"If it doesn't come from here," Enrico Labayen says, pointing to his head and his heart, "it doesn't mean a thing. All of this movement, just the arm, the leg – what is that? Dancing isn't moving from point one to point two. It's everything in-between, everything you are feeling and creating."
This holistic perspective informs every aspect of Labayen's work, to create dance that is Filipino in essence but universal in appeal and experience. His dance both recalls the ritual and tradition of his Asian background and explores technology and Western modes of expression. Labayen Dance/SF, his contemporary ballet company, is where these ambitions come to fruition. Founded in 1990, the company performs work that combines Asian sensibility with the vocabulary of classical ballet to create a unique movement idiom. The latest result is Carmina Burana: Revisited, an evening-length concert piece on view at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco this weekend.
The early inspiration for Carmina was the ritual of the Tadtarin, a three-day festival between the summer solstice and the feast of St. John, based on a matriarchal ceremony in the pre-Catholic Philippines. The name means "to chop up" or "mince" in Tagalog, and is thought to refer to Salome's demand for the head of John the Baptist, a time-honored story of dangerous female seduction. Depicting the youth, maturity, death, and rebirth of an archetypal woman, the Tadtarin was formerly a wild Dionysian orgy celebrating victorious female power that has evolved under Spanish Catholicism into a docile ritual in which women pray for a spouse or a child. Though suppressed after WWII, the rite was revived in the 1980s and embraced by women and queers, populations that were oppressed and marginalized under Spanish Catholicism.
But in the piece's four-month development, the concept of the Tadtarin began to cede to the authority of the dancers themselves. "I noticed their strengths and weaknesses, physically, mentally, spiritually, and politically, and succumbed to the Muses," explains Labayen. The piece matured into a meditation on the complexity of female experience, and all the ritual that remains is in the dance.
In costumes reminiscent of the spare, flowing dresses favored by Martha Graham, and a set designed and constructed by Labayen, Carmina spans the realms of dance and theater, drawing on global issues of female inequality and the individual stories of female figures in the dancers' lives. The similarities to Graham do not end on the surface. Like Graham's, Labayen's movement is firmly grounded in the impulse of the torso, and his choreography draws inspiration from history, myth, and personal experience.
Backed by Carl Orff's iconic score Carmina Burana, the dancers stand in formation, an army of Amazons fixed with a single intention, a pack of wolves on the hunt. They flick their dresses like the slice of a blade, flourish them with the gusto of a matador, then retreat into the folds of the fabric like children cowering in the dark. In minutes, they transition from the wild pulsations of beasts in a jungle to the solitude and introspection of sinners in a confessional, to the self-conscious preening of adolescents in a dressing room. They grasp each other's heads softly, huddle conspiratorially, then dart out at one another, ready to slap the daylights out of anyone who comes too close.
Rivals, friends, comrades, lovers: Labayen's choreography ruminates over the diversity of female identities and relationships. Above all, it is noble. "The carriage of the body is very important to me," he instructs, demonstrating a stately walk with sinuous elegance. "No matter what you are doing, you maintain an internal dignity." As with all great dance masters, his lessons extend beyond the dance.
The architecture of the set displays the broad horizontal lines reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie design. Handcrafted and painted scarlet by Labayen, the stylized table and benches become a shifting landscape as the dancers climb over, under, and around them, rearranging them to form risers for a church choir, a dining table in the home, a bawdy saloon, a boxing ring, a crucifix, all delineated in clean geometry. These configurations – domestic, social, historical, abstract – form a series of arenas for emotions to unfold.
Carmina marks the return of Labayen Dance/SF to the stage after a five-year hiatus, during which Labayen returned to Southeast Asia on research fellowships to study traditional dance. With dancers from Brazil, China, Korea, and Russia as well as the US, Labayen has assembled a company that reflects a multicultural sensibility and a diverse set of talents. As with much dance currently being made in America, the dancers work a variety of jobs, study, support families. Labayen himself has worked as a chef and an accountant.
Art in America is always connected to a life of labor – of desk jobs in advertising agencies, of teaching and learning, of serving food and tending children. The lives of women in particular exemplify this multiplicity of roles – to nurture and support, to carry and create, to defend the home and open it to others – and to Labayen, the laboring body is the dancing body, entirely rooted in the human, in the aching specificity of individual hunger, sadness, and triumph. As Labayen terms it, the dancers come to the studio to "play." But it is a highly spiritual play, with far more than technique at stake.
"Dance for me is a religion. Dancing is praying. Dance is meditation. Dance is a labyrinthine path that helps me to discover myself and better understand others," explains company member Daiane Lopes. "Rico truly looks at all his dancers as individuals, and knows how to bring out the best in them," says founding LD/SF dancer Diane Mateo. Lisa Lincoln, new to the company, agrees. "He pushes us within the frames of discipline, passion, and musicality to bring forth our power."
Labayen, who has danced with American Ballet Theater II, Alvin Ailey, Alonzo King's LINES Contemporary Ballet, and who has been decorated with a constellation of accolades, including an Isadora Duncan award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography, speaks with great humility about his dancers and his work. "I make dances for them to bare their souls," he says. "When they are onstage, they are alone. I'm not there anymore."
Enrico Labayen's Carmina Burana: Revisited, July 23-24 at 8 p.m., July 25 at 7 p.m. at Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF. Tickets: $25, at www.enricolabayen.com or (415) 273-4633; $30 at the door/without reservation.