The Philippine Online Chronicles

Every tropical fool by now knows that the changing seasons are nothing but indistinguishable markers of time referencing impermanence, exhausted and beaten to its last satisfactory cliché. The indio also intuitively knows that these are but mere projections of modernity -- modernity stalled and artificially implanted like those asparagus sprouts grown down south that have replaced the once idyllic landscape of rice paddies, having mutated into verbal aporia that even the post-colonial fails to grasp. Surely, any excuse for making something out of nothing can easily pass off for creativity, most especially if framed in the in-between, because the satisfaction of indecision has permeated not only the privacy of our domestic discretions but also the artistic preoccupations of even the overtly crass. Hence those delicious admissions to ambiguity gentrified to a point of dull. The all-too-familiar tone of being neither here nor there, aimless rebellious adolescent wandering, transience, noncommittal romantic liaisons, unsynchronized rendezvous, displaced perseverance where even nostalgia for the once straightforward plainness of proverbial hope is rendered uncomforting. Comfort lies elsewhere but in the certain. And is this not our contemporary obsession, to claim uncertainty or mask the meaningless by choreographing the meaningless? Assert the worthless through the unnecessary illustration of the worthless? Or name superficiality through the kitschy camp of surface?

The uncertain is back in fashion. No, it always has been. And when Baudrillard said “contemporary art plays on this uncertainty, banking on the guilt of those who understand nothing of it (that is to say those who have a precise intuition of what there is to be understood),” he must be suggesting how the intelligible has receded in favor of the nuanced. But isn’t uncertainty by now become another easy-fix ready-made? Has it not become another certain, in the face of the candy-store possibilities that our society of spectacle so generously paved for us? As gleaned from Airdance’s latest outing, In Between Tenses. The show features a satisfactory array of ambiguity – being both and neither, androgynous versatile bodies, well able, capable and willingly malleable – almost hinting at its commercial and idealized appeal at the same time scratching the surface of the performative.

For who else but those straddling the plastic resiliency of appearance know better? Astrology aside, the company brings to mind the archetypal personality trait of anyone born under the air sign: well-rounded, flexible, easily adaptable, easily persuaded, flighty, indecisive, but nevertheless charming and diplomatic. Perhaps this may be the reason why, since its inception, the company has conveniently (albeit comfortably) been shifting between the demands of quick fix commercial endeavors and (quickly) negotiating the demands of artistic practice. No conflict here. Neither is there any tension.

In fact, this is what sets them apart from the rest of the pack: their nonchalant practical compartmental division of what qualifies as raket and, in the company’s parlance, "artistic shows." Throughout the years, they have produced work for fashion shows, product launches, TV shows and movies, meanwhile managing to secure their place on the “legitimate stage” not only by conscientiously mounting a regular season of artistic shows but also due to their highly visible involvement in the somewhat-by-now prestigious contemporary dance gathering Wifi Body: Festival of Independent Contemporary Dance, held yearly at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, where current artistic director Ava Maureen Villanueva and colleague Rhosam Prudencio Jr. have both launched their careers as choreographers, having both won in the New Choreographers Competition.

The company has obviously found its niche and is not about to flinch. Like a true Libra, struggling between two contradictory points of a continuum, they have found an un/compromising steadiness in the unpunctuated, monotonous, but pleasantly sober drone of balance, maintaining just the right amount of peculiarity suitable to imbue popular taste and a professionalism that is rightly appreciated in the dance community. It comes as no surprise then that In Between Tense showcases the very versatility of a group of young dancers-choreographers ably juggling the stereotype expectations of dance and quirky, sometimes even banal, subject matters conventionally associated with contemporary practice.

