First generation Mexican-Salvadoran artist Jocelyn Reyes crafts powerful and visceral dance performances using broad theatricality and humor to examine some of the thorny corners of her life. Reyes created her San Francisco-based dance company, REYES Dance, to bridge the gaps between diverse communities through movement and collaboration, an admirable and well-met goal.
Delving into the Latin American immigrant experience of code-switching and navigating across borders, languages, and cultures, tonight’s preview performance of DIOS, completes a trilogy of autobiographical works Reyes began in 2019 with MAGO, which examines the remains of love in the wake of a family member’s passing.
Raised in Los Angeles, Reyes spent summers in Mexico in her grandmother’s household. With DIOS, Reyes and her collaborators show us the complexity of balancing and reconciling the teachings and expectations of secular America with the rigid dogma of Catholicism. The piece follows the spiritual journey of a young woman from quaking girl, through questioning teen, to questing adult. We revel in the journey from fear-based acceptance of an all-knowing judgmental God to a place of self-knowledge and affirmation of one’s own inner power.
Reyes is a gifted creator with a clear and recognizable voice and style. As with LASOS (2022), DIOS is rendered in the style of an animated film. The bright hues, broad and playful movement, caricatures of the harsher figures, and cartoonish sound effects help convey a story whose emotional and physical violence might otherwise be traumatizing to watch. Choreographed in collaboration with REYES’s dancers Brooke Terry, Caitlin Hicks, Maya Mohshin, Giovanna and Giulia Sales Nascimento da Silva, DIOS is shaped around the sequence of Masses that take place during Holy Week.
Reyes and company take us to church using the central aisle of the ODC/Theater for religious processions. The theater is dressed in purple, as are the dancers. Purple, which during Holy Week symbolizes the pain and suffering of Jesus on the cross, surrounds us, draped along the far edges of the seat tops evoking the experience of sitting in pews. Periodically, performers enter from the rear, offering the audience/parishioners palm fronds, or a basket of battery-operated-votives to be passed down each aisle and lit.
Caitlin Hicks, center, as priest directs a group of altar servers in REYES Dance DIOS. Photo by Kyle Adler
DIOS is skillfully designed with each collaborator’s contribution adding to the overall excellence of the production. Lighting Designer Thomas Bowersox supports Reyes’s vision with colorful backdrops and God-worthy brightness as clergy walk down shimmering aisles, or girls clamor atop each other to reach heaven through a golden sunbeam. A cleverly placed backlight projects the towering silhouette of God on the backdrop, who early on reaches out to the girl cowering in prayer on stage. Feeling his presence, she turns and lifts her finger to touch the shadow-tip of his outreached pointer ala Michelangelo's iconic ‘Creation of Adam’ fresco. This image appears twice more over the course of the 45-minute DIOS. Each successive time the silhouette is smaller, as the girl’s belief in the power of external approval wanes. The final image finds her sitting alone, absent the looming shadow, drawing her index fingers toward each other until they touch, completing her quest to her own spirituality as the one reliable truth.
Giovana Sales Nascimento da Silva in REYES Dance DIOS. Photo by Kyle Adler
Designer Monique Prieto’s costumes are flattering boat-neck sleeveless dresses and rompers to which she adds short circular capes in purple, red (symbolizing blood and passion worn traditionally on Good Friday and Palm Sunday), or white (to convey purity of the First Communion scene). The uniformity of the clothing reinforces the rigidity of a Catholic school’s uniform, while the cut allows for the athletic playfulness of Reyes’s choreography, which finds girls cartwheeling and leapfrogging as well as skipping and marching in step with one another.
The sound design, by Emmet Webster and Reyes, includes Spanish-language secular and religious songs, vaulting operatic choral music, and circus band tunes. The action of DIOS takes place at church and catechism, in homes in the U.S. and Mexico, and in the expanses of a young woman’s mind. Girls attend classes and frolic together, often in the presence of an array of older women: mothers, grandmothers, and nuns, who berate them.
The lasses try to meet expectation, aping the gesture sequence taught them by a matron. Sometimes inattention or silliness intercedes and an individual develops their own unique swagger for a moment, though any break in conformity is met swiftly and excessively. The female disciplinarian, played by a variety of performers, when met with a lack of agreement raises her hand high and play-slaps the offender causing the victim du jour to collapse to the floor. Repetition is used effectively, and despite the absence of actual blows, these scenes are crushing for their frequency and lack of compassion.
As time passes, the maturing young woman questions the grounds for her punishment. When she eventually strikes back with a single air-slap, a physical and linguistic battle erupts between the two who must be dragged away from one another. They windmill their arms in faux-combat to a soundtrack of comically squeaky voices that made me think of what Charlie Brown’s teacher would sound like if she inhaled some helium.
Reyes’s humor also shines through in a charming sequence telling of the story of the beginning of life on Earth. A voice-over tells of the Universe expanding with bits of matter bouncing off each other. The schoolgirls act out the narrative beginning as a trembling clump, soon exploding into space against a star-dappled backdrop. We giggle as dancers lying on their sides become floppy floor fish, jumping frogs, flapping birds, great apes with swinging arms and finally, flex-footed humans. The dancers are captivating throughout, but are especially exuberant as evolutionists. The opening religious teachings segments are in Spanish, the theory of evolution is explained in English, and later sections use an alternating pattern of both languages as an equilibrium is reached.
Full Ensemble in REYES Dance DIOS. Photo by Kyle Adler
In DIOS Reyes has once again told a hopeful story that reconciles and heals the traumas of the past. It is personal and universal. The hard truths are present, they can’t be dismissed, but the power of the collective to provide levity, sanity, and sanctuary is imbedded in the work and we leave both reflective and energized. It is a credit to Reyes, with her cogent voice and collaborative spirit, that so many past collaborators returned from LASOS, including Terry, Hicks, Prieto and Webster. I look forward to what Reyes might bring us next.
Review by Jen Norris September 6, 2024
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DIOS
At ODC Theater – 3153 17th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Thursday - Saturdays, 9/29 – 10/1/22 at 8pm
Artistic Direction: Jocelyn Reyes
Choreography: Jocelyn Reyes in collaboration with Caitlin Hicks, Maya Mohsin, Giovana Sales Nascimento da Silva, Giulia Sales Nascimento da Silva and Brooke Terry
Performance: Caitlin Hicks, Maya Mohsin, Giovana Sales Nascimento da Silva, Giulia Sales Nascimento da Silva, Brooke Terry
Lighting Design: Thomas Bowersox
Costumes: Monique Prieto
Text: Jocelyn Reyes (recollections of stories told by mom, grandmother and professors + a lot of research)
Sound Design: Emmet Webster and Jocelyn Reyes
Music
Polka, Reggeton, and Basinski: Emmet Webster
Clapping Music: Steve Reich
Spoken Text: Jocelyn Reyes
Vienen Con Alegria Senor, Alabare, Pan De Vida, Resucito, Salmo: Flor Y Canto
La Guadalupana: Manuel Esperon
Rumba Cha Cha Cha: Grupo Kual
Dies Irae: Mozart
Das Rheingold: Wagner
Sound Effects from Free Sound
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