Saturday May 28, 2011 - Exit 12 Dance Company performed Roman Baca's HOMECOMING this morning on the flight deck of the USS Intrepid. In the above rehearsal photo: Michael Wright and Lisa Fitzgerald, photographed by Kokyat.
What a beautiful day for an outdoor performance: warm but not humid, with a nice breeze. While there was a good crowd watching the back-to-back performances I think there would have been an even larger number of spectators had the event been listed on the daily schedule of shipboard activities; it was not mentioned on the placards detailing the day's events. Once we got on board, we were continually directed to a performance of excerpts from WICKED which was taking place on the plaza level. Luckily we managed to find Roman and his troupe just as they were about to start dancing.
The work was danced twice, with a short break in between. The participating dancers were Taylor Gordon, Adrienne Cousineau, Lisa Fitzgerald, Jackie Koehler, Joanna Priwieziencew, Michael Wright, Aaron Atkins and Preston Bradley. All danced with quiet intensity: HOMECOMING steers clear of melodrama and tends to aim directly at the heart. An unexpected element of the performances stemmed from the hot surface of the deck which caused the girls - who spend quite a bit of the time kneeling - to sustain blistering marks on their knees. They carried on gamely, finding subtle ways to avoid making the painful marks worse.
HOMECOMING in a way is a danced drama; its theme is the other victims of war: for it is not just the serving soldiers who live in a constant state of readiness and anxiety. It's also the loved ones living at home, wondering from day to day if their spouse/child/beloved is safe; for them, warfare can create life-altering circumstances even though they are at a safe remove from the battlefields. HOMECOMING gives voice to the loved ones who wait, as heroic in their own way as the fighters in the field.
Some warriors will come home; others will not - or they may return, altered physically and psychologically to a degree from which there is no recovery. In HOMECOMING we see couples happily reunited but we also see those for whom the wages of war have essentially destroyed their dreams: the soldier who does not come home, the man so horrifically wounded that his wife can hardly recognize him.
It's so easy to forget that we are at war. The wars are far away, and what we see and hear about them in the press seems carefully monitored and detached from emotional realities. In HOMECOMING, Sergeant Baca and his dancers remind us of aspects of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that tend to get lost in our daily routines of banal entertainment, political gamesmanship and unsorted priorities.
I hope that HOMECOMING will continue to reach wider audiences in the coming months. My great desire is to see it performed on a double bill with Robin Becker's equally powerful INTO SUNLIGHT. Both works force us to contemplate things we would just as soon ignore.
A gallery of Kokyat's images from the performances of HOMECOMING aboard the Intrepid will be found here.