The Outsider Chronicles

If I were to tell you that recently, I went to an experimental modern dance piece , you might raise your eyebrows. If I were to tell you that the piece explored trans-gender issues in a social activism festival, you might even start to smirk. And if I were tell you that it was brilliant, you would roll your eyes around and around until I could only see the whites of your eyes. Well, I went to, saw, and vastly enjoyed Sean Dorsey's "The Outsider Chronicles", as part of the ManiFestival (Dance Brigade's Festival for Social Change) in San Francisco.

"The Outsider Chronicles" is a loosely biographical collection of consists of 6 short pieces. The stories revolve around the theme of sexual identity. Before the show, I was a little afraid that this was going to be a niche piece. The audience was not your typical theater crowd, mainly lesbian couples and trans-gender folks. Would the piece speak in a secret code of the trans-gender community, impenetrable to the ears of an outsider? Fortunately this was not the case. "The Outsider Chronicles" spoke in a universal language. It spoke in the form of story.

The most significant artistic choice that Dorsey made, was to perform the dance pieces over a spoken word performance. I had never seen this fusion of spoken word and dance before. By engaging the audience through a series of beautifully written story, Dorsey had highlighted a fundamental problem with most forms of dance that I have seen - although kinetically enthralling, most dance is intellectually dis-engaging. To fully engage in a scene, I think it is imperative that we get under the skin of the characters on stage. Dance alone cannot tell such stories. With spoken word, character and dialog are refracted onto the movements on the stage.

The miracle of the "The Outsider Chronicles" is that Sean Dorsey is every bit as good a spoken-word performer as he is a dancer. There were six beautifully written stories, full of vigor, life and humor. There was a piece about the first time he kissed a girl. Another was a poignant piece about the drive of a couple to have an emergency meeting with his father. These spoken word pieces could easily stand on their own. Here, they formed the platform on which the dance unfolded.

The stories and the dance dove-tailed as we see flying bodies act out the conflicts and confusions of the relationships embedded in the stories. The spoken dialogue gave flesh to the movements. Movement and intention become one. I could felt the stories wash over me, kinetically, bodily. Reflecting on this, I realized that the vacuity of much of traditional ballet was due to the inherent limit of dance to convey rich emotional experience. Whereas seasoned ballet enthusiasts already know the story of the ballet that they will see, and hence can interpret the actions on the stage, there is no such recourse for a novice. In "The Outsider Chronicles", Dorsey cuts through that incomprehensibility by merging voice with dance.

I was also enthralled by the lighting and staging. The staging was spare, allowing the rather imaginative use of light to cut through the space. Slabs of light were used to conjure up a conjugal bed, another to project the interior of a car free-wheeling on a road-trip. In another scene, a wash of vertical light conjured up a bath-room on the front of the stage.

Dorsey examines the line from desire to the fulfillment of a fully-realized self-identity. His stories document his struggle to engage with the world, though specific to trans-gender issues, there is a universal dimension to his story. The strength and compassion in the way he recounts his past, makes his struggle heroic. In the last piece "Creativity", Dorsey laments a moment in his youth where he missed a chance to seize the moment and declare himself, and pit himself against everyone around him. But if he failed in that moment in the past, he has more than made-up for it in sublimating his story into a muscular work of art.