Dance review by Berkshires editor Bess Hochstein
What a pleasure to make the annual return to Jacob’s Pillow, the verdant venue in the Berkshires presenting the world’s best and most innovative dance companies, for the opening of its 93rd summer festival. Driving through the deep green landscape on a sunny early summer afternoon, I was overtaken by joy and anticipation to see the first show of the season, by Prehistoric Body Theater, a performance collective based in Java, making its US debut at the stunning outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage.
In her opening remarks, Pillow executive and artistic director Pamela Tatge revealed that this appearance was the result of three years of efforts to bring the company to the US, noting that it might be a historic event given that travel visas have recently become more difficult to secure. Tatge obviously took great pains to return to the longstanding tradition of presenting dancers from across the globe — and across multiple dance disciplines, cultures, and traditions — at the Pillow’s bucolic mountaintop stages, giving audiences an opportunity to expand their concept of dance or, at the very least, see something they have never seen before. The global purview of the Pillow was curtailed by COVID and hindered by the Trump v1 travel ban, while the scope of performances was also limited by the loss of the Doris Duke Theatre to fire during the pandemic. This season marks a return to form, featuring a panoply of performances from all corners of the world. Avid audiences can see dance from West Africa, Cambodia, Mexico, Korea, Norway, Taiwan, and Ireland, as well as more homegrown troupes spanning the United States, ranging from classical ballet to Swing, Tap, Afro-Latino and -Caribbean, Circus, Hula, Powwow, and even ice dancing (!) on three stages, including the much-anticipated, new-and-improved Doris Duke Theatre.
Prehistoric Body Theater brought us to Montana’s Hell Creek Formation — famous as a font of fossils — by way of Indonesia, where company founder Ari Dharmaminalan Rudenko — who hails from Washington State — has gathered a group of performers well versed in Javanese dance, folklore, puppetry, acrobatics, rituals, and other disciplines, both traditional and experimental, in their jungle HQ to create art-science performances. They began working on their flagship piece, Ghosts of Hell Creek, in 2017; the process of creation was long and arduous because it involved extensive paleontological research as well as decision-making by debate and consensus among the company members.
At the Pillow, Prehistoric Body Theater presented an excerpt from Ghosts of Hell Creek: Stone Garuda in perhaps the most perfect setting imaginable. “Garuda” is a winged deity of Hindu and Buddhist mythology. But rather than deities, this dance theater work resurrects the Acheroraptor, a feathered, winged raptor that perished along with other dinosaurs when an immense asteroid slammed into the Yucatan Penninsula more than 66 millions years ago, creating the Chicxulub Crater and instigating a global extinction event.
On the outdoor stage, set among the treetops, the performers emerge caked in mud, maintaining a deep squat and and straight backs, bodies hinged at the hips at a 45 degree angle, taking hesitant birdlike steps, jutting their heads in pecking motions, holding a pair of fan-like wings upright against their lower backs, their elbows bent toward the sky. Occasionally, they pull themselves up to nearly full height, extending their arms and flapping their wings in a suggestion of flight, before folding back down into their avian crouch. Furthering the avian characterization, the performers wear simple rounded wedge headpieces that mimic a bird’s crown. They resemble clay bird figurines— like those found in a museum’s antiquities collection or craft markets of developing nations — come to life.
The performance is mesmerizing, as the “Acheroraptors” interact, coming and going on the stage and its central raised platform, approaching each other, engaging in avian activities like jerky head movements, dominance displays with arms/wings outstretched, scratching at the ground, puffing out their chests, all to an audioscape (by Iwan Karak in collaboration with composers Merak Badra Wahanyung and Mo’ong Santoso Pribadi) that blends gamelan, percussion, electronic music, and nature sounds like rushing water, crashing waves, wind, crickets, and animal calls. (The birds of the Berkshires contributed too, adding several well timed tweets and chirps.) Given the movement, the soundscape, the warm weather, and the lush green setting, it felt like the audience had been transported to a jungle.
Eventually, monkey-like figures join the Acheroraptors onstage; these primates interact with each other and observe their avian neighbors, bounding, bouncing, and crouching mostly on all fours, leaping high and landing low to the ground. They enter and exit, scamper around the stage, until the great cataclysm occurs, enacted in slow motion: the audio turns foreboding, the Acheroraptors cluster on the raised platform, and they gradually collapse into a heap, releasing their wings.
Paleontologists recount that all the dinosaurs, Acheroraptor included, went extinct when the Chicxulub Impactor smashed into the earth, but somehow the early primate Purgatorius survived, becoming the first step on the evolutionary path that led to the advent of homo sapiens. We see the beginnings of this evolution, as the crumpled mass of avians slowly reconstitutes in mammalian form, taking on the traits of more advanced primates: socializing, playing, finding and sharing food. They become bipedal, running, learning to hunt and wield weapons. This performance effectively lets the audience bear witness to the end of one era and the fast-forward rise of another.
The work of the performers is physically arduous; they maintain crouched positions, leap high with no preparatory movement, hold their faces neutral and eyes wide, until they evolve and begin to express emotions like anger, fear, and concern. Their skills in traditional Javanese theater and puppetry are evident, and they are to be commended for convincingly inhabiting their avian and primate forms without ever breaking character. Given the current state of our educational institutions and the attacks on science, it’s a bold show to bring to the US, and one that ideally would be widely toured, especially in our under-pressure public schools.
Prehistoric Body Theater performed at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts, June 25 -26.
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