El Muro Hermoso

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El Muro Hermoso ("The Beautiful Wall") Here in Tucson, near the Mexican-American border, there are a lot of strong feelings about the proposed "Big Wall," along the 2,000 mile border between our two countries. It is a complex subject, with as many complicating factors as changes of angle that the border takes from east to west. From animal migrations to the travel patterns of the Tohono O'odam nation (through which our national boarder cut), from issues about drug transportation, finding migrant and non-migrant work, lives lost in the desert heat, nationalist sentiments, to rivers, shared lakes and canyons that make a simple wall an unsimple idea... as an artist I am more intertested in seeing past the yes-or-no answers that divide us. In this piece I present photos and images from the border, movements of the people who are crossing the border for their various reasons, and sounds from various leaders and groups who purport their particular point of view. Ultimately, this dance is an expression of feeling of being caught in these images. El Muro's early performances were an initial experiment for me, before I had yet to own projection-mapping software, of how to project images on an ever-changing landscape of brick-like boxes, that become alternately a desert landscape, a prison cell, columns of an ancient building, or the bricks of the great wall itself. While I've incorporated video and slide imagery in my work since 1987's Judgments, the last ten years my work has been devoted to looking at ways of getting out of the video box: how to incorporate video that is not just a distracting rectangle above the dancers, but is in effect another character, set piece, or dancer on stage too, in three-dimensional way. The casts of El Muro Hermoso have been quite wonderful: Malikah Fernandez is a highly trained, powerfully emotive dancer, recently transplanted here from Chicago; George Johnson was born in Mexico and spent his younger days traveling by foot across the border when it was a more open range. Both dancers, and I myself, bring to the piece a set of stories and histories of migrations and peoples that help deepen the work beyond mere movement. The piece will be performed at the Southern Vermont Dance Festival on Friday, July 14th, at the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro. Renee Davis of "Sister Moses" fame will be dancing with Billbob; having begun dancing together 30 years ago, they will be a potent force on stage together! The new performances of El Muro Hermoso will flesh out more of the movement and imagery with new projection-mapping software. The images will be crisper and cleaner and more specific to the boxes than seen in the YouTube video here. But what does not change is that eye of Malikah's that fills the wall at the end: looking at ourselves, it reveals much about who we are, and what we are doing to ourselves.

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Copyright 2016 Billbob Brown