Last weekend’s Contemporary Choreographers’ Collective (Coco) Dance Festival offered three nights of shows at Queen’s Hall, St Ann’s. The festival also included community master classes and an awards ceremony. The Saturday night event began with a pre-show, The Elemental/ I>Hail for Stones, by artist Akuzuru. She led a group of young women in white around the venue accompanied by a pounding drumbeat by Everald “Redman” Watson. The women were a coffle at points, tied together by ragged cloths they wore on their costumes; at other times they were a screaming mob attacking each other with cardboard boxes as Akuzuru sprinkled baby powder over them.
Contemporary dance is generally non-narrative, but some of the pieces in the Saturday show told stories. Two audience favourites, pop/soca pieces done by Best Village groups, played with pop, modern and folk forms. The pieces, Beach Vybes by Ibis Dance Co and School Days by New Edition, used soca medleys as a backdrop to portray, respectively, a beach party and an out-of-control classroom. Another narrative piece closed the night’s programme, the clever, evocative Punchline by Genevieve Durham DeCesaro. Another mishmash—this time of ballroom, modern and contemporary dance, and slapstick humour—the piece was set to a story about the choreographer’s father’s struggle with dementia.
But most of the pieces were abstract, riffs on an idea, forcing the audience to think through what gestures, movements, costumes and props added up to in a work. Sonja Dumas’ piece, Walk the Talk, played with ideas of femininity and power in how the women performing it sauntered, skipped or strolled about the stage. Another Coco founder, Dave Williams sat centre stage dusting himself with talcum powder and hugging a mirror for his piece Older, ruminating on the effects of ageing. Santee Smith, a member of the Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan from Six Nations, Ontario, in her piece NeoIndigenA, performed a ritual under a spotlight.
The press release on the show described the work as one “that fiercely cycles through sacred portals between Skyworld, Earthworld and Underworld.” On stage that Saturday, Smith’s movements gave, alternately, impressions of strength, sadness, pain, longing as she donned a sparsely feathered headpiece and greaves for her impassioned finale. This is T&T’s only juried dance festival. Juan-Pablo Alba-Dennis, Jacob Cino, Jélae Stroude-Mitchell, Sade Chance, Jilene Forde and Sharifa Hodge all had work in the show, as well as Noble Douglas. DeCesaro, of Texas Tech University, was one of several visiting dancers and choreographers in town for the festival.
