A Piece of Parade was part of the 2017 DIDA season. A devised work developed by Porter Witsell (choreographer), Zach Aliotta (violinist and dramaturge), and twelve other performers, it featured collective choreography as well as individual vignettes reflecting individuals’ positionality inside and outside their communities and the larger community of Durham as a whole.
[photos to come]
From an Indy review by Michaela Dwyer:
In the choreographer’s note for A PIECE OF PARADE, Porter Witsell insisted that she didn’t make the piece, but the forty-minute work, performed underneath The Palace International, was anything but anonymous. Fourteen local performers, including “a poet, a house painter, a violinist, a person who works at an LED factory cutting crystals for wafers, a mathematician, a college librarian, a middle schooler who loves to dance, a father,” brought “three different first languages” to bear. Many had never performed before an audience.
The work, then, was more invested in process than product. By assembling this group to create Parade, Witsell challenged the notion that dance must come from specific histories of training. When a diverse network of people creates the material, and thus, the terms on which we watch it, we become accountable to the material, and to one another, in a clearer, or at least different, way than usual. This ethos reminds me of the work of Minnesota-based dance group Emily Johnson/Catalyst, whose performance installations emerge from long-term collaborations between artists and community members and relate to a place’s history and infrastructure.
The performers in A Piece of Parade modeled this vision of accountability by sharing the ways they see the relationship between “art and performance” and “real life.” They wove their questions and desires into each movement sequence, each spoken statement like a miniature manifesto: I see no prisons. No borders. During the war, there is no time to dance, no time to be creative.
The ways these performers moved together also proposed a value, and a real joy, in feeling and bearing one another’s weight. Across several short scenes, the performers huddled together, climbed on one another’s backs, and emerged from the audience’s idiosyncratic seating (it included an antique chair with giant wheels and a seesaw) to perform a duet.
As Witsell expected, much of the audience was composed of the performers’ friends and families. But I was there, too, crouched on a wooden board in the front row. As I paused to detail the look of a certain phrase, I was aware that I was missing something else onstage: a knowing grin, a nudge to pass a flashlight. Pen down, I realized I could see the tiniest increments of choreography, like a performer’s eyes opening and closing as he spoke: ¿Cuando fue la última vez que viste las estrellas con los ojos cerrados?
Watching this attentive, sometimes wobbly, necessarily imperfect dance unfold felt like waking up to something new. It was the rare movement-based work that struck a balance between clarity of vision and experimentation. And in the context of DIDA’s spring offerings, it pushed the organization’s promise of dance community and accessibility further than ever before.