By Bob Morrison
Everything I know about sufi dance could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. Nonetheless, my ignorance did not prevent me from throughly enjoying Death Before Dying, a fusion of this exotic dance vocabulary with the more familiar one of the Western World's modern dance.
Conceived, produced and directed by the single-named Arpita, the show also benefits from live sufi and rock music by the band Moksha. At first I found it interesting to hear how the music changed when the dancers from Arpita's Eastern dancers and choreographer Jane Franklin's Western dancers traded places on stage.
Then I began to hear the eastern instruments adding their alternate scales and tunings to the rock numbers, and the electric guitars joining the accompaniment to songs sung in a language I couldn't understand.
The dancers, likewise, began adding gestures and poses from their opposite counterparts.
The program notes delineate a story line of love and violence. I never was able to follow it. When I mentioned this to Arpita the following day, she replied, "Well, it's pretty abstract." So I felt a little better. Maybe I'm not hopelessly provincial after all.
What I was able to do was thoroughly enjoy the beautiful form and motion of the dancing of two cultures, and the subtle changes taking place with cross-fertilization between them.
More images from "Death and Dying" are available for your viewing pleasure at my Bonnie Briar Productions web site. Please visit.
Cheers,
Bob
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