SoMoS program essay, by Lisa Kraus
The Roots and Branches of SoMoS
Like Australian aborigines
who believe that the well-being of the natural world depends on their repeatedly
walking the paths through their homelands,
choreographer Merián Soto connects to the wild areas
surrounding us through movement. She has spent years now presenting
performances around Fairmount Park and parks
further afield that bear witness
to their beauty and fragility. Through her branch dancing practice, she has
developed a way of performing that encourages viewers to slow down, observe
closely and feel their own kinship with nature, other bodies and the forces
acting on them.
Now she is filling a vast Philadelphia parking lot with SoMoS and
its domed tents splashed with projected
images of nature, sounds recorded through the seasons, and dancers moving in
slow motion balancing branches. It’s the culmination of a long path that began
on the beaches and in the rainforests of Puerto Rico.
Soto grew up in Bayamón and Playa Cerro Gordo, climbing
trees, wandering up creeks and running on rocks on the beach. It was an
imaginative space for her, an orientation to the feel of the earth under her
feet and the mobility and weight of her own body.
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| Merián Soto and Patti Bradshaw in Escalio (1983) |
Study in New York with kinetic awareness pioneer Elaine
Summers gave her tools to research the inner life of the body: its sensations,
rhythms and storylines. Also, as a young dancer, she tapped into a deep well of
energetic power through learning the Afro-Caribbean form of bomba. Holding the
two approaches—traditional forms like bomba and son along with improvisational
somatic practice—has made Soto a unique artistic explorer. Almost thirty years
ago, she made a dance,
Escalio
(1983), in collaboration with visual artist Pepón Osorio and dancer Patti
Bradshaw in the early days of their collective Pepati
án.
She describes it as being all about the earth. So the threads that are woven
together in
SoMoS go way back.
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| Prequel(a) 2002 Photo: Julie Lemberger |
Constructing rich theatrical environments has been an
ongoing aspect of Soto’s work. The studio-set of
La Maquina del Tiempo (2004) with its dripping “rainwater” evoked a
long slow afternoon for dancing. The films of Irene Sosa in
Prequel(a): Deconstruction of a Passion for
Salsa (2002) brought the palm trees and beaches of Puerto Rico into the
performance space. In that solo, Soto danced salsa on a wooden platform
sprinkled with sand, the scratchy sound amplifying her every rhythmic step.
Following these works, Soto began to reverse the trend of
bringing the natural world into the theater by taking her movement practice out
into the woods. One reason had to do with aging.
Growing older as a dancer requires shifts in physical
practice. Soto had burst on the New York scene as a compelling livewire of a
performer and had always seen her own dancing as being about channeling energy.
But on turning 50 she began to see the potential power in drawing energy inward
rather than projecting it out. Doing more with less energy.
With a sabbatical from her teaching position at Temple
University and time to explore what she calls her “anti-aging project,” she
headed into the woods. She says she went into Fairmount Park by the Wissahickon
Creek to clear her mind and become centered. When she picked up a branch and
began to dance with it, there was an immediate energetic connection, as though
she was completing a circuit
Branches offer a feedback loop of touch and sensory
awareness. Their weight, their shapes, the ways they react to a dancer’s
movements and the possibilities they offer for hanging or balancing are all
features that Soto is excited to respond to through improvisation. And Soto
feels that working with branches brings her and her dancers to an all-important
state of full presence. That means being fully here. Now.
 |
| Jumatatu Poe in Postcards (2009) , Photo Cylla Von Tiedeman |
Bringing a larger group of dancers into her practice
resulted in many versions of the branch dances. She initiated the
One Year Wissahickon Park Project (2007-8),
which animated select locations in the park during each season over the course
of a full year. And with several other iterations, this work began to make its
way back into theaters. Soto’s
States of
Gravity & Light (2006-7) and
Postcards
from the Woods (2009) represented a new kind of performance/installation with
projected video in saturated colors showing details of woods, water and sky.
The works have a mesmerizing effect, just as the outdoor performances do, but
within a completely constructed space.
With SoMoS Merián Soto takes an expansive outdoor space and creates indoor
spaces within it in the form of three large tents. Again using video and adding
sound recordings reflecting the seasons, she re-introduces nature into this
paved-over place. SoMoS is a field of
possiblities, a slow-moving carnival-like installation, where audience members
can wander, as in the woods, and frame it as they choose, moving in close and
further away, improvising their own experience..
What might audience members see? The slowness of the dancing
invites us to notice how movement travels sequentially through the dancers’
bodies, how they engage in a continual balancing act not only with the
branches, but with their own bones, how they twist and bend to the extremes of
their movement range and how they morph from one shape to another, simply, like
a plant turning toward light.
The dancers “paint on the surface of the tents” by casting
shadows in response to the shapes and shadows they see. We can savor the
shifting designs they create. And watch for how they share weight and enact
wordless conversations.
We might sense underlying stories. Soto has said that one
aspect of branch dancing is “magnifying.” When she stands upright with a branch
held vertically it makes her feel heroic, like a sentinel, and she goes deeper
into that image. Or using a branch that’s planted firmly on the ground like a
crutch makes her imagine herself as a crone, so she delves into that feeling.
When the branches are held horizontally, Soto sees it as a place of grace, of
balancing.
In watching SoMoS
there’s nothing specific to “get.” It can be read as a series of beautiful
images and interactions. But Soto sees it also as a form of environmental
activism. Her motivation for creating it arises from her sense of the natural
world as being in peril. She sees the body as being in peril too, and in making
SoMoS, is reflecting on how we might
contribute to preserving these fragile areas of our existence.
Perhaps some will be inspired to create something beautiful
out of ordinary objects for themselves. Soto sees the potential for that all
around us.
We live in a fast-paced, multi-screen, jump-cut moment. With a performance like SoMoS, we’re not entertained so much as
invited to tune in in a different way, to a subtler set of channels. Hopefully
what we find is a measure of peace, of curiosity and of connection to nature,
both within the body and in our wider world.
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