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IMPRESSIONS: "FRONTERA"- Animals of Distinction at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House
By Henning Rübsam
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Published on December 19, 2024
FRONTERA; Photo: Steven Pisano
Choreography and direction by Dana Gingras
Live music by Fly Pan Am
Visual concept by United Visual Artists
Part of Next Wave 2024 & Emerging Visions
November 8 , 2024
Canadian-born choreographer Dana Gingras, who grew up partly in Argentina and Scotland, moved back to Canada in the early 1990s. She knows about borders. Gingras has taken many of her projects to different continents, first from her home base in Vancouver with her then company The Holy Body Tattoo, and since 2006 from Montreal where she founded AOD (Animals of Distinction).
In Frontera, which AOD performed on November 8 at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, a woman dressed in sneakers, black shorts, and a white tank top walks the perimeter of the empty stage. Other cast members eventually join her path, and after some time congregate upstage left. Given the work’s title, I wonder if the dancers are hatching a plan to cross a border, or if they are already on their way. Is there a feeling of unease? I am intrigued, and hope the group gets to cross any obstacle they need to cross.
One dancer walks across the stage, and a pointed light on his back makes him a target. Or does he delineate and divide the space with every step he takes?
As the dancers show some hesitation in their steps, I get the signal that the territory might be unfamiliar. The soundscape soon changes from nature-babble to more ominous vibrations. The dancers run and jump in all directions. Have they been detected by border patrol? Am I reading too much into this? As the music takes on the spirit of a rock concert, the dancers dart across the stage and flail about. A backdrop lifts, and reveals a live band. What a treat! The dancers go wild, and the choreography shows an aerobic display of very able bodies.
In addition to the live music, a light show reminds me of lyrics from Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera: “There are some who are in darkness/And the others are in light/And you see the ones in brightness/Those in darkness drop from sight.”
The dancers play hide and seek, and go in between beams of light that might represent a border wall or the bars of a jail cell. I ponder the difference between simplicity and something just a bit too simplistic.
Another initially arresting lighting effect wears out its novelty. A strip of light slowly scans the otherwise dark space from above, moving from one side of the stage to the other, and then back and forth again too many times for me to count or care. A heap of bodies faintly moves below and separates, but the movement does not relate to the scan and there does not seem to be any consequence. Does it signify that there is surveillance anywhere and anytime, and we are even being watched in our sleep? I would not be surprised if some audience members take a little nap during this droning interlude.
In the section that follows, the cast travels through shafts of light directed horizontally by the lowered lighting battens. It’s another cool effect, for the space under the lights is not bright, and the lowered tech apparatus creates a sense of confinement.
Despite the length of the surveillance scanning, Frontera certainly has many arresting images, and I am ready to applaud as the group forms a tunnel through which everyone slips away into a darkened upstage area. Then the work starts all over again, however, and the tedious games with light beams take on a circus effect. During the last half hour of this 70-minute work, I feel trapped in a border theme park.
Frontera could be a fascinating statement on migration if it were half an hour long. All the fixtures and paraphernalia are in place, namely capable dancers, live music by a rock band, and inventive lighting design. In its current version, it is just an overlong spectacle in desperate need of an editor.
