Review: Los Lazos Que Unen

SBDT director Brandon Whited ushers the company into a new era.

WORDS Ninette Paloma

The 1959 hit Corazon de Melon by Cuban band Las Hermanas Benitez is a song rife with delicious contradictions. Consumed by love and wearing plasticine smiles, the sisters declare themselves unable to think of anything more than their sweethearts, pleading to the moon for help in managing their all-encompassing obsessions.
If you were a Latina woman coming into your own in 1950s America, you no doubt heard that song floating absently through transistor radios and low-lit dance halls – a catchy tune with dark undertones that my grandmother once described as a lesson in “what love is supposed to look and feel like.” 

It is the song choreographer Rosie Herrera leads with in her powerful work Querida Herida, a study of the archetypical line between passion and violence, where the stages of love burn through curiosity, addiction, rage, and resignation. Through witty composition and sharp-as-nails movement, Herrera lures us into a world of obsession with humor – only to throw us into a tailspin of unease as the dancers lurch and hinge through physical turmoil. 
  
Over the course of Los Lazos Que Unen/ The Ties That Bind, these careful contradictions will repeat themselves as Santa Barbara Dance Theatre director Brandon Whited leads the viewer through a journey of identity and self-awareness. Each of the three represented choreographers pull directly from memory to unpack an intimate representation of what it might feel like to straddle two cultures; two lifestyles; two experiences. 

In Eric Parra’s La Luz, an odyssey of survival and hope stretches across the stage with aching grace as each of the seven dancers layer themselves into one life-altering experience. Parra challenges the notion of home as the epicenter of movement shifts and fragments from left to right, upstage and downstage, as we follow the dancers into the light of possibility; and folded between the two guest works is Whited’s Miles to Go, a powerful commentary on anti-gay violence juxtaposed with a delicate and tear-inducing pas de deux by Derion Loman and Calder White. As the audio of a news broadcast blasts in the background, the dancers move serenely through solo experiences before coming together to share the weight of a long road ahead. The imagery is poignant, the message powerful.

To say Los Lazos Que Unen/ The Ties That Bind marks a fresh chapter for SBDT would only be describing half the story. Whited’s fixed lens and keen appreciation for diverse approaches to the language of contemporary dance is setting a new standard for the 47-year-old company – altering the palates of Central Coast dance audiences in the process.