Fanny Ara’s “Lilith” Roars
Garth Grimball
On February 23–25, Fanny Ara presented Lilith, a solo performance on female independence. The program lists four sections: Identity, Pretend, Sexuality, and Liberation. But the free-flowing nature of the performance precludes any episodic arc. Ara is a flamenco artist who is expanding the form beyond its traditional style. She describes her work as experimental.
I love flamenco. It is a dance that showcases effort. The majority of performative dance forms are all about masking effort. The goal is to make the choreography look easy, seamless. Not so with flamenco. Effort is maskless in flamenco. Flamenco musicians and dancers improvise in tandem to pull energy from the depths of their beings and release it out as if the stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s magnificent to behold.
Ara’s performance is magnificent, but in Lilith her talent in flamenco is obscured by a high volume sound score. Gonzalo Grau and Vardan Ovsepian accompanied Ara with live piano, keyboard and cello with a recorded soundtrack.
Lilith begins with Ara lying face down on the floor. She crawls her way across the stage. The train of her dress extends like a mermaid’s tale tethering her to an invisible anchor. Costuming is central to the work. Layering and shedding become motifs. Ara uses fabric to inhabit different archetypes — veiled over her mane she is a Madonna figure; unraveled within a swirling turn she is a deity weathering a storm.
The experimentation is loose and improvisational. Throughout the hour-long performance Ara plays with and within the rhythmic expectations of flamenco. She plays the piano while the musicians watch her. Grau and Ovsepian slide paper fans back and forth across the floor to the sound of unsheathing blades. The sound score switches between accompaniment and foley sound effects tracking Ara’s movements.
At times the music overpowers the concept and the dancing. The sense of improvisational freedom feels constricted when the choreography becomes so bound to the score’s composition. The sound levels were at such a high volume that Ara’s footfalls were inaudible, making her virtuosic dancing float away rather than pulse through the space.
Ara is such a captivating performer that any audio qualms are secondary to watching her command the stage, whether it is a simple walk or hybrid dance step-costume change. While the conceptual rendering of Lilith may be diffuse, Ara’s talent is clear.
