Intense 'Forests' a crossroads for gods and humans

JOHN YI/YH Dancing! Forests! Kneeling! Folding chairs!

You won't know what hit you. The raw, visceral impact of Wole Soyinka's Dance of the Forests is stunning. The play opens the gates to another world of swirling forests, pounding rhythms, unsettling spirits and inescapable cycles of history. Ritualistic and stylized, Soyinka offers a unique vision of traditional African culture and mythology by taking advantage of the possibilities of Western theater. Through his work, Soyinka, born in Western Nigeria in 1934, celebrates his ethnic Yoruban heritage while exploring how to integrate ancient traditions into modern culture. This tension between ancestral loyalty and the temptations of the modern world, as well as the possibility of progress, is a central theme in Dance. The play traipses amongst the past, present, and future and the analogous three stages of Yoruban existence—the world of the ancestors, the world of the living, the world of the unborn.

The story charts the paths of three characters of the modern age—Demoke the carver (Manuel Negron, PC '99), Rola the courtesan (Annabelle Steinhacker, ES '00), and Adenebi the Council Orator (Michael Walker, DC '01)—as the forest spirits force them to confront their crimes, both in this lifetime and the past 800 generations. The pantheon of deities inhabiting the forest plays an active and antagonistic role in shaping events, resembling the Greeks'quarrelsome galaxy of gods. The primary divine conflict resides in the eternal feud between Ogun, the god of creativity (Billy Schraufnagel, DC '03), and Eshuoro, the god of destruction (Tony Randoll). Their dispute is ultimately mediated by Forest Head, the reigning patriarch (Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbuam, JE '00), and his assistant, Aroni, the god of Justice (Clarissa Ward, JE '02). The suffering of crime and conflict plaguing the play's human and supernatural beings alike finally gives way to redemption as the humans face their transgression and decide to follow the path of expiation, ritualistically purging themselves of their generations of crime.

The strengths of the production are the inundating rhythms and mesmerizing choreography of its ritualistic dancing. Each character, most markedly the supernatural ones, possesses an utterly distinct and quite unnerving way of holding himself or herself, moving around, and relating to the other characters. Their bodily movements evoke something primal and animalistic, yet twist the familiar into a unique and seeming unnatural carriage. Playing extremes of emotion and superhuman passions, the exaggerated physicality of acting successfully integrates with the shrieks and howls of the deities. The skill of the performers in perfecting all of these movements then becomes clear as many of the actors switch roles two to three times during the show. Notable for their success in this utter transformation into a creature inhuman are Andrew Winton, JE '01, playing Oshuoro's sinister jester with growling, nightmarish glee, Sarah Treem, BR '02, enacting her possession by spirits with unearthly writhing, and Schraufnagel, who brings the swaying, intense Ogun to life.

Director Chipo Chung, TC '00, takes full advantage of the recently reopened Whitney Humanities Center Gym—the open space lends itself to the feeling of an outdoor forest, breaking out of the sense of enclosure inherent in a traditional theater's proscenium arch. The use of theater in the round creates the impression of submersion in the leafy depths of the forest as the play unfolds all around the audience. The forest set is constructed primarily of rusting metal industrial scraps, immediately underlining the contrast between remnants of the modern world and the natural, ancestral universe of the forest. The familiar Western garb of the modern protagonists mirrors this opposition in its contrast with the spirits' body paint and traditional clothes.

A Dance of the Forests' primary problem is its tangled plot, which often renders the play nearly incomprehensible. The unacknowledged mixing of time periods, ambiguity between humans and supernatural beings, and multiple, cyclical story lines, as well as the compound roles for each actor and occasional indistinct speech, all contribute to difficulty in deciphering the plot. Yet the recurring feeling of being moved and simultaneously unable to understand what exactly is happening, contributes to the atmosphere of chaos. It strengthens the dominance of emotion over intellect that Soyinka tries to emphasize as an alternative to traditional Western play-going experiences.

Chung's production, though not an easy ride, nonetheless creates a stunning impact on a visceral level. In its nightmarish intensity, A Dance of the Forests masters Soyinka's intentional ambiguities and contradictions.

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