A scene from Monger, by Barak Marshall.(Photo by Gadi Dagon)
By Tara Mitton Catao
What resonates in your mind’s eye after watching Monger, the evening-length work by choreographer Barak Marshall, is the astonishingly original movement.
With the fusion of highly arresting visual images, an extremely diverse music score and such powerfully athletic and gestural movement, Marshall has created an absolutely original portrayal of oppression.
Monger reveals the busy “downstairs” life of a group of servants that is dictated by the invasive presence of the mistress of the house “upstairs” who, though never really present, makes her perpetual demands to the servants on an old-time radio mic, conjuring up images of World War II radio shows.
Layered over the entire work is a veil of ever-changing ethnicity that seeps from one section to the next, driven by the score, an intriguing patchwork of music styles ranging from rock to classical to Romanian gypsy music. This “it could be anywhere” aura is also aided by the varied costumes, which seem to evoke pre-war America’s WPA, black-garbed Victorian nannies and contemporary women for sale.
The stark stage lighting divides and isolates the space as various cleverly choreographed vignettes touched on the real lives and feelings of the servants; the underlings. At times, it’s humorous and quirky. At other times, sad and poignant.
But all the time, the movement races as the dancers perform this wonderful choreography with its distinctive rhythmic gestures.
Monger tells a story. One of the beauties of dance as an art form is that one can make one’s own personal interpretation from the loosely formed, symbolic story line in the dance. This is a story about power and its effects. Barack Marshall has created a layered and intelligent work that weaves his multicultural heritage with his multi-generational artistic inheritance and captures our imagination with his images.
Unfortunately, because of unforeseen circumstances, the originally scheduled dance company from Israel was unable to perform Friday night at the Duncan Theatre. A young Los Angeles-based company called Bodytraffic, for whom Marshall is a choreographer, quickly learned Monger so that the work could still be performed as part of the Duncan season.
The dancers should be highly commended for their performances considering they learned the entire work in three weeks. An amazing feat, especially as the unusual choreography is very demanding, requiring a great deal of stamina and movement articulation, and that the dancers use their voices in a variety of ways.
However, considering the theatrical variety of Monger, this was not a rich interpretation of the work. The performance was danced well enough but it was just not theatrically weighted enough.
It is a work that is truly dance theater, and whether it was the lack of rehearsal time or perhaps the lack of experience in the tradition of dance theater in the United States, this performance just did not take off as it should have, considering the quality of the choreography. It should have just been electric.
Barak Marshall’s Monger will be repeated tonight at the Duncan Theatre on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth. Tickets for the 8 p.m. concert are $37. Call 868-3309 or www.duncantheatre.org.