Review: Las Cuatro Estaciones: A Story of Human Trees by Sharon Marroquin
by David Glen Robinson
Sharon Marroquin has made a profound artistic statement in her work as part of her residency at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican-American Cultural Center (MACC) in Austin. Her field is multimedia dance, and her Las Cuatro Estaciones: A Story of Human Trees is effectively her recital in culmination of her residency. As such she sets a high bar for the other seven latino artists in the Latino Art Residency Project at the MACC. Also, her soundtrack is Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Concerto, recomposed by Max Richter, always a great crowd pleaser.The bilingual nature of the show is skillfully constructed.Notice that even the title is half Spanish, half English.
Trees, human or otherwise, have leaves, and it is the leaves that provide the overarching motif and metaphor for the stories related here in dance, video, and ensemble acting. Indeed, at several points performers bring on handfuls of leaves until the set becomes a veritable early spring photosynthesis convention. But Marroquin gives us not a four-fold division of the year to program music, but something else, something more. Her purpose lies with the cycles of nature and the dualities that underlie them.She offers us a passionate and thoughtful treatment of light/dark, life/death, falling/rising, spirit/flesh, peace/violence, growing/withering, love/hate, opening/closing, cold/hot, joy/fear, raw/cooked, stillness/movement and perhaps others that eluded this reviewer. It is a list of binary oppositions rarely seen outside of anthropology, and even more rarely nowadays within it.
But Marroquin escapes any enslavement to dualism; she cuts apart these dualities to show how they exist and work together as elemental particles of human reality.How does she do it? She seems to apply the cleaving blade of some spare wisdom formed mainly of her own life experience. In part as a cancer survivor, but only in part. And this is the out of time and out of mind brilliance of Las Cuatro Estaciones: A Story of Human Trees. Many of us have had similar psychic and emotional desert wanderings of forty days and forty nights, to be biblical about it. In her monumental piece, Marroquin invites us only to remember our losses and share the marvelous learning gained from them as mulch for the renewal of all things.
Memories of the performance play like flash images. A deliberate first and last image is of the company in stillness on the stage floor, curled and gnarled, grains of potential and nothing more. And there is Marroquin herself, morphing from powerful queen to withered crone in a few seconds of stage time, shiny green leaf to curling russet detritus in a seasonal heartbeat. There is also Lisa del Rosario on a tree stump, becoming the tree and making hesitant, halting efforts to grow, eventually rising to face the sun in pride just as it fades to darkness.
The children’s company rolls on stage in a beginners’ dance class movement brilliantly translated to performance, little tree leaves tumbling across a walkway in unison. This junior company’s work is flawless and enthusiastic. They clearly love their choreographer and teacher.
The duet between Alyson Dolan and Wendy Rucci almost escapes the leaf motif. Their dance takes place mostly on the floor, and it is open, intimate, and accessible. A pattern of kisses in a repeated phrase informs the audience that this is definitely a love duet. It is also one of Marroquin’s thoughtful applications of everyday movement. The surprise within the duet is Dolan’s startled facial expression when she awakens and her lover is gone. She brushes leaves from her hair.
Marroquin is not above allowing us the voyeur’s kinky gaze at girls fighting on stage. Accidentally provoked slap fights escalate to forcible duets and an ensemble brawl. A dour Marroquin observes it with choleric humor, and as with deities so with nature: since God is on nobody’s side and nature has only harsh judgments, everyone must die, which they do stage center. So much for the rewards of violence and dominating power among human beings. Leaves lightly dust the bodies.
Marroquin takes a blended approach to pedestrian or conventional movement. In one segment, she brings out the ensemble one by one, each laden with the props of daily life and work. Each performer carries out one of the implied tasks—cooking, bicycle riding, hair brushing, getting ready for school, etc—and performs them repetitively, gradually transforming the tasks into phrases thought of more formally as dance. The company repeats the entire cycle of tasks, gradually slowing down and expressing fatigue. The clear lesson is that much of daily life is boring and wears poorly with age. This use of mundane movement and its changes differs from that of Allison Orr’s Forklift Danceworks and others. The Forklift approach keeps the primacy of pedestrian movement as art without further elaboration, whereas Marroquin gradually morphs the everyday and its movements back into the province of fine art dance. Both are valid and contrasting takes on living movement.
The fifty minutes of non-stop dance of Las Cuatro Estaciones are enriched fully, down to each second. Marroquin never strays from exploring the cycles of time and life. She encourages us to seek acceptance of them and remember that dead leaves make excellent mulch.
The production was nearly flawless, and it should be a source of pride for the MACC in its new facility. A very special credit goes to Ana Baer for video production. Her video followed the theme of leaves to high chroma perfection. Almost all of the video is structured as a montage, most delightfully in the extended sequence of falling leaves becoming falling diamonds becoming falling chunks of actual ice.
The show will be over by the time you read this. The names to watch for are Sharon Marroquin and the Latino Art Residency Project at the MACC. There certainly will be more to come.
Las Cuatro Estaciones: A Story of Human Trees
by Sharon Marroquin
Sharon Marroquin
March 24 - March 26, 2017
March 24, 2017: 8:00 pm
March 25, 2017: 2:00 pm & 8:00 pm
March 26, 2017: 2:00 pm
Mexican American Cultural Center
Austin, Texas
Tickets: $15 General Admission
