We are One – The Haiti Project
Shamrock McShane
The Haiti Project is something that touches the soul. And the soul is something inside you that lives as long as you do.
This is what the people of Haiti learned when their loved ones died all around them, swallowed and crushed beneath the debris of a massive earthquake.
“They cannot take our soul,” says a survivor and artist, because all the Haitians we see on stage and on screen in this multi-media magnificat are artists – actors, singers, sculptors, painters, dancers, and musicians.
The first sounds we hear come out of the darkness of night and presage the morning not of a new day but of a time before. We do not know it is before; we are only dimly aware of it, like someone who has just woke up, and the roosters are crowing and the sun rises on the sea, and we are not alone and that with the light of day gives to all of us the oneness of many, the joyful ensemble awash in color.
There is a moment in Vanya on 42nd Street when we begin to gather that we are no longer watching friends chatting, people we have seen crossing the streets of Manhattan, arriving at a vacant theater, sharing a cup of coffee, passing the time of day, but instead they have become Chekhov’s characters and we have plummeted without knowing it into the heart of a play.
There’s a moment like that early on in The Haiti Project. The fine musicians of The Haiti Project’s band (Josh Lederman on guitar and knocki; George S. O’Brien on keyboard; Arturo Escamilla on percussion and azor; Ivan Thue on bass; and Fred Buhl on violin) inhale deeply of our presence in the sea air of Haiti and breathe out first rhythm, then melody, then song, and in the hush that follows the words just come to them, and they are the words of friendship and harmony and love, and there is nowhere to go from here but up once again into the heavens of music.
The music derives from a cacophony that borders on the sublime, and only because we are seated in a theatre, the Fine Arts Hall of Santa Fe College, do we perceive the sheer choreographic architecture. It was the ensemble of Saxe-Meiningen in the 19th century that first demonstrated the precision and artistry required to present seamlessly the teeming crowd scene. Gregg Jones follows in the proud tradition of those rare directors – the Hippodrome’s Lauren Caldwell is another and this ensemble own Jessica Arnold, who here proves adept as dancer as well as performer – imagine, a trifecta of such practitioners in but one Hogtown – who can mobilize a stage full of actors into a living community instead of just a traffic jam.
The proscenium arch gives in grudgingly to a third dimension – but if you can bend it far enough out of shape, it will break. By incorporating the giant rectangular movie screen center stage, against which the actors perform, the proscenium arch generates another dimension, a true third dimension – that will be breathtakingly reversed at the climax of the play when the actors in silhouette play behind the screen and then stride purposively toward us and out of the picture frame and into our experience.
The Haiti Project bursts the bonds of the stage; the performers spill into the audience, soar above us, and pass among us. The Theatre of Gregg Jones has grown from the enclave of the Black Box where he wedded technology to Viola Spolin-inspired improvisation to the Fine Arts Hall and with it of course is The Return of the Big Head People – those puppet personas that parade through our collective consciousness and tell us our heads are so much bigger than the rest of us that the best we can do is gesture and try not to topple over, but our expressions, wry and rueful, never change.
The Big Head people subtly introduce the major plot point of The Haiti Project precisely because they are disorienting. We get a queasy feeling and then, out of nowhere, there is a rumble, and suddenly, terrifyingly, the narrative line ruptures, and the earthquake is upon us. It is a moment eerily akin to Jessica Arnold’s staging of the crumbling of the twin towers in America’s New War Strikes Back, except that it is exponentially greater as more and more thousands die and the land itself is transformed. Now we know that when we sensed at the beginning that this was the time before something – that this is what the something is, and it is awful.
Here is now a darker night than any of us have ever known, and over all is cast an ominous state of rest. To call the moment atmospheric is to cast it in all its sensory awareness. It is now, after the dancing images and moving melody, that awe arrives and we can only wonder: How can pain be so beautiful?
The choreography plays stasis against movement to portray the plot – there is a plot. There is a narrative line, just like there is melody to the music, lots of melodies combining to form one great tapestry of song woven together by the mastery of image and sound. It all begins in rhythm, a beat, pulse, heartbeat, waves lapping the shore.
The starkness of monologues, superbly articulated and Haitian-inflected by Tom Miller, Daniel Dvorak, and Howard Anderson, while matched in synch with their Haitian video counterparts, gives us a world view that speaks to us like comrades.
The Haiti Project is spectacular, it is majestic, it is saturnalia, a celebration, and all that aesthetic energy is what keeps it afloat even under the weight of a hefty didacticism.
The beat takes form and we have dancing images and a pulsing energy, and here come colors and the paintings and sculptures of Haitians in Haiti. One quibble – the nature of the slide show with its regular interval of changes militates against the subjectivity of art, which would require of great paintings more time to process this, say, than that. What does it matter? We are in Haiti!
And there is our man Gregg Jones among them, asking what we would ask, and listening. That’s all you have to do – listen, breathe, and sing. You see, Gregg – the trickster, improv master, puppeteer, theatrician – he goes there to Haiti and he just keeps on living his hectic life and then he bring his life back to Gainesville, and it lives here with us. And like ripples in a pool that circle outward endlessly, we find, like the members of the band, that we are playing the same song!
“Under the debris,” we are told by the most soulful of singers, “you sing, not to keep from being afraid, but to find peace.”
Such song. “Much love will revive Haiti,” we who would be revived must learn. “And it will be somewhere where it will feel good to be living – very good.”
Among the startling, stirring, sensational dance moments are those produced by Howard Anderson. Sebastien Duvilaire (who is also the Project’s choreographer), and James Wales, as well as Kelsie Maria Candelaria and Zazou Pierre.
Kids, let me tell you, this is what you go to college for – a taste of foreign tongues, another culture, another way of life, the knowledge that there is no Other, the wisdom that we are all one.
The Haiti Project performed at the Fine Arts Hall of Santa Fe College, April 4-7, 2012.
- Shamrock McShane |
