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  2.  DANCE MAGAZINE
  3. Gesture, video and cello
  4.  By Emily Marcel
  5. November 2006
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  7. ‘It’s not every day that neuroscience and dance find themselves onstage together, but Cuban choreographer Marianela Boan will do a bit of brainy experimentation in False Testimony. She isn’t hooking up electrodes to the dancers’ heads, but she will be tracking brain waves using more artistic means than a EKG.”                    
 
 
 
 
  1. THE INQUIRER
  2. A blend of wit, craft and illusion
  3. "False Testimony" shows the cool ways video and dance can interact, often tricking the audience.
  4. By Lisa Kraus
  5. Nov. 06, 2006,
  6. Philadelphia is fortunate that after earning her master's degree at Temple University, Marianela Boán has chosen to stay. Evidenced by her False Testimony at the Painted Bride, the Cuban-born veteran choreographer of international stature combines wit, craft, and serious techno-smarts.
  7. False Testimony starts simply: A wooden packing crate sits center stage as two "workers" in overalls set the stage. One is cellist Monica McIntyre, whose scratchy beats, sonorous bowing, and vocals form the piece's soundscape. The other is videographer Danielle Kinne, playing a chilly, controlling figure.
  8. When Rebecca Lloyd-Jones and Megan Mazarick, the two dancers, first appear, their images are projected through live-feed video on the crate's wooden surface. They conform to and ricochet against its edges in movement that's all choppy abruptness, appearing like hapless Wallace & Gromit or Keaton-esque figures. Synergistic correspondences abound: Lloyd plants her feet against the wooden walls to wedge herself up high, while Mazarick crumples low. Their shapes echo, their velocities keep pace. As we hear them clunking, and see the box shimmy with their weight, the effect is tantalizingly weird - a virtual version of dancers we know are just screened from view.
  9. When they pop out from the crate (actually two side-by-side boxes) we get the setup: What we see projected stage right is actually taking place facing upstage left so that when a leg or head slips out of the frame it appears on the "wrong" side. It's a mind-bending trickery that Boán uses to great advantage in chases and image overlays.
  10. Testimony is a digest of cool ways video and dance can interact. Dancers are multiplied, hall-of-mirrors style, or shown in radically different scales (tiny and way close-up). The camera shifts from passive observer, to play toy, to a scary tool for surveillance as the two dancers cower from its gaze.
  11. Is the videographer their jailor, as when she slides the boxes together to form a closed prison? Only on heading home did the fact of Boán's Cuban-ness connect the dots for me to Guantanamo, incarceration, surveillance, and "false testimony." In the end the two dancers, driven to a frantic finish, toss off their clothes and lie still in the now recumbent boxes.
  12. Despite some ambiguities and brief lapses of focus, False Testimony skillfully intermingles humor and terror, rugged physicality, and exceptional technical wizardry.
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  15. CITY PAPER
  16. Box Tops
  17. Cuban choreographer Marianela Boán calls her work "contaminated."
  18. by Janet Anderson
  19. Nov 8, 2006
  20. Using just two dancers, a videographer, a cellist who also sings and two large wooden boxes, Marianela Boán created a magical dance for her new BoánDanz Action company's debut at Painted Bride. The recently transplanted Cuban choreographer calls her work "contaminated," and yes, everything was touched or changed by something else onstage. Even False Testimony's serious moments were contaminated with laughter.
  21. The videographer also served as stage manager. Wearing what looked like a white telephone lineman's uniform, Danielle Kinne pulled the two boxes into center stage, carefully measuring corners and making tiny adjustments to get them just so. What the audience saw were the upright boxes' flat backs.
  22. Then one of the boxes was unexpectedly filled with a dancer who crawled, slid and pounded against the interior walls. The video illusion was so real that it wasn't until Kinne walked across the image — causing the moving image of the colorfully dressed dancer to be projected onto her white uniform — that viewers were convinced there wasn't a real person in the box. Cellist Monica McIntyre, also in a white uniform, contributed atonal accompaniment.
  23. The actual dancers were nearby. A hand shot around the box and the video-image dancer slapped it. The second box suddenly acquired its own dancer-inhabitant as well. Kinne turned the boxes facing forward and now both excellent dancers, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones and Megan Mazarick, were moving in their boxes, twisting and reacting to video images of themselves or each other and even jumping into the other's boxes. The single-minded videographer kept finding new angles, focusing on an eye, a foot, a grimace. Occasionally they danced onstage while a full screen backdrop showed everything in ever-diminishing visions, and sometimes they became freeze-frame snapshots.
  24. This quickly shifting, extremely clever choreography seen from different angles kept the audience constantly reorienting its perception of what was real and what was not. Boán has a fascinating, very personal vision that involves mixing things up while never losing focus. Plus she paces her work well; False Testimony, even with an intermission, was short and tight as a drum.
  25. Best of all, Boán was able to tie a mysterious piece like this together and lay it complete at the audience's feet. Unexpectedly the videographer turned the boxes flat on the ground and the dancers re-entered them. While being filmed from overhead, they frantically pushed against the walls, tore off their clothing, and then lay still and nude in what turned out to be coffins.
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