Post:ballet had its Last Dance; Leaving a Powerful Legacy Behind
By Larissa Archer
As exciting as it was to receive an invitation to Magma, Post:ballet’s immersive dance piece and the chef d’oeuvre of their residency at the Midway, my excitement was dampened by the announcement that this would be their last production, after which artistic director Robin Dekkers would dissolve the company.
The reasons made sense: absent the kind of splashy donorship the city’s flagship companies receive, the grassroots funding Post:ballet enjoyed that allowed it to do the daring “anti-establishment” work it’s known for also required an unsustainable level of hustle from the leadership, who also helms Berkeley Ballet. At least all the artists involved have new projects worth following.
Still, my night at Magma demonstrated everything I will miss, and the city should miss, about Post:ballet. Beyond the creative uses of the spaces within the vast venue, with dancers creating porous movement installations by weaving through the audience and between the different rooms and hall, the piece was fashioned after the myth of Cassandra and seemed to depict the world in the midst, or wake, of some purposefully unidentified cataclysm.
Conceptualized and choreographed by Moscelyne ParkeHarrison, it began with her issuing a spoken word warning about–something–and undergoing what seemed like a slow-motion panic attack: hurling herself to the ground and up again, hair whipping, eyes beseeching, it really appeared the throes of someone who knew something terrible and was trying and failing to convey that knowledge before it was too late.
It was disturbing, effective agitprop theater: We returned from the break to news anchor dialogue projected onto the backdrop discussing disasters and their immediate aftermath. The names and nature of the disasters themselves, as well as where they occurred and their casualty numbers were redacted: in the age of regular occurrences of climate catastrophe and war, each instance could be any of them, and indeed they happen with such frequency now that the scripts for describing them are near-interchangeable.
Putting the unnamed disasters in mind caused certain moments in the ensuing dance to take on a dark tone, such as sequences in which dancers charged at each other and stepped, jumped, leveraged, and catapulted themselves off each other without ever looking each other in the eye–indeed, seeming not to notice that it was other human beings they were using as furniture: it felt like people desperately attempting to survive and escape with their own skin, even at the expense of others, rather than working together in community.
It was a dark vision of what our response to living in a time of disaster could be.
Other moments stood out in particularly high relief simply from the idiosyncrasies of my own doomscrolling from earlier in the day: I had read a particularly grim statistic about the ecological price of AI: the energy used by the average AI program to answer even a simple question was the equivalent of tossing a full glass of water to the pavement. With that in mind, the dazzling Babatunji’s epic pas de deux with a glass of water also took on a particular vividness–he was so precise with his movements, took such care not to spill any despite spinning, twirling, and frequently, gracefully changing hands.
It was moving to witness this loving, humane protectiveness of this tiny amount of life source in light of constantly being told that the waste and destruction of our natural habitat is the inevitable collateral damage we must accept in return for the dubious advantages of evermore powerful and invasive tech.
This is what I loved about Post:ballet. They didn’t make dance theater out of simplistic storylines, they didn’t satisfy themselves expressing black and white emotion, the main events in their stories were never someone falling in love or dying of a broken heart or turning into a swan.
Their work wasn’t always easy to read, but rewarded examination with subtlety, intellectual challenges, and mature concepts. It was ballet for adults, and not all ballet is. It is wonderful that its artists will continue their individual explorations beyond Post:ballet. But the city has lost something special with the closure of a company that had achieved the kind of heft that allowed it to produce complex shows on the level it did, resourced as it was, in major venues like the Midway, or on film.
Not every company can enjoy largesse to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from high-rolling donors; let the dissolution of Post:ballet be a warning–not unheeded like Cassandra’s– that some of the most interesting and probing work requires grassroots support, and perhaps especially in this culturally hostile new political climate.
