Body positive+: Dance and the Body

MANILA, Philippines - The premise for Ballet Philippines’ new show is that Dance is the Body. The dancer’s body is the choreographer’s medium. Through the meaning behind each movement crafted by the latter, dance becomes more than mere technique and acrobatics. From the stage, the body speaks – you feel it, though you may not be able to comprehend it.

In Body Positive+, BP’s 46th season opener, audiences will have the chance to marvel at the human body at its finest. The program showcases the dancers’ virtuosity in the Black Swan’s 32 fouettes, lyricism in William Carter’s Bach Concerto and emotional depth in Enrico Labayen’s Cloth, to name a few, but at the same time goes beyond that.

The show calls for us to not merely applaud the beauty of each performance, but to listen to what each dance is trying to say. More than just a concert, Body Positive+ is a dance gala for HIV awareness.

Alarmed by the rapid spread of the disease in recent years and the general public’s lack of awareness of the issue, BP’s artistic director Paul Alexander Morales felt compelled to make an effort to change this. “It’s very important for us to create works that are relevant to what’s going on in society today, and we believe that the rise of HIV is a topic that needs to be discussed more freely and frequently,” says Morales.

And speak at length they shall, with forums on health and HIV preceding each show, as well as a visual art exhibit, also entitled Body Positive+, by Artletics, a group of painters led by Manny Garibay.

Taking the message further, Ballet Philippines is also launching a campaign and a 2016 calendar, both entitled Be Positive. “The stigma attached to being HIV positive is still rather severe, but it doesn’t have to be,” explains Morales. With a positive outlook and a well-informed society, a person living with HIV can have a bright future.

One of the featured works in the Body Positive+ program is Erl Emmanuel Sorilla’s Requiem to a Cygnet. Sorilla both draws inspiration and diverts from Swan Lake’s iconic cygnets or little swans, with his version starring an all-male cast of three, instead of the original’s four ballerinas. In this piece, the three swans mourn the death of their sibling, who was rejected by society – an extreme fate, but not unfamiliar. Juxtaposed against Requiem are more traditional swans – Odette and Odile with their Siegfrieds and the swans.

Bach Concerto, another featured piece, was choreographed by William Carter, a leading dancer with the American Ballet Theater who died of AIDS. Through this neo-classical ballet, his work surpasses his untimely end, with its subtlety of motion, moving toward the abandonment of the senses to the music’s rhythmic sensibility.

The re-staging of Enrico Labayen’s Cloth is met with much anticipation. Inspired by a passage from Song of Songs, a book of the Hebrew Bible known for its sensuality and evocative imagery, it is a dance of two men that investigates missed opportunities for meaningful connections and unrequited emotions. Two more works by Labayen are also set to be performed: Will You Still Be There? and 2 Barres, a Man and the Plague.

Through these choreographic works and several more, the dancers of Ballet Philippines lay down a part of themselves on the stage. As their bodies are molded to convey the dancemaker’s message, the dance becomes a part of them, inextricable from their identities. When the time comes, they pass the dance on from their body to another – as Enrico Labayen’s legacy was in part passed on by Katherine Trofeo to the BP dancers in the restaging of Cloth.

Dance is, by its very nature, fleeting. It is an experience that cannot be replicated exactly, and that is part of its beauty. As dance exists only in the body of the dancer, the performance remains alive only in the memory of its audience. The experience will naturally differ from person to person, and each may have his/her own interpretation, but one thing is certain: some way or another, something in them changed.

Through the dancer’s body, the audience is taken into a time and space that exists only in the music and the movement. This experience of dance is something to look forward to.

Body Positive+ will be performed at the CCP Little Theater on Sept. 12, 13 and 19 at 6 p.m. Visit www.ballet.ph or call 551-1003. For tickets, call the CCP Box Office at 832-3704 or Ticketworld at 891-9999.