Undulating across distant water and land, contemporary artists from all over the world are coming to Albuquerque’s N4th Theater for Global DanceFest.
The cultural immersion takes over the city four weekends in October, and it will feature a medley of media including film, theater and dance.
The main performances feature culture from Zimbabwe, South Africa and Japan, as well as others from Madagascar and Senegal.
Marjorie Neset, the festival’s artistic director, said she started the event in 2001 to not only attract theater-goers, but to share her interest in worldwide artistic expression. Having traveled all over the world, Neset said she has been exposed to a multitude of cultures.
“For me, people in the U.S. are very insular, and we somehow think that we are the most important people in the world. We know how to do things the right way,” she said. “It turns out when you start traveling that you find out there’s a huge and very interesting world out there. There are other important cultures and countries. We’re just one of many cultures and countries. The big thing is putting the world in perspective.”
Jonathan Khumbulani Nkala will perform two pieces based off a historical event in Zimbabwe the first weekend.
Bo Petersen, the director, said the pieces evoke powerful discussion that sway the audience.
“‘The Crossing’ is inspirational,” she said. “It is a celebration of the human spirit’s ability to overcome the most taxing of circumstances and to survive. In a way, ‘The Bicycle Thief’ has a similar message, but with an added poignancy because the body of the story is told through the words of a child.”
Also, Vincent Mantsoe of South Africa will perform a dance that he said carries the audience through the journey expressed by the dancers.
“The audience should be transported to another life-form, as to speak, and to try and let their minds not to wonder, but to be part of the journey that each and every dancer’s character is trying to convey or interpret,” he said. “It is about us. It is about the culture, life and learning from each other.”
The final weekend will give the audience a taste of the East, featuring the work of Yasuko Yokoshi from Japan. “Tyler, Tyler” is an integration of traditional Kabuki-style performance and contemporary dance, a performance that Neset said is a way of conveying the convergence of cultures in today’s society.
“Yasuko is one of the best-known Japanese artists,” she said. “We’ve done very little work with Asian artists, so I think people will come away thinking what it means — traditional and contemporary culture. This piece is really about that clash of cultures, and God knows we’re dealing with that every day.”
The festival also calls attention to the growing synthesis between art genres and media of expression.
Susanna Kearny, the festival’s spokeswoman, said performers express the novelty of international culture in a fresh perspective.
“The global world is becoming very small, and so we have people from all over the world in our country,” she said. “That used to be a bigger deal a generation or two ago, but there’s something about contemporary arts that presents things in a new way that’s exciting. It can be international, national or local. It’s just a new way of interpreting something or revisiting something old in a new way.”
Neset said after the audience has sampled a few foreign cultures, they’ll find their world culture interest piqued, hatching a newfound desire to explore.
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“I think they come away with that sense of the world being a bigger place and of being curious about more places,” she said. “That’s one of my goals with this is to make people curious so they’ll pay attention to the world and read about the politics, the environment, the food and travel.”
*Global DanceFest
Friday to Oct. 23
N4th Theater and 516 Arts
Vsartsnm.org
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