Not sure I know what to say about this one

Pappa Tarahumara. Ship in a View UCLA Live. Royce Hall. 2/4/06.

I tend to be suspicious of anything where a synopsis or review claims that their work is "capturing the enduring wonder and indescribable beauty in all things", and I'm still rather suspicious after seeing this performance. Pappa Tarahumara is a Japanese modern dance troupe that is, I believe, vaguely butoh-inspired. I have nothing like the vocabulary and knowledge to provide an informed review of their performance, and I make no pretense to understanding it, but I will say that I felt fairly intellectually engaged. Pieces of it kind of reminded me of Merce Cunningham work I've seen (or at least the bicycle bit from Variations V). The LA Times Review provides a decent thrashing of the work. The production was cool and grey and the effect overall was rather mind-numbing, although I didn't know what was going on, so I was paying fairly close critical attention. There was some gesture toward a plot and setting, but it was unclear and poorly developed. Supposedly the production was a representation of a seaside town in the 60s, but I'm not sure how I was supposed to know that other than the fact that the program told me.

I did have a rather large problem with the piece in terms of gender, though. There were some interesting gender issues, including the fact that one (or possibly two) members of the ensemble were men wearing dresses, which was curious in a good way. The bad thing, however, was that the production seemed incredibly phallocentric. There was a giant pole in the middle of the stage, for goodness sake. And twice, men climbed the pole to perform, but women never did. There was also a man (not in a dress) who sat upstage center for almost the the entire performance in a clear position of patriarchal authority. I found him rather suspicious. And, most of all, there were two women who seemed to represent aspects of female sexuality, and whenever either of these two women, the one with the curly hair and the one with the bob, did anything suggestive or overly wild, they were punished with sexual violence. There were two moments in which the woman with the curly hair was roughly embraced by a man whenever she got close or flirtatious with him and she had to break away violently. The girl with the bobbed hair, at some point near the end of the show, spent a few minutes with her dress up showing the audience her underwear for no apparent reason. Immediately following that, she was practically nailed to some boards upstage. The gender and sexuality in this performance was profoundly disturbing to me.

The most frustrating thing about the performance was its false ending. There were several points where it felt like it was building to a climax and a conclusion that never came. At about an hour and 15 minutes into the production, they were in the middle of something that felt very much like the end. It was about my limit of endurance and the music seemed to be reaching an ending and I was all ready to start clapping and watch them take their bows, but NO, without giving the audience any kind of mental break they continued into a whole new section where everyone changed clothes and they did it all for no apparent reason. This new section seemed in no way dramatically different from any of the other work that came before.