Dance Review: Queen Godis Spits the Realness at DTW

Queen GodIs (QG) presents a provocative choreo-poem, spitting rhymes, dancing, and singing this past weekend at DTW.  Now, many dancers like to differentiate between dancers and “movers.”  If QG is not a self-professed dancer but rather a “mover,” then there are a whole lot of dancers out there that should really MOVE better!  Her movements are captivating. She leaves many in the audience wanting to spend a day just walking around in her skin.  As she spits rhymes and ticks her hips around in a circle, one man in the audience even shouts, “ON BEAT!” 

QG truly impacts the audience with her performance.  She surely could have rocked a mike, but the work goes deeper than mere, commercialized rhymes.  Stating, “a mother is a brother,” QG pushes the boundaries of womanhood/motherhood in directions I have never seen before.  She performs as a mother to us all: women, men, sisters, youth, fathers…  She links the plight of teenage girls with mythical womanhood and assumes the role of God in the creation of a perfect man—her son.

The staging includes a large red pole in the center and ninja-inspired costumes of the patchwork artist, Micah L. Lee.  These costumes represent the mythical land where all women are beasts and all sons are taught that their words become actions.  She wears a large black womb that is marsupial.  Like the kangaroo pouch, this womb is functional.  Lee’s patchwork belly protrudes out from QG’s body and holds a cell phone so that she could get a call from the future father of her unborn child.  It rings several times during the performance, but she could not hear him —only static.  This magical pouch also has headphones so that she could “plug-in” to her belly —into herself.

With various strings and chords strewn about the area, the overall staging and direction is cohesive and propels QG’s poetry forward with dynamic pacing.  There is nothing raw or pedestrian in Nicco Annan’s brilliantly crafted choreography, suiting QG’s body and complimenting her words.

The storyline of QG and Annan’s “work-in-progress” frames the notion that we are all works-in-progress.  QG represents the teenage mother.  She portrays herself as once the studious girl who didn’t have time for boys and also the girl with full belly/empty head.  She represents the best and the worst of this world.

As the performance moves on, the poem states that a woman’s body represents “the truth.” Upstage her unborn and possibly not yet conceived “son/sun” reads:

Bodies tell the truth, if we listen, and we babies live inside the truth close enough to hear it and play it back.

During the work, QG is continuously listening with headphones that plug into her belly, “the belly of creation.”  Played by the very talented, Erwin E. A. Thomas, her unborn “son/sun” provides an internal monologue upstage. His acting is on point as he hits a range of emotions.  His character explains layers of their journey through this mythical place described in the choreo-poem. Their stories intertwine as the “son/sun” is a repository of her pain, yet he has his own path and feelings about what life would be like.  He is impacted by all the negativity that QG experienced in life.  He is a “record” of all that happened to QG and would play this back at birth.  When he emerges from her contractions “he would already have a record contract” where he is to make music from those experiences he has shared with his mother.

Their emotions blend hard against soft. QG is strong in her words and/or singing, “This old world tried to take my smile away.”  Behind her Thomas speaks of the fear of being born and having to become a man.  In a phone call to his father-to-be, Thomas pulls himself up to the red pole to insert a telephone extension into the top.  Here he pauses before trying to dial his father.  This father, who he has never met, whom QG has yet to meet, who is not ready to be his father, is the only one who might help him learn manhood.  To his father, Thomas speaks of the fear that perhaps:

I will be the next man to hurt my mother…. Where I am from mothers are instruments that we are taught not to play with.

QG bares her soul on stage, and she is a Bitch!  Aptly named, QG creates “Bitch” as a scene that conflates this offensive female stereotype with the archetypal mother of Rome, Faustulus, a she-wolf.  During this pivotal scene, Son blurts out with the innocence of a child, “My mother is a Bitch!”  Then covering his mouth, he giggles.  QG moves around the scarlet pole dancing and delighting in her belly, her sexualized youth and the power of creation.  Also delighting in the power of misinterpretation as others look at her with disgust, she knows the truth. Thomas reads:

My mother is a beast… My mother is a bitch… My mother is an MC, master creator she chews men up and spits them out.

Chew on QG.  I would love to see this work continue, and I look forward to the next installment. 

After the performance, Asere Bello holds a talk back where he explains QG and his work on Gender & State Violence in the community.  In his work, he focuses on explaining to young men how “sensitivity is a strength.”  He goes on to say, “What is man and what is women?  These concepts create prisons in themselves.  A man has to be a breadwinner and a woman has to juggle between a Madonna and a whore.  What do people do, who don’t fit these particular images, to get ‘there’, when economic conditions are denied them?”  Interestingly enough, this talk back is as deep as the work and lasts longer than the whole performance put together.  The audience freely giving their opinions of what they have experienced, no one wanted the night to be over.

In the end, Queen GodIS provides a Rochart inkblot of the urban woman with everyone—man/woman/child—getting the opportunity to peek inside her soul to see contemporary society. At times, QG is in tears during her movement with the birth of this creation . . . so real, so genuine.

It moves me, it moves the audience and as Nicco Annan likes to say, “It came from a very real place.”

Photography Top Left by Akintoye Moses
Photography Mid-Right by Ife Abdus-Salam

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Sasha Deveaux
Performance:  Queen GodIs Project Power U: part III
Choreography and Direction:  Nicco Annan
Choreo-poem:  Queen GodIS
Venue: DTW, Dance Theater Workshop, New York City
Date: Friday, March 27, 2009, 7:30pm
www.iDANZOnline.com

 

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