Danscoreo in "Lamentatio" preview (work in progress), August 2009, Querétaro, Mexico (Photo and copyright by David Steck)
November 1, 2009
By Claire Sykes
Shackled and blindfolded, caged and beaten, and in solitary confinement for months. For over five years, Jumah al Dossari endured it all at Guantánamo Bay. Agnieszka Laska couldn’t help but create dance from it.
The subject of human injustice has found its way into art for millennia—from Homer’s Illiad to Allen Ginsberg’s Wichita Vortex Sutra, Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War to Käthe Kollwitz’s Peasant War, and Beethoven’s Fidelio to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. You can add to this list Agnieszka Laska’s Lamentatio.
(Photo and copyright by Chris Leck)
For 20 years, this 51-year-old Polish choreographer and dancer (now living in Portland) has been setting the aesthetic movement of the body to music, against a backdrop of domestic violence and torture, wrongful imprisonment and war.
Such concerns seem to suit Agnieszka (say “Ahg-nyésh-kah”). When I first met her several years ago, I immediately felt a darkness, a weight about her. Was it her post-World War II Polish roots? Had she suffered somehow, herself? Yet she exudes a vibrancy, illuminated perhaps by faith and fortitude, that fuels a natural warmth.
Agnieszka Laska (self-portrait)
Among the horror there is hope. The Agnieszka Laska Dancers embody both in Agnieszka’s latest piece, Lamentatio. With poetry from a Guantánamo Bay detainee and an Iraq War soldier, and other text, the 70-minute, multi-media work presents 17 dancers (five of them with disabilities, from Impetus Arts), 15 musical artists, five Tuesday Group actors, Takafumi Uehara’s projected video montages, and original music by the company’s resident composer Jack Gabel. Lamentatio makes its U.S. premiere at Imago Theatre here in Portland, November 18-22, 2009.
Agnieszka Laska Dancers in "Lamentatio" (work in progress), June 2009, Imago Theatre, Portland, Oregon (Photo and copyright by Chris Leck)
Claire Sykes: How did you start your company, the Agnieszka Laska Dancers?
Agnieszka Laska: I was working as a freelance choreographer for several years in Poland, Germany, the UK and Querétaro, Mexico, where I never had to run my own company to be one. When I moved to Portland with my husband and composer, Jack Gabel in 2001, I thought I could make a living as a choreographer like I was used to. I wasn’t aware of how miserable the situation was in this country for dancers. It was really depressing. I didn’t want to lose my skills, so I started my own company.
CS: How would you describe the Agnieszka Laska Dancers?
AL: It’s a constant experiment. When I started the company, I used mostly classical ballet dancers, because I didn’t find the modern dancers here in Portland very well trained then. But I’ve always combined many different dance techniques, including Polish folk dances, and theater. The closest description I suppose is dance theater, similar to German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch’s work, with its blend of dance and drama. It’s not dance that tells a story, literally, but rather dance expressed through the narrative of emotions.
CS: Nothing about your work is too literal, is it?
AL: No. My pieces move with the logic of a dream. I let the dancers, and the audience, interpret them. People come up to me afterwards and tell me what the work is about for them. Everyone has a different story. It’s their story, related to their life. I bring some emotion, and let people go with their own experiences.
Danscoreo in "Lamentatio" preview, August 2009, Querétaro, Mexico (Photo and copyright by David Steck)
CS: What’s the story about you that gets told in your work?
AL: I definitely include life experiences in my pieces. Every artist looks to their own life and whatever happened, in order to be truthful with the work. Some of my pieces have been about being abused as a young woman. In my early choreography, there’s always something about a man hitting a woman.
CS: Your work also deals with war, torture and unjust imprisonment. Why is that?
AL: Because somebody has to do it. Acts of genocide and other injustices are possible not only because of a few blood-wanting criminals, but also because of silent witnesses. I can’t do too much to stop war and torture, but at least I don’t want to be silent. It would be way easier for me to make one more beautiful, abstract dance that does not engage me emotionally so much and doesn’t make me cry every night. But the ugly parts of life have to be reminded to the public, over and over, or else we forget.
Danscoreo in "Lamentatio" preview, August 2009, Querétaro, Mexico (Photo and copyright by David Steck)
CS: Music carries much of the narrative and emotion in a dance work. What do you consider about music when choreographing?
