And the world comes dancing

Global DanceFest artists are challenging spoken language’s limitations.

The production kicks off its three-weekend-long, eclectic compilation Friday. Together, the three sets, spaced out over three weekends, compose dance’s Rosetta Stone — a cultural-bridging, body-language experience that gives audiences a glimpse at African, New York, and Latin and Hispanic dancers from Los Angeles, Mexico, Brazil and Mozambique.

Contemporary dance opens eyes to foreign spheres and ways of thinking, said Marjorie Neset, VSA Arts New Mexico executive director.

“Global DanceFest is intended to represent the world and has a real kind of cultural base, not in the sense of projecting heritage particularly, but in the sense of taking a look at the world as it exists,” she said.

Celebrating diversity, the production disavows ethnocentricity by merging around-the-globe dance numbers.

The first dance — from Mozambique’s Panaibra Gabriel Canda — “Time and Spaces: The Marrabenta Solos,” is accompanied by marrabenta, a form of Mozambican dance music.

Canda’s country has been in constant political turmoil since civil war erupted and waged from 1977-92. He said the piece evolves because of the country’s shifting political beliefs, so it doesn’t offer a solution or conclusion because his people don’t know what the future holds.

“If you feel it’s strange, that means that it provoked something in you,” he said. “It revitalizes something. From the difference, you can start to question yourself or even to just understand yourself. But the presence of this difference — it’s like you give yourself a better understanding of your own choices as a human being.”

And choices are truly what these performance sets are about.

Performers/choreographers from Los Angeles, Mexico and Brazil collaborated to produce “El Sueño de la Razón/Slumber of Reason,” a piece from the Latina Dance Theater Project that features 10 interpretations of Francisco Goya’s seminal caprichos, or etchings. It runs March 25-26 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

Collaborator Licia Perea said the etchings departed from what artists were doing around 1799. On that note, she said, the etchings’ subject matter of corruption, war, or beauty and the supernatural is still relevant today.

Like Canda’s piece, “Slumber of Reason” explores parallels between two cultures, though it looks at shared themes of time periods, not societal change.

“So we take some of those things and we’re applying them to contemporary issues that are really the same,” she said. “Each one of them is like a little story, so that’s what we’ve done as well.

The second week features a performance called “I Drink the Air Before Me,” choreographed by Stephen Petronio. Neset said this performance is about unadulterated body movement.

“I think the work of all three of the artists, it’s hard to describe,” she said. “(Petronio’s) is pure, fast, powerful, strong contemporary dance.”

An abstract, weather-inspired performance is how Petronio described it. He said he looked at pictures of weather patterns to develop body movements. Dense with music and movement, Petronio recommends taking it in from an intuitive, not intellectual, standpoint.

“There is a very vivid sense of disorientation and reorientation along the course of the evening,” he said. “I tried to use that sense of orientation because a part of what’s so beautiful about a storm is there’s this incredible calm, then there’s a crazy swirling.”

Neset said dance, movement and body language are universally understood communication, so the performances broaden the audience’s world view.

“I think the reason we have the modest, but really devoted audience that we do have, is because people see this way of looking at the world — that this is one of the ways of looking at the world,” she said. “Then, dance is fun. Movement is interesting and beautiful, but I suppose that idea of connecting with the world (is what) I find really important.”

*Global DanceFest Spring 2011

“Time and Spaces: The Marrabenta Solos”
Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.
N4th Theater
4904 Fourth St. N.W

“I Drink the Air
Before Me”
March 18-19 at 8 p.m.
National Hispanic Cultural Center
1701 Fourth St. S.W.

“El Sueño de la Razón/Slumber of Reason”
March 25-26 at 8 p.m.
National Hispanic Cultural Center
1701 Fourth St. S.W.

$20 general admission
$12 students/seniors*