The Miami Light Project's Here & Now Festival, now in its 10th year, provides a quick glimpse at what's bubbling up in Miami's theatrical underground. That's sexual and pop culture ambivalence, aerial antics, and domestic rebellion, to judge from the four works performed Friday night at the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
Diana Lozano's Circ X Stripped was the gutsiest, most challenging and most revealing - in more ways than one. Lozano, who presents sexy, outrageous cirque-gogo performances at clubs and parties with her company Circ X, turns on her money-making venture with a vengeance. Profitable as it is, Lozano is ambivalent to resentful about the image-obsessed world where clients -- who leave messages requesting things like ''a girl dressed like a cross between a zebra and a cat'' -- care more about her cup size than her artistic yearnings, and the way it pushes her and her dancers into bulimia, anorexia, and constant anxiety about their body.
''I sell myself to make money,'' Lozano says flatly. She thrusts the contradictions into the audience's face, making us almost as uncomfortable as she is.
Dressed in latex bikinis and bimbo smiles, Ivonne Gougelet and Heather Carol stroll the audience sporting LED screens showing video of breast enhancement surgery on their chests. There's video of the women answering questions about when they last vomited and what plastic surgery they'll get. Wearing hooker platforms and little else, Lozano, Belaxis Bull, and Rosie Herrera do a writhing, Solid Gold worthy pole dance around and into toilets, miming vomiting and scooping out money. The combination of their near naked, perfectly shaped (they're pros, after all) bodies in an all-too familiar commercial grind, together with everything implied by the toilet, is grotesquely funny and disturbing. Powerful stuff.
An adept comic with a smooth, accomplished command of her body, Teresa Barceló, takes us on a desperate, and all too familiar, quest for sleep in the witty, physically engaging Z-Minus. Thrashing on a single bed, she listens to a recorded voice droning on about relaxation, while a clock ticks, water drips, and car alarms wail. She does a locking and popping dance, the jerky, marionette-like movements standing in for our often frenzied, out of control lives. Twisting herself up two long white fabric ropes hanging form the ceiling, she spirals and hangs in the air, a gorgeous metaphor for the suspension of dreaming or insomnia. She chases round the stage after hanging stuffed fabric Z's that jerk tantalizingly out of reach, till she wrestles one down and cuddles it like a lover -- onstage and in hokey romantic slides. Just as she passes into peaceful bliss, the alarm goes off.
Ileigh Reynolds' Opposite Skate Direction is one of those pieces that sounds more interesting than it is. Disco, roller-skating, aerial dance -- fun, right? And loaded with possibilities for inventive physical feats and clever irony. Instead Reynolds, Ty Barker, and Bernardette Salgado-Kalyan, in neon green Afro wigs and leggings, and 70s print tops, beamed and posed as they twirled on roller skates and swung on ropes to disco and electro funk, about as interesting as the 70's high school roller disco romp it evoked, but without nearly as much fun or energy.
In Off The Table Joanne Barrett tackled the conflict between conformity and individuality, necessary rules and equally necessary creative rebellion. It's an interesting idea, and Barrett had a lot of interesting elements: vocalist/percussionist/tap dancer Katherine Kramer leading bassist Antoine Khouri and saxophonist/flautist Virginia Mayhew in an original jazz score; a table with utensils for baking cookies (served at the end) and playing rhythms on whisks and bowls; fine dancers Rachel Carroll, Ilana Reynolds, Nicole Farnesi and Anne Morris and Barrett.
We hear a litany of rules ''don't lick your fingers... think before you speak'' while the dancers squirm in and out of lines, break out of precise patterns with jerking gestures, their loose, playful movement contrasting with the stream of constricting verbal orders and Kramer's precise tap rhythms. A dancer answers her cellphone, as another pokes her to stop. Barrett busily mixes cookies, and just as busily leaps out to join her dancers.
It's sweet stuff, with an engaging humor about the absurdity of rules and of rebellion. But it's also rather abstract. It's not clear whether we'd understand what Barrett's driving at without the program notes.
