Tatiana Mejía: Singing to Make No Song

“Bow”, she states as she dips one foot behind another, hand held gracefully aloft with her head low – stooping in the manner of a curtain call. Immediately then, she stands up with her hands square on her hips and quips, “Dayyuuumn!”. She has just euphorically danced a phrase of sonic footwork. I am in the audience watching SWAY by choreographer Tatiana Mejía at Radialsystem, as part of the space’s collaboration with Tanzfabrik under the fold ‘:LOVE’.  Bow. – Damn! – The two words next to each other, accompanied by Mejía’s starkly different gestures, motion towards a dichotomy within her. Bow. – Damn! – she exclaims yet again at the end of another section of the performance consisting of a series of exuberant trills of vocal improvisation. The words ring of her experience being within her performer-skin, while also being an audience to herself. Bow. – Damn! The first word uttered softly and humble-sounding followed by the second as a sass-tinged declaration. Bow. – Damn! The bow gesturing towards the culture of European aristocracy and the ‘damn’ uttered with a swagger I associate with Black American speech. Bow. – Damn!

Initially I perceive Mejía’s utterance of these words as an indication of a dichotomy. But as the evening’s performance progresses, one realizes that it is more than a dichotomy – rather Mejía moves across many folds of influences that are tacked onto her being. These influences from different cultures, political contexts and generations manifest in her dancing vocalising body. However, SWAY is not Mejía parading her creative talents across Ballet and Mapouka strung together. There is a certain critical self-perception in her acts, where the focus is not on being virtuosic. Rather the virtuosity is not allowed to be fulfilled, thus allowing for an articulation of failure.

A quintessential moment where this is evident in her gestures is when Mejía executes her interpretation of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A. As she rotates her head, extends her arms or stretches her feet apart – there is a precision in showing her imprecision, an intentional disinterest in displaying precision. The entire phrase is nonetheless performed with dedication. But her facial expression and the shrug in her shoulder seems to say with rolling eyes “Do I have to do this?” This duality allows me as an audience in on the performer’s state of mind. I think back to Rainer’s No Manifesto (1964), which she definitively represented through Trio A. The manifesto states: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic.” Six decades later, Mejía performs her interpretation of Rainer’s work, itself an attempt at rejecting heroic or anti-heroic statements, but takes this articulation to her own body and context. Thus, in a cheeky and humourous way, she encounters and disarms, not just American ‘contemporary’ dance, but also early influences in her life such as Ballet. Mejía further pulls upon threads from Afro-diasporic movement styles such as Mapouka and dembow dance, as she finds them in the context of her roots in the Dominican Republic. She incorporates these movements consciously, such as dembow dance with its subversive origins from the 1990s in the marginalized communities of Santo Domingo.

The programme notes of SWAY share Mejía’s exploration of navigating “the delicate swing between strength, power, resistance, defiance, vulnerability and failure.” She plays with the figure of the neo-loser, who could be a complimentary avatar of the heroine – a figure she particularly perceives through the archetype of the “Strong Black Woman” marked as resilient, independent and caring. Mejía fashions a cape for herself akin to a superheroine, then makes leaps across the stage trying to take off in flight. “Black girl magic – Loud – talented – magic – sting – angry” she scores this section with these attributes associated with the archetype. Later, in the post-performance talk, Mejía shares about the pressure on the Black individual to double portray –  the exhausting demand of upholding heroic virtues in a capital-driven society but also to not be bracketed into negative racialized stereotypes. Thus, with SWAY she tries to find the space with the Strong Black Woman archetype to celebrate “the incoherence of moving freely between external attributions and self-perception”.

Her free movement across these expectations of successes and failures appears as though she is waking herself from one dream to find herself in another one, switching across dance, song, sound and narration in this unspooling. The transitions are abrupt, like glitches.  Her song is also marked by glitches, unambitious in the need to impress or catch a tune. While improvising, she allows her voice to drop like a parabolic stone. The path of her voice and other sonic aspects of the stage are also visible visually through the sound-sensitive animation that is mapped and projected onto the background screen. Thus, in one section, Mejía’s every footstep creates a coloured scratch in the projected background. However, just like her footsteps resist developing into a recognisably rhythmic beat, the scratches in the background also do not turn into a full-fledged painting with connected lines.

In this exploration of failure, SWAY shows the solo-performer in attributes of excellence via proactively changing the goal. Therefore, “the loser” or failure is also able to find a space for complete articulation within the performance. In movement, it manifests with Mejía giving space for her muscles to celebrate their laziness. In song, her voice finds free flight without the need to make a coherent tone or song. The choreographic work hence feels like an assertion by the choreographer as an artist to give complete validation not just to the successes, but also to the hours spent towards failed attempts, half-tries, discarded ideas and expressions-in-the-making.

While she meets her desire in that act, I wonder if we as an audience this evening (or as a society at large) are also at this level of acceptance. I ask this because of one particular moment:  In the middle of the performance, Mejía breaks into a score of dembow dance to fast percussive music. Her movements display high rigour and are visibly demanding upon her energy reserves. She pushes and perseveres, and the music prolongs, keeping her pushing even further. As soon as she ended this phrase, the audience erupted into enthusiastic applause. This spontaneous act of appreciation of Mejía’s virtuosity and expertise, appeared to be an honest expression of how we as an audience continue to measure and reward success. Although audiences may still have a way to go with appreciating creative efforts that don’t place virtuosic excellence as a sole benchmark, I am glad for Mejía — for with SWAY, she appears to have traversed that glass ceiling for herself.