A week of dance

Without really realizing it, I ended up with a week of dance performances...no, not me dancing, but was in the audience for several different performances. It started out last Friday when I had a long weekend for Chinese New Year (Welcome the year of the dog). I stayed in town which gave me an opportunity to go see the dragon and lion dance on the other side of my neighborhood. It was pretty much me and a pile of small kids, but I enjoyed watching the antics in any case.

Lion dance for Chinese New Year

Sunday I headed downtown to check out a Ballet Manila performance called Ballet and Ballads. I had not idea what I would be getting, especially since I had won the tickets in a school raffle. Turns out it was ballet, but danced to live music which was being sung on stage for most numbers. I found myself a bit confused when after intermission the audience went crazy when a singer stepped out on stage. Turned out it was Christian Bautista, which meant nothing to me. I asked our taxi driver on the way home and he said he was a Filipino teenage heart throb. It definitely seemed to be the highlight of the performance for most of the audience. Not quite the experience I was anticipating as the audience sung along, yet somehow felt all the more Filipino because of it. After all people here do love to sing and dance.

Ballet Manila with live singers. Christian Bautista is in white.

Thursday I stayed late at school to watch our high school dance group run through their performance. Twenty minutes of a variety of dances with a huge amount of props (bungee cords, door frames, mini-tramps, laser lines) made me appreciate the opportunities that our students have just by virtue of being at our school. The stage they danced on was just as nice, if not nicer, than the other performances I watched this week. The time they put in was clear as the produced an impressive dance experience.

Dancers of the Bohol Dance Project

Friday night I ended up at a free performance at the Fringe Festival, a performance by the Bohol Dance Project taking place just a block from my apartment at the BGC Arts Center. They brought four male dancers in for their first performance outside of Bohol. You could see the emotion and thrill they had on being a stage in Manila, and couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement. Their two pieces were drastically different - one choreographed by a Romanian and the other a Filipino, each drawing on very different inspiration. If only more of my Friday evenings would end with a live dance performance like this.

Aishwarya's dance performance

Last weekend I escaped my apartment for a short time (perhaps 45 minutes total) to go watch Aishwarya's dance performance. She is a friend who works at school with me who has been practicing traditional Indian dance for the past 18 years. We walked in a bit late, and it took me a few minutes to actually accept that the woman on stage was actually the Aish that I normally see laughing and smiling. Immaculately made up, with a head dress of fake flowers and an extension added into her braid, she seemed like a different being. I was drawn in by her facial expressions - feeling that I understood part of the story despite not having any clue what she was actually dancing about. A later inquiry revealed she was dancing one section of the Ramayana - a great Indian epic, a section which the website Aish directed me to said the following:

Years pass and Rama, Sita and Lakshman are very happy in the forest. Rama and Lakshman destroy the rakshasas (evil creatures) who disturb the sages in their meditations. One day a rakshasa princess tries to seduce Rama, and Lakshmana wounds her and drives her away. She returns to her brother Ravana, the ten-headed ruler of Lanka (Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon), and tells her brother (who has a weakness for beautiful women) about lovely Sita. Ravana devises a plan to abduct Sita. He sends a magical golden deer which Sita desires. Rama and Lakshman go off to hunt the deer, first drawing a protective circle around Sita and warning her she will be safe as long as she does not step outside the circle. As they go off, Ravana (who can change his shape) appears as a holy man begging alms. The moment Sita steps outside the circle to give him food, Ravana grabs her and carries her off the his kingdom in Lanka.                               from this Ramayana Summary if you want more detail

 Despite my great lack of knowledge I still felt like I understood a good part of the emotion of the story as Aish danced around in a circle, stomping her feet in time to the live music provided by a quartet and making the bells on her ankles ring, then holding precise poses. Emotions that included supplication, denial, sadness, surprise, and more. Aishwarya took me through several emotions as I watched, an escape from a rather mundane weekend.