Christina Moura’s monologue-performance lasted about an hour. An extremely pretty medium-sized, cinnamon-skinned woman with evident dance training, her attitude towards the audience was challenging, dismissive and voyeuristic. She announced at the beginning, her large hypnotic eyes focused on the audience, “This is a conventional performance,” then stating we were the audience and she was the performer. Her body postures included wonderful rippling arm movements, legs entwined while her torso crouched over her hips, walking; she engaged in a fair amount of talking, sounding either like an African dialect or Brasilian offshoot in addition to English.

At various points, I discerned an archetypcal Afro-Brasilian in bondage, followed by swallowing water then spat in spumes across the floor and at the audience, which giggled at Moura’s defiance of performer-audience conventions. The water enabled her to slither across the floor with ease. A toy car was ridden around, Moura donning pink-rimmed dark glasses, her body talk with Copacabana Beach attitudes. She added a plum colored, camisole shift over her tights before enacting street walker come ons with graphic breast and pelvic gestures. Before the finale, she repeated several times comments about the length of an incision in a breast,whether for enhancement or biopsy left unexplained and for emphasis she added a mirror. Once, she writhed on the floor, despair or addiction uncertain. Another sequence included striking a stone at four corners of the stage before at mid-center stage left placing the stone below her pelvis and dropping it.

Moura lost me at that point; I prefer remembering an initial fascination when she took off a long-armed grey tee-shirt, wrapped it around her head; with deliberate pauses, her slender fingers fashioned it into a marvelous turban. It promised so much, the rest so little.

Kate Foley worked in New York City and San Francisco from 1986 to 1998 before commencing residency and production in Croatia in 2001. She currently teaches at a new cultural facility in the Zagreb area of Croatia.

Angels of Sudjerac utilizes five dancers of highly divergent body builds to execute a ritual-like evocation of folk legend in a part of Croatia. Reinforced by gritty black and white film footage, which shows an animistic site overlain with Christian symbols, the dancers evoke possession and the extremes of body postures it induces.

Before the main body of the work, ethnologist Zoran Clea explained the historical background giving rise to the dance. The possession depicted turned the five women, dressed in trousers with varied tops all glistening from a rough surface, from decorous figures with careful tread into hip swiveling creatures swirling their arms, flinging their bodies to the floor in precipitous directions. The film footage flickered in and out of the movement.

Greater contrast between sexual views and the split between mind and body between the two offerings could scarcely be imagined, between denial with an accompanying innocence in the Croatian tradition and the deliberate, sensual display of Brasilian Moura. If nothing else, the two nationalities on a single evening provided implicit comment on the interplay between climate and culture.

Moura