Clarissa Mijares names the surface of appearance in her piece Spring Comes Abouncing, calling attention to the apparatus of the theater whose demarcations exist in so far as the audience are separated from the performers/ance. Mijares directly quotes performance theorist and theater director Richard Schechner, “theater comes into existence when a separation occurs between spectators and performance…the theatrical situation is a group of performers soliciting an audience who may or may not stay.” Dancer Carlos Deriada stands in the center of a brightly lit stage singing Jose Mari Chan’s "You and I," ending the song number with an applause directed to the audience (reflected back to himself). He is later on joined by the rest of the ensemble who randomly give out flowers to members of the audience. The piece surely stands out from the rest, not only in its spartan simplicity, but also in its discursive proposition, unmasking the appearance of the stage by acknowledging its liminal frame. By acknowledging the things that exist, Mijares treats the stage as a research platform, pointing out how the performance of an action is also at the same time the object of the performance.

Rhosam Prudencio Jr.’s male-female duet Fickle Minded touches on the similar theme of mirroring with the two dancers executing the exact same movement sequences, which fail to bridge the distance that sets them apart. Is it possible that similarity creates a wider gap than cooperation? A distance that is both external and internal to the self, discussed by Mia Cabalfin in 2 X 2, which exposes the subjectivity of the dancer that ever so rarely speaks up. Cabalfin amplifies the slippery gap between the person and persona through ID shoots of the company’s senior dancers, who divulge their "true selves" on the projected background video while parodying themselves through dance, live. Illustrating what Slavoj Zizek pertains to as a discord or minimal difference within the self -- a subjectivity defined as the “irreducible gap between the subject and its ‘background,’ and the fact that a subject never fully fits its environment.” The piece cleverly ends with Ava Maureen Villanueva re-introducing her slightly anomalous shifted self: “I am A-va.”

Balancing on a tightrope is surely as difficult as it seems, the deceptive ease of it lies not in the act of doing but in the motility of this initial impulse when one can finally carry on the act of crossing without noticing the perils that await below. Avel Bautista fittingly tackles this ease in Teenage Wasteland. Suitably plucked out of The Who’s "Baba O’Riley," also the opening theme song of CSI New York. It is a musical walk-through of adolescent jouissance where contemporary jazz dance rock opera dance number meets cheeky wholesome mosh pit. Delivering romantic images of angst-ridden masculine and emasculated bodies lost in the confusing wonderland of identity crisis and teenage rebellion. A veteran jazz dancer-choreographer, Bautista definitely knows formula. The piece starts off with fragmented dance routines, androgynous bodies clad in jeans, without organs, gracefully thrashing their bodies on the floor, later to culminate in clean unison. Of course, such a ritualistic act of passage is never complete without the obligatory taking-off of shirts, signifying what else but change.  Wasted youth, all grown-up, disciplined and obedient in their regulatory ROTC white shirts and jeans.

In Between Tenses attempts to reconcile the period of transition that the company currently navigates, with the entry of a new crop of choreographers, the development of its senior members, and the departure of some members, as well as coming to terms with its past aesthetic identity. The company reflexively examines their own history by "paying tribute" to its past, as in the video diary The Dance Lives On, while mulling over the anxiety of continuation as articulated in Ava Villanueva’s Walk With Me, a send-off eulogy to Marielle Alonzo’s forthcoming leave from the company, and Carlo Valderrama’s 3 to 5 Years From Now, showing that the present is as uncertain as the future -- the present nothing but re-inscription of the past, a grammatical reconstruction of what has transpired, when being in-between has less to do with uncertainty but in fact a conscious certain admission of the motility of time and history.

If there has been anything uncertain about the show, it is its conceit to certainty. There is nothing at all wrong about certainty even if doesn’t seem "contemporary" because in the end what matters most is not whether a work sounds vogue or trendy enough for popular appeal, but how effectively it unravels the apparatus and the machine which constitute performance and reiterates the necessity of the theatrical divide.
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Airdance’s In Between Tenses also featured the works of Jed Amihan, Mariel Alonzo, Johnny Amar and Lans de Leon. It ran from 13-14 March 2010, at Dance Forum Space, Quezon City.