In 17th-century Mexico, Sol Juana Inés de la Cruz was a nun, poet, intellectual, composer, and champion of women’s rights to education and the pursuit of knowledge. Although she is not unknown, especially in Mexico, she is something of an enigma and her life and work are subject to many interpretations. It’s a shame she isn’t the focus of her new production, Sol Juana, by her choreographer Michelle Manzanares.
The production, which debuted as part of Ballet Hispanico’s Thursday-Saturday run at the New York City Center, is set in a generalized past. The dancers wear baroque court costumes (by Sam Ratell). The music is mostly baroque, secular and sacred, some by Sol Her Juana herself. However, there are few attempts to touch upon the peculiarities of this period and the ideas of Sol Juana.
Instead, there are scenes of general struggle. Most dancers are sprawled on the floor and the first thing they do when they get up is to fall. Then they keep collapsing, floundering on the floor in fancy clothes. Gabriel Sproub, who plays Sol Juana, straddles them, but her signature movement, also a crumbling, painful implosion, is only more articulate and staccato. Afterwards, the dancers, often taking turns leaping, spend a great deal of time on the ground.
After a while, we hear the sound of crunchy writing, and Sprauve’s writhing solo alludes to a certain interiority, the poet’s absorption, euphoria, and loneliness. This solo also hints at why Sol Juana became a nun and found a place to live the life of the heart for women of the time, her decision represented by a change in costume from gown to custom. ing. But much of the drama in the film is channeled into the duet between Sproub and an unidentified woman played by Isabel Robles.
Accompanied by one of Sol Juana’s instrumental works and a recitation of her love poem, this duet fleshes out a scholarly musing on forbidden desires. The women hesitantly dance around each other, holding hands back to back.staff take off
Even if you take off your underwear and leave it alone, the dance remains chaste. Strap them to the floor and rub their noses, or do back-to-back lifts. As Robles exits, Sproub collapses on a joint and begins graffitiing on the ground. Suddenly, book pages fall from the sky like confetti.
This is as close as “Sor Juana” addresses the source of its subject art. The way the paper she wrote is scattered about is telling. Indeed, Sol Juana’s poetry talks about being overwhelmed by love, but it expresses that feeling in formal poetry. The Manzanares dance shows little interest in 17th-century aesthetic forms, whether poetic, musical, or choreographic. More importantly, it gives no weight to the social and religious forces that constrain the heroine, the concrete forces that give meaning to her struggle. She tried to make this outstanding figure resonate with modern audiences, but her handsome and ambiguous body of work ended up shrinking her.
The problem with this season’s other premiere, Omar Roman de Jesús’ “Papagayo” (“Parrot”), is not ambiguity. The first, Amanda Del Valle, in a shimmering feathered fringe costume (by Karen Young), frantically storms the first few rows of the audience, searching for her missing hat. And the curtain rises on the chair-taking game in which the person who leaves the seat dies.
The hat is there and seems to give the wearer power over life and death. When Del Valle got her hat back, she clapped like a crazed child and made the others dance like zombies. They attack her when she loses her hat. All of this madness is set to tracks by Mexican big band La Sonora Santanera and lounge music by Les Baxter, the sound of hips swaying amidst playing and hissing.
Luckily, the Hispanico Ballet dancers, especially the brilliant newcomer Fatima Andere, performed well on the recently acquired William Forsythe duet “New Sleep” and the straight-up Pedro Ruiz classic “Club Havana.” We have a good chance to show off our skills. Full of clichés and cigar-smoking stereotypes, “Club Havana” doesn’t have the ambitions of “Sol Juana” or “Papagayo,” but it fulfills its simple intention of entertaining through dance. ing.
Ballet Hispanico
June 1-3 at New York City Center.
