Confronting their darkness with dance

by Jane Gordon
The New York Times

Copyright © 2001 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.

The dark-eyed cinnamon-skinned woman, posture perfect, stood before the dancers gathered in a practice room at Trinity College in Hartford. In halting English, she told them of her country, Chile, and its national dance, the cueca. She told them of the cueca’s history as a courting ritual, all passionate, sensual movement. And she told of when it changed--when sons and daughters were taken from their homes by the Pinochet regime, tortured, killed, vanished--and the cueca became a mother’s dance of mourning.

           That dance, which was being taught by Marta Torres, a West Hartford resident who is an exile from Pinochet’s Chile, is part of a new work by the Judy Dworin Performance Ensemble that is called “dónde éstas? (where are you?)” As if it isn’t difficult enough to get people to venture to Hartford on a cold March evening, Ms. Dworin wants them to attend a work that may bring them to tears and possible outrage.

            “People don’t want to see things that are dark, but when you confront the darkness you can create change,” said Marjorie Agosin, an internationally acclaimed poet who grew up in Chile. The sounds of Agosin’s poetry resonated throughout “dónde éstas?,” the story of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Chile and Argentina, women who march every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina wearing photographs of their children’s faces on their bosoms, and who dance the cueca alone in the streets of Chile.

            “I am overwhelmed by the power of the work,” said Ms. Agosin, now a Wellesley College professor whose ancestors include Austrian Jews who fled Hitler and Russian Jews who escaped the czar’s pogroms. “It is much more than a dance performance, it is a story of political violence and displacement, and that could happen anywhere.”

            Ms. Dworin, the chair of the theater and dance program at Trinity, has been marrying politics and movement for more that 10 years now. Women accused of witchcraft in colonial America, the tragedy of Chernobyl, racism, sexism, mourning, and the ancient goddesses have all attracted her attention.

            She was sitting in an audience listening to Ms. Agosin read when her one particular poem, “El Presidente,” or “The President” struck her with its images of Pinochet.

            “Last year in Argentina, the mothers lost four,” Ms. Dworin said, remembering the moment. “They are dying. And their children’s torturers are free, living in town, shopping at the local grocery store. It hits you in a place that is inexpressible. Both the level of inhumanity man is capable of, and the courage and strength of which man is capable.”

            To attract an audience, the ensemble has advertised heavily in the Latino community and also in synagogues because of the topic’s connection to the Holocaust. Still, Ms. Dworin acknowledges the challenge of getting others to see such emotional work.

            “Because we walk that edge of pushing and challenging, we always run into that problem, but we just keep pushing,” she said. “I was eight when I started dancing. But it wasn’t until I got to college in the 60’s that I became politically aware. I became immersed in all that, and I saw that the only way I could do anything about this was as a dancer.”

            Her dancers sound like her, a troupe that incorporates its politics into its art. They are a stew of immigrant samplings from Italian and Irish to Jewish, Chinese, and Iranian who make their livings teaching dance in schools throughout the state, at the Hartford Conservatory, at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, in private lessons. They are also all shapes and sizes, which, in a performance such as “dónde éstas?” lends them credibility as the mothers.

            “When we first started showing this to people who had experienced it, it was trans-formative,” says Shari Azar, a member of the ensemble. “They felt grateful that someone was telling their story.”

            The story was, as are all of Ms. Dworin’s pursuits, exhaustively researched. She traveled to Chile, met the mothers of the disappeared, toured the places of torture, and talked to survivors. She returned home to Hartford and found New England exiles, people such as Ms. Torres and Juan Brito, a Hartford social worker, to help her shape the piece.

            On a cold Friday in February, just days before the opening of “dónde éstas?,” Mr. Brito sat in the practice room at Trinity to watch the ensemble perform. Mr. Brito, a small serene man who greeted others warmly and listened carefully as they spoke, works in the Hartford school system now. Almost three decades ago, though, he was a 26-year-old social worker in the Santiago schools and a guitarist who composed songs for his musical group. He knew the military had marked him, if only as someone who had spoken out at a few union meetings, and he was fired from his job. With the help of a Catholic group, he fled to Hartford. He will be on stage for the performance, playing a song he composed.

            And Ms. Dworin found Ms. Torres, who was a 19-year-old student when Pinochet’s forces took her from her home and interrogated her. Ms. Torres had heard the stories of torture and murder. She fled the country, like many others who had supported Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist, in his efforts towards peace.

            “Teaching the cueca to the dancers made me sad, because every time I had to speak about Chile, my country, it was painful for me,” Ms. Torres said. “But it made me happy at the same time, because with this, people will remember and never forget what happened in Chile, especially young people. They need to know what happened there.”

            Ms. Dworin brought them together to tell their stories in poetry, dance, and music. She did so, she says, “because meeting these people gave me, and I think everybody in the company, an authentic feeling. You are meeting the person whom this happened to. The feeling and the energy and their stories are there, and that’s where the language of movement takes over.”

 This article appeared in The New York Times on Feb. 25, 2001.