Delfos Danza

I am not a dance person.  When other girls were taking their first tap and ballet classes, I was learning how to swing a bat on my T-ball team.  Years of softball and zero acquaintance with anything resembling contemporary dance (other than a ludicrous college class where our teacher allowed us to nap if that's what "felt our bodies were saying") has resulted in a woman passionate about baseball and somewhat dismissive of most contemporary dance forms.

I felt it necessary to lay that on the table before I attempted to craft an opinion on my recent experience at the Ordway, where I saw a performance by Delfos Danza, a contemporary dance troupe hailing from Mexico.

Is troupe even the word I'm supposed to use?

I struggle to articulate myself properly on subjects about which I have no knowledge, but there were parts of the performance I found stirring and beautiful, and others I found tiring and somewhat boring to watch.  The visuals incorporated into the performance were stunning, a mix of video and exquisite costuming that provided a perfect aesthetic support for the dancers' movement.  But I struggled to understand the story, the point, the motivation, the reason, the crux, the hinge, the lie, the philosophy, that the performance was attempting to convey.  There was a sense of being captured, trapped even, and that correlated with what I read in the program about the piece having something to do with masks. Some sort of physical manifestation of what it means to hide behind a facade? Or be forced to wear a facade against one's will?  Maybe?

The most powerful image for me was that of flight and escape.  The video usage of the birds was beautiful, the shadows of wings and the tree at center were wonderful ways to bookend the beginning and ending of the performance.  But, I have to admit something here, I couldn't help but think of the episode of Portlandia making mockery of the hipster desire to stick a bird on absolutely everything, "stick a bird on it." But birds are powerful symbols of both entrapment and escape, so I can't fault the usage of a recognizable symbol for those concepts.

Dance, to me, is a foreign world, one I struggle to relate to given my complete lack of physical gracefulness and the absence of any desire to remedy said issue. But it's a foreign world I enjoy peeking into, even if I'm left feeling somewhat lost.

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