In 17th century Mexico, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a nun, a poet, an intellectual, a composer, and a defender of women’s right to education and the pursuit of knowledge. Although not obscure, especially in Mexico, she is something of an enigma, her life and work are subject to many interpretations. It is a pity that ‘Sor Juana’, a new creation by choreographer Michelle Manzanales, does not bring her into sharper focus.
The work, which Ballet Hispánico debuted as part of its New York City Center performances Thursday through Saturday, is set in a common past. The dancers wear courtly baroque clothes (by Sam Ratelle). The music is mostly baroque, secular and sacred, partly by Sor Juana herself. But little attempt is made to go into the particulars of the period or the ideas of Sor Juana.
Instead, there are scenes of generic struggle. Most dancers start out sprawled on the floor and the first thing they do when they get up is to collapse. Then they keep collapsing, writhing on the floor in their fine clothes. Gabrielle Sprauve, who plays Sor Juana, steps over them, but her identifying move is also a collapsing, painful implosion – only more articulate and staccato. Later the dancers jump, often one after the other, but they spend an awful lot of time on the floor.
After a while we hear the scratchy sound of writing, and Sprauve’s winding solo alludes to some inwardness, the absorption, euphoria and isolation of a poet. The solo also suggests a rationale for Sor Juana to become a nun and find a place for a woman of her time to live a life of the ghost, a decision represented by a costume change from dress to habit. But most of the work’s drama is funneled into a duet for Sprauve and an unknown woman played by Isabel Robles.
Set to one of Sor Juana’s instrumental compositions and a recitation of one of her love poems, the duet gives substance to scientific speculations about forbidden desires. The women hesitantly dance around each other until, back to back, they join hands. Servants undress them
to underwear and leave them alone, but the dance remains chaste: some floor-bound nuzzling, a back-to-back lift. As Robles goes outside, Sprauve does her articulate collapse and starts scrambling on the floor. Suddenly, pages from books fall like confetti from the sky.
This is as close as “Sor Juana” comes to addressing the sources of the subject’s art. The rendering of her writing as scattered paper is telling. Yes, Sor Juana’s poem speaks of being undone by love, but it expresses that feeling in formal verse. Manzanales’ dance shows almost no interest in the 17th century aesthetic form, be it poetic, musical or choreographic. More importantly, it gives no weight to the social and religious forces that bound her heroine, to the particulars that gave meaning to her struggle. In order to make this exceptional person recognizable to contemporary viewers, the handsome and vague work ultimately reduces her.
Vagueness isn’t the problem with the season’s other premiere, “Papagayos” (“Parrots”) by Omar Román De Jesús. First, Amanda del Valle, costumed (by Karen Young) in sparkly feathered bangs, manically attacks the first few rows of the audience, searching for her missing hat. Then the curtain rises for a musical chairs in which the person left without a seat dies.
The hat is there and seems to give its wearer power over life and death. When del Valle retrieves the hat, she claps like a demented child while making the others dance like zombies. When she loses the hat, they turn on her. All this madness is put on tracks by the Mexican big band La Sonora Santanera and the lounge music of Les Baxter, sounds that give rise to some hip swaying between the histrionics and hisses.
Fortunately, the Ballet Hispánico dancers, especially the amazing newcomer Fatima Other, are getting better chances to show their skills in the recently acquired William Forsythe duet ‘New Sleep’ and the straightforward Pedro Ruiz chapter ‘Club Havana’. Riddled with clichés and stereotypes about cigar smoking, “Club Havana” lacks the ambition of “Sor Juana” and “Papagayos”, but it fulfills its simple intention – to entertain – through dance.
Ballet Spanish
June 1-3 in central New York.