Crimes & Whispers (2006)

July 18, 2006 Dance review: 'Crimes and Whispers'

Camille Lefevre, Special To The Star Tribune

The air was stifling hot, the room saturated with lethargy. As viewers fanned themselves, the dancers moved with a limpness that signaled impending heat exhaustion. It appeared the non-air-conditioned theater might suffocate "Crimes and Whispers," even as it conjured the torpor of the show's Buenos Aires setting.

But the performers rallied. Florencia Taccetti and Jennifer Ilse, in particular, gave finely wrought performances, emotional and honest. While the 75-minute show -- co-produced by Gerry Girouard and Dancers, and Off-Leash Area -- was uneven in concept and execution, the two female leads steered the story away from melodrama, and into well-sounded depths of violence, despair and denial.

In 16 tableaux-like sections, "Crimes and Whispers" re-imagines the time after the 1976 military coup, during which thousands of citizens permanently "disappeared" at the hands of the junta, and mothers started circling the Plaza de Mayo with pictures of the disappeared. Paul Herwig's sky-blue set, painted with cartoon-like cityscapes, houses secret doors, black-curtained openings, and panels that peel away to reveal images of violence.

Violence also is conveyed through Girouard's choreography, a highly physical blend of tango, acrobatics and break-dance moves. Victims twist and cower beneath the feet and legs of the junta, who imprison their victims with horizontal one-armed balances. The mothers line up against the walls with their hands raised, as the junta pin them with wall-walking handstands.

Elbows jut, legs lunge, and shoulder stands end in break-dance "freezes." Through their movements the characters argue, insult, plead and try to persuade each other. At the work's core are Taccetti , the mother who ardently tries to get Ilse's blind citizen to see, or at least acknowledge, the missing.

Ilse performs much of the work blindfolded, which lends her torture scene with Girouard as the junta leader a wrenching, visceral quality. She often places her hand to her face, gently turning herself away from the truth. And in a friendship duet, she enfolds Taccetti in a choreography of embraces.

Herwig's Death appears throughout the piece, a worn traveler in felt-hat and sunglasses who snaps Polaroid's of his victims. Even he despairs at the junta's death toll, ripping open hidden pockets of misery to reveal the secrets beneath.

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities dance critic.

July 16, 2006 'Tango' revisits Argentina coup
BY LINDA SHAPIRO, Special to the Pioneer Press

In the intimate, barely air-conditioned theater, dancers sweat gallantly as they hurtle through scenes of violence and terror. They are re-animating scenes from the 1976 military coup in Argentina when thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the military junta.

Choreographers Gerry Girouard, Jennifer Isle and Florencia Taccetti re-envision the coup and its aftermath with mixed results.

Interfacing Girouard's trademark style of gymnastic moves with Argentine tango and traditional modern dance, "Crimes and Whispers: a Tango of Despair and Defiance" makes some bold, experimental forays into depicting physical terror and psychological despair. But too often, the depiction of these harrowing events slips into histrionics or acrobatic stunts.

Co-presented by Gerry Girouard and Off Leash Area theater, the 75-minute piece begins with a casual performance of the Argentine tango, a dance of languid seduction, in a decadent dance hall in Buenos Aires. The scene switches to the Plaza de Mayo, the main square where the mothers and grandmothers of those kidnapped by the junta marched in silent protest for many years.

"Les Madres," as they were called, express their grief in melodramatic and rather hackneyed modern dance moves. Then they inexplicitly face off with the junta in a series of aggressive actions that mix defiant tango and martial arts gestures with thrilling rebounds off of the walls. It's exciting dance, but dramatically skewed: Why would these Madres, famous for their passive resistance, start throwing karate kicks?

More effective is a later scene in which the Madres, cradling white shawls as surrogate babies and crooning to them, are interrupted by a sinister character (played to creepy perfection by Paul Herwig) who stuffs their "shawls" into a laundry bag and then proceeds to hang bloody pieces of clothing on a clothesline. Taccetti, Denise Armstead and Chouette Evers beautifully convey the quiet grit and iron resolve of the Madres.

