in tempo remixing techniques from hip-hop music. It’s confrontational, too: with arms thrust out, Menzo’s gaze challenges us from below brows as she repeats in rhythm, “Who’s the puppeteer?”
Menzo and Cortés are mature movers whose wells of energy overflow at the most exciting moments, upending the venue’s power dynamics. During a playful, loose section, they chase each other around the theatre, perform bits of unison street dance and break every physical wall between audience and performer. With moxie, Menzo teeters across the front row, hangs off the metal railing of the raked seating and disappears behind the set to return with a fog machine. Cortés scrambles up the rows to the top of the theatre, returning with a bucket of black paint to throw across the stage. Suddenly boundless, the dancers take control of the space.
Nondescript hoodies and jeans are eventually discarded for shiny, post-humanistic leather outfits. The performers stalk around the stage, rapping in near-synchronicity, then entangle and slide across the slippery floor in thigh-high heeled boots like a cyborg-spider. The images Menzo presents are many: what the body is and how we perceive it are deep, shifting pools that illuminate Menzo’s penchant for black holes and monsters. Like the planetary bodies of a galaxy, the work attracts and repulses us in turn (some spectators didn’t last until the end – they missed out).
Slowly, every white bit of stage (dance floor, fabric) is refashioned into a joyful mess of glossy, black paint. The dancers, too, are covered in it, so much so that it becomes hilarious to all involved. As they slip around the stage, snickering with electronically distorted voices and ludicrous harmonica sounds, the audience can’t help but join in with the laughter.
Liberated from their last bits of clothing, Cortés and Menzo finish the work on a high – stark nude except for mic packs and belts. Passion builds as they gesture and erupt in short, ecstatic dances, voices layering poetry above the pounding bass. The lyrics describe limitless, metaphysical realities: “Pixelated frames…Body is a planet, body has migrated.” Black fabric draping all over the space, the dancers’ satisfying abandon ushers the work into celebration, resistance, imagination.
Tagged: Performance, review, Vancouver
