Rebecca Davis's "Darfur'

Suffering without drama

JIM RUTTER

In Time Magazine’s 20th Century retrospective, "The Most Important People of the Century," the “Heroes and Icons” section included Colin Powell’s essay about the American GI. Rebecca Davis’s Darfur would like to show a similar hero who, like the army regulars described by Powell, went “forth on a crusade to save democracy and freedom, to defeat tyrants, to save oppressed peoples and to make their families proud of them.”

Fusing a number of styles ranging from ballet to hip-hop, Davis keeps her piece firmly rooted in dance’s theatrical tradition by telling the true story of Brian Steidle (danced by Voltaire Wade-Greene), a former U.S. Marine who takes a job as a UN observer monitoring the ceasefire in Sudan and later returns to America to work as an activist for ending the Sudanese crisis.

A very undramatic American story

Davis may have been inspired by Steidle’s book, The Devil Came on Horseback, but she hampers the impact of her piece by sticking too closely to Steidle’s biographical account. The first scene explodes with a huge aerial leap as the newly discharged Steidle rejoins his friends in New York City. They want to party; he wants to find something to do with the rest of his life. But the lively, very acrobatic choreography (plenty of leaps, lifts, and jumps) in the first movement evaporates into the next scene, when the group sits in an internet café, Steidle’s buddies checking their e-mail while he searches Google for “Jobs in Sudan.” Later, extended scenes show him going through border control in Africa, or filing reports (literally).

But how to dramatize choosing a job— and in dance, no less? Some theatrical works (like Patrick Marber’s Closer) have managed to captivate by using an over-the-shoulder Internet experience. But however well danced, there’s little drama in “passport control” or airport security lines, and certainly no art. In Darfur, Davis further exacerbates this handicap by choosing music with set time lengths that artificially limit each scene. And while picking a song like The White Stripes’ "Seven Nation Army" may offer a great percussion line for timing forceful movements, I really can’t understand why I need spend nearly four minutes watching Steidle (and his luggage) get jerked around by border agents.

To be sure, Davis couldn't expect audiences to sit through an entire hour of suffering caused by war crimes. But she needs to find and develop scenes that reinforce this reluctant world-saver’s dramatic arc— either that, or simply invent them. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, don’t degrade your artistic truth into a series of mere facts.

Poignancy unknown to Americans

By contrast, Davis’s secondary narrative— about the personal suffering of a young African boy (Gabe Stone Shayer) and his parents (Lauren Putty and LaMar Baylor)— combines the best qualities of expressionist dance movement with Davis’s own ability to powerfully capture the atrocities suffered by Sudanese refugees in story, theme, and movement.

From this young boy’s first appearance, Davis evokes a great contrast between Brian Steidle’s America and their Africa— not only in the explosiveness and vibrancy of the dancing, but in the very “sense of life” each scene gives, depicting a near mystical dancing that combines with a day-to-day struggle to achieve a poignancy unknown by the Western world. The Americans, so full of life, dance happily through their youth, while Shayer’s boy trails a forked stick around like a sounding tool by which he might hope to find water— available in hundreds of fountains in New York City.

In this segment, the music and Davis’s choreography merge compellingly, setting Shayer’s intense and vivid portrayal of suffering to a xylophone that pounds on him like a whip, and guitar strings that contort his body like a vise. Baylor (his father) arrives, and a devastating scene of taunting, rejection and then acceptance devolves into a father and son preying upon one another— the son seeking affection but kept at a distance by the hurt pride of a father who knows that he’s the product of another man’s rape. Throughout their entire relationship, Davis’s dramatically forceful depictions both engender sympathy and rankle us with their callousness.

Moreover, Davis intuitively grasps that the rape scene needs but one moment of violence, appreciating that it’s horrifying enough to show— in dance— four men treating any woman like a human marionette. A lesser choreographer might have gone for syrupy, cheap commiseration, but Davis has the husband reject his wife afterward— only intensifying the tragedy.

How to choreograph an observer?

Davis clearly possesses brilliant instincts; if only she had trusted them in conveying Steidle’s story as well as the African family’s. After an unseen battle between the rebels and the janjaweed militia, Davis creates one of the evening’s most riveting numbers by having Steidle stand idly by while four dancers dramatize conflicting views of the attack. Since all Steidle can do is observe, Davis cannot achieve any catharsis for him except a passive observer’s helpless revulsion (danced like utter torture in a paralyzing solo number by Wade-Greene to Damien Rice’s Elephant).

Unlike Colin Powell’s aforementioned essay of soldiers as world-saving heroes, in Darfur the real story belongs to this refugee family and their suffering. Does the audience (and this work) really need the symbolic American intermediary? Isn’t the dance itself supposed to be the intermediary? Isn’t the point of art to bridge distances so we identify with a message?

In Darfur, the celebrity-savior culture too often obscures the real crisis. Reporters cover Angelina Jolie, Bono or George Clooney rather than focusing on how this Sudanese-sponsored terror is destroying the lives of millions. Certainly these celebrities call attention to the problem, but why repeat this phenomenon in a ballet?

Davis had a perfect opportunity to bypass this distraction and get her audience to care intimately about the suffering victims, not merely about one more story of a “caring American” and his moral conversion. Yes, we Americans have a duty to help end suffering in the world. So let’s see the drama in the suffering, not the observers on the sidelines.