The most effective scene employs Girouard's acrobatic choreography to show the sense of disorientation and fear among prisoners. In a duet between a junta interrogator and his victim, Girouard oozes menace playing cat-and-mouse with the blindfolded Isle, biding his time, then springing to trap her against the wall like a malevolent spider web. What's brilliant is the way in which the two incorporate the aggression of tango moves and rhythms into this sadistic confrontation.

Other highlights include a sinister sound score by Neverwas and a marvelous set by Herwig — an abstract representation of the Plaza that gets torn apart to reveal the bloodstained photos of actual Argentine citizens who disappeared.

July 19, 2006 Crimes & Whispers

There's nothing wrong with fascism that a little selective blindness won't fix, by Quinton Skinner

The torture and murders committed by the late-'70s military junta in Argentina might have been lost to memory if not for the mothers and grandmothers who silently haunted the Plaza de Mayo in front of Buenos Aires' presidential palace. Some are still there. Their mute resistance helped break through a society's unwillingness to face the depths to which its government had sunk, and it eventually contributed to the regime's downfall.

And so Gerry Girouard and Off-Leash Area wade into deep waters with Crimes and Whispers, which depicts the events of that time in an ensemble dance performance that is alternately surreal, wrenching, and seductive.

The performance opens (too) slowly, with Death (Paul Herwig) snapping Polaroids on a painted set (designed by Herwig) that evokes Argentina's national colors (light blue and white) and the Plaza de Mayo. Things then speed up considerably, with an abstract depiction of the military junta's rise to power. The youthful dance ensemble (with principal choreography by Girouard) launches into a high-energy number, with four dancers in civilian clothes and three in black military uniforms. What first seems a celebration soon begins to suggest sexual aggression, glamour, and the dark, alluring power of militaristic nationalism. And so goes the recorded score by Chris Cunningham (working under the name Neverwas), a dense brew of accordion, cello, drums, guitars, and keyboards. Though tango makes up the trunk of the soundscape, rhythmic tendrils shoot out of it; at one point the descriptor "hypno-Latin" sprang to mind.

Between the larger ensemble pieces, a dynamic emerges between a mother with a child stolen by the government (Florencia Taccetti) and a citizen living in willful blindness to the invisible dead all around (Jennifer Ilse). Ilse first moves, violently, to deny Taccetti's faded Polaroid, then later literally thrashes to avoid the semi-sexual dominating moves of the junta, here personified by the uniformed Girouard. His choreography features a signature move in which the dancers run up the set's walls with their legs while grounding themselves with their arms. The gesture lends a surreal edge that evokes the seduction, dominance, and acquiescence beneath both our romantic lives and our relations to those who govern us.

The second act takes a detour into Argentina's 1978 World Cup victory, with a big pumping techno score playing against the irony of death taking place blocks away from the celebrations. (The scene is forced and facile, which seems to be the point.) By now Herwig has returned, dressed in a black hat and shades, to take a knife to his set and reveal painted ghostly faces and bloody hues beneath the pastel sky.

It's natural at this point to wonder where the show is going. One hopes it isn't turning into a paean to the human spirit; really, if we're to learn anything from the previous century, it's that we need to triumph over human nature. Instead something complicated and unexpected happens. The music goes silent. Girouard and Ilse launch into a hard, entirely unsentimental dance about brute force and a population that refuses to accept the fact that it lives under an unscrupulous regime. Thudding into walls and the floor, the blindfolded Ilse squirms and tumbles to dodge the increasingly disdainful Girouard. Authoritarian government, the movement suggests, will grow bolder the more its people deny its abuses.

Finally Girouard and Taccetti stage another silent showdown, this one violent and full of anguish. When the scene fades to black, the fight is still going on; there is no triumph to be had for either side.