AL: The first thing is that the music cannot be boring; it has to be interesting and evoke some emotion. The preparation for me is to listen, listen and listen, and then some ideas come. Then I go to the bare-bones analyzing—reading the score, checking the rhythm and where’s the accent, where’s the melody, where’s the repetition. And then I start setting the choreography, following the score closely.
Danscoreo in "Lamentatio" preview, August 2009, Querétaro, Mexico (Photo and copyright by David Steck)
CS: How much of the music used in your work, in general, is presented live, and which musicians do you turn to?
AL: As much as I can, I use live music—players from fEARnoMUSIC, or the group itself; the Oregon Symphony String Quartet; flute player Tessa Brinckman and her East West Continuo; Phil Hansen, principal cellist with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra; and Thomas Svoboda, pianist, who is also a composer.
CS: I know that Jack writes most of the music for your pieces. How would you describe what he does?
AL: It’s contemporary classical, similar to [Henryk] Górecki, but I think he has his own voice, which is neo-romantic, melodic. Dancers leave rehearsals singing.
Danscoreo in "Lamentatio" preview, August 2009, Querétaro, Mexico (Photo and copyright by David Steck)
CS: Tell me about the music Jack wrote for Lamentatio.
AL: It all started in 2007 with me buying a book for his birthday, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. After we were done with The Fall ‘01, about torture and war, which Jack composed the music for, he was depressed because the work didn’t get much response, and he told me he wasn’t going to compose anymore. I thought, that’s not good. I saw this book and thought he could write music based on these poems.
For Lamentatio, he put to music poems from this book and Here, Bullet, by Brian Turner, an Iraq War soldier-poet, as well as a testimony from Chris Arendt, a Guantánamo Bay guard, and other texts. The words are sung by soprano Nancy Wood, with cellist Diane Chaplin and a nine-voice choir. Jack’s score is composed around excerpts from The Odyssey; and Missa pro defunctis – Requiem, by Roman Maciejewski, who spent 14 years writing this two-hour-long piece. Maciejewski lived in Europe during World War II. He saw enough horror; and viewed every war as ignorance and lack of respect for human life and of the divine order of nature. As an artist, one of the things he felt he could do was write music that people would listen to and reflect on what’s behind it.
Danscoreo in "Lamentatio" preview, August 2009, Querétaro, Mexico (Photo and copyright by David Steck)
CS: What is the Guantánamo Bay detainee poem you chose for Lamentatio?
AL: Jumah al Dossari’s “Death Poem” [see below]. Dossari, from Bahrain, an island in the Persian Gulf, was imprisoned for more than five years at Guantánamo Bay, several months of that in solitary confinement—without ever being charged with a crime. While in custody, he tried to take his life 12 times. Then, in July 2007, the U.S. military freed him, put him on a plane back to Saudi Arabia, without a word of apology. Afterwards, in a Washington Post article that he wrote, he said that after one of his many brutal beatings, a female guard whispered into his ear, “I’m sorry for what happened to you. You’re a human being just like us.” And that gave him hope.
Agnieszka Laska Dancers in "Lamentatio" (work in progress), June 2009, Imago Theatre, Portland, Oregon (Photo and copyright by Chris Leck)
CS: What are you saying in Lamentatio?
AL: I’m saying everyone’s a victim in a situation like this, even the guards. And I’m giving voice to the victims. Lamentatio also shows how poetry and art can help people find hope. We can often survive the most horrifying conditions, if we have hope.
Danscoreo in "Lamentatio" preview, August 2009, Querétaro, Mexico (Photo and copyright by David Steck)
CS: What does hope mean for you, personally?
AL: It’s always been art, music, poetry and dance. We can use these to show hope. But art is one thing and love is another. I have the strength to tackle such difficult topics in my art, to tell such heart-breaking stories, because I have Jack’s unconditional love in my life. There’s no force bigger than love. You can pretty much overcome anything, if you have someone to love and who loves you back.
Agnieszka Laska and Jack Gabel after "Songs of Eva" premiere, Lincoln Hall, 2004 (Photo and copyright by Chris Leck)
Admission to Lamentatio is free to veterans, refugees from any armed conflict anywhere in the world and those who are disabled.
DEATH POEM
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”
- Jumah al Dossari
© Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
