Scaling "The scales of memory"

In Les écailles de la mémoire--a profound and fresh collaboration between Brooklyn's Urban Bush Women and Senegal's Compagnie Jant-Bi--the collision of genders and cultures with common roots creates an explosion of sparks. UBW's chameleon-like dancers and the dynamic all-male corps deployed by Germaine Acogny are, simply, made for each other.

Both troupes have claimed the stage as their throne and dance as their gilded frame. When such commanding, magisterial performers as these can also make room for cartoonish physical humor and forthright sexiness--claiming those things, too, as their province--what can a humble audience member do but accept the role, the gift, of watching them?

Fabrice Bouillon-LaForest's forceful and enveloping score and J. Russell Sandifer's moody, sculptural lighting provide a powerful sense of space and place. Mind the fact that the human body is 70% water; the conjoined forces of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's dancers and Acogny's troupe, costumed by Naoko Nagata, seem to be rolling the waves of the fearsome and often tragic Atlantic through spines and limbs and across the darkened floor of the stage. It is the mighty Atlantic that divides them and unites them, the trickster Atlantic that holds the deep impression of their history and opens the way to their future.

Try for a ticket for tomorrow night or Saturday, both at 7:30. Also, on Friday, November 21, at 6pm, choreographer Reggie Wilson will hold an artist talk with Germaine Acogny and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar in the Hillman Attic Studio at BAM ($8).

2008 Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn Academy of Music Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue
718-636-4100