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Living history
Everett Dance Theatre’s compelling Home Movies
BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Anyone who wants to experience the full impact of collaborative art should see Everett Dance Theatre’s Home Movies. Anyone who wants to understand how personal experience can be translated into art should see Home Movies. Anyone (and everyone) should see Home Movies. And see it again (Friday and Saturday evenings through October 2). Because you can’t get all that’s in this sprawling (but incredibly tight) multi-generational, multi-cultural, multi-media piece the first time around.

The company of five dancers, with Dorothy and Aaron Jungels as directors and with Laura Colella, Mariana Tschudi, and Christine Mullowney joining them as designers, have been working on Home Movies for more than two years, and I’d seen early segments of it in a workshop format. But nothing had prepared me for the artistic impact of the end product. In fact, combining narratives with music, video, and dance could have been disjointed or distracting. But each of these media enhances its counterparts, and the whole is so polished that the final effect is simply brilliant — one of the most moving theatrical pieces I’ve been exposed to in a long, long time.

Where to begin? With the stories? Here’s a sample: Cambodian-American Sokeo Ros tells of his family’s flight from their homeland to a refugee camp in Thailand where he was born and of the turbulent relationship between him and his parents in this country and of trying so hard to win his father’s affection. Marvin Novogrodski relates a tale of his Polish grandmother and her dramatic rescue of his teenaged father from a train headed to Palestine after World War II.

Bravell Gracia Smith shares his birth story — he was born during the Blizzard of ’78, and his mother, of Cape Verdean descent, whose language contains the word "velle" for "storm," names him "Bravell" for "braving the storm" — and the story of his father’s illness and death. Aaron and Rachael Jungels recall their funny adventures while growing up in an East Side house where their father (a professor at RISD) put his five toddling kids into a black-and-white film about a bird’s funeral and their mother (a fledgling choreographer and dance teacher) had everyone, including their dad, practicing ballet. As a young teen, Rachael sneaks out to the clubs to dance; as a 10-year-old, Aaron sets out on a 300-mile bicycle trip with his 12-year-old brother, from Providence to Cornwall, Maine.

Obviously the stories run the gamut, from wrenching to hilarious, from revelatory to puzzling. And the storytellers are accompanied threefold, often by video and, almost always, by movement and music — from the gravel-voiced Louis Armstrong singing of aspirations and dreams, to bluesy, jazzy instrumentals, to the high-pitched voice of an Asian singer, to the foot-stomping beat of contemporary hip-hop. The music never overrides the mood of the performer; nor does it attempt to manipulate audience reactions.

The movement that weaves around the storyteller (sometimes the teller is moving, too) is part-mime, part-symbol, part-backdrop, part-commentary. Bravell holds Rachael’s prone body across his knees as he remembers the hospital staff asking what he wanted to do with his father’s body. Two to four of the male dancers go into headstands when the narrative indicates someone’s world turning upside down. Rachael’s free-form dance sequences, sometimes solo, sometimes with a partner, remind the teller and the listener that life was always moving behind, in front of, and around him, even while he was being challenged by a tragic situation or an ongoing frustration.

And there are also Everett’s signature dance sequences, in which partnering happens among all five people on stage, sometimes all at once, in intricately shifting sculptures as someone is lifted for a moment while another slides under an arch of legs and still another holds onto someone’s shoulder and is flung out as that person whirls around. It’s almost a blur of push-pull, lean-bend, everyone climbing up, over and around each other. There’s a moment when Bravell lies on the floor with his feet up and Sokeo balances on his stomach, arms out, looking as if he could fly. A similar moment occurs (actually at least three times), when Rachael walks up onto Aaron’s outstretched hands (she’s held by someone else) as he lies on the floor, and she walks on up over his head. That image is amazingly evocative — as if she’s stepping into an unknown future.

The third accompaniment to the dancers’ stories are the video images projected on large scrims to either side of them, on the large screen that covers the back wall, or on double scrims that drop from the ceiling center-stage. Memorable uses of these images are: a long, narrow, partially distorted panorama of Broad Street, as Bravell touts the rich culture of that neighborhood; a view of the front porch of the Victorian house his parents used to own, while he sits on a chair behind the scrim, as if he’s on the steps leading up to the porch; Sokeo’s popping hip-hop solo against a large sun-like image on the back wall, with bits of video that had appeared throughout Home Movies flashing on the two tall scrims beside him; and a close-up of the face of an octogenarian whom Marvin met last year in Poland, who remembered his grandmother.

There are also actual "home movies," of the Jungels kids chasing chickens or Dorothy and her sister in Ireland with their mom. We also see a portion of the film Aaron made about his dad and a snippet of the film his dad made of his kids. We see the next generation, with Sokeo’s dad holding his granddaughter and Rachael’s young daughter dancing and swaying, off in her own world.

The Everett dancers and directors have looked at many, many ways of defining "home" and "movies." They’ve allowed their memories of "home" to expand their vision of what their families were, are, and will be; and they’ve pondered the importance of visual images and movement in their lives. Home Movies will replay itself in your mind for days . . . or at least until you see another performance of it.


Issue Date: September 17 - 23, 2004
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