The cross-pollination of global cultures that gave rise to the omnibus genre known as world music has some equivalents in the dance world. This week, two different examples can be seen on area stages.
With roots in Indonesia and the Pacific Islands, these visiting companies fuse traditional and contemporary styles, incorporating Western influences to create new hybrids of movement and music. And later this month there’s a visit from an ensemble that uses West African dance and drumming to draw disparate cultures together.
This Friday’s performance in the Asian Arts and Culture series at UMass is perhaps the most diverse and daring. Gamelan Galak Tika fuses the traditional instruments and dances of Indonesia with electric guitars and the music of Western composers. Here the group teams up with Ensemble Robot, a collective founded by MIT grads who invent and deploy robotic musical instruments. This interspecies collaboration features a piece called “Heavy Metal” (referring to the robotic glockenspiel that figures in it) and a gamelan-rock number titled “Amok.”
Black Grace is a New Zealand dance company that merges indigenous forms and contemporary choreography. The troupe, performing at the UMass Fine Arts Center on Tuesday, contrasts the propulsive rhythms and macho (to mix cultural metaphors) all-male dances of Maori and Samoan traditions with the “feminine” grace associated with modern dance. Originated by men with little formal training or dance experience outside hip-hop, Black Grace is now New Zealand’s foremost contemporary dance company.
Bush Mango, a community-based ensemble from upstate New York, seeks to form common bonds across cultures by dancing to the liberating rhythms of West African percussion. The group’s mission “recognizes the racial, socio-economic and cultural differences of people and realizes that the ancient music, dance, and song it embraces can transcend one’s background and life circumstances.” Its latest production, Joy, comes to Brattleboro on March 20.
Gamelan Galak Tika and Ensemble Robot: March 5, Bowker Auditorium, UMass.
Black Grace: March 9, Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, UMass. Tickets for both at (413) 545-2511, www.umasstix.com.
Bush Mango: March 20, Latchis Theatre, 50 Main St., Brattleboro, (800) 798-6301, www.bushmango.org.
Ridiculously Precious
A different kind of fancy footwork takes the stage at Mount Holyoke College this weekend. Moli?re’s satirical comedy Les Pr?cieuses ridicules is a dance of pretension and deceit. A pair of Affected Young Ladies (the usual English version of the title), for whom witty artifice is all, scorn their hopelessly unrefined suitors and are subsequently duped by their own affectations. The 1659 one-act was Moliere’s first succes de scandale, launching his reputation for deflating the pompous and pretentious.
Theater professor Roger Babb has one foot in the avant-garde and the other in an ongoing fascination with the comedies of Moliere and Marivaux, playwrights who combined the japes of Commedia dell’ Arte with shrewd observations of social rituals in the age of powdered wigs and courtly gavottes. His recent productions at Mount Holyoke have made the cozy Rooke Theatre even more intimate, placing the audience as well as the actors on the stage, making us virtual eavesdroppers on the plot’s, well, ridiculous intrigues.
