Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality

4. Song of Lawino

[4] Song of Lawino Directed by Valeria Vasilevski and choreographed by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Aaron Davis hall, City University of new York, new York, January 5–8, 1989. Women and Performance 4, no. 2, 1989. There is an intriguing, almost eerie mesh of self and other, community and dissent in the dance/theatre piece Song of Lawino. As i walked from the lobby, which was filled with people greeting, hugging, and chattering away, into the darkened theater, the flood of community feeling dissipated as i stared at the laundry line hung with brown braids and various hair pieces. What was the meaning of these disembodied remnants of some woman’s vanity, some woman’s life? it wasn’t until i read the short biographies of the performers included in the program that i realized that a few of these hair pieces were actually physical bits of the performers’ own life stories. While chopping her childhood braids off gave Connie Chin a sense of liberation from the traditional values of her parents, for Ching Valdes-Aran, cutting her hair was simply a way of earning money to support her fledgling acting career. Strung up among other, more anonymous hair pieces, these braids also served as visual symbols of the difficulty many nonwhite, nonEuropean women have conforming to Eurocentric stereotypes of beauty. Directed by Valeria Vasilevski, and choreographed by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar with the performers’ participation, Song of Lawino was inspired by the writing of okot p’Bitek—a Ugandan poet who died recently in political exile. in his epic poem, also called “Song of lawino,” p’Bitek speaks out against Western political, economic, and social colonialism. Taking on the voice of an Acoli woman, he confronts the reductions of modernization—most poignantly symbolized by the husband’s attraction to Westernized “modern” women—by reaffirming the spiritual meanings of traditional Acoli culture. realizing a dream of p’Bitek’s in bringing his message to the stage, the ten women performers weave music, dance, and song into a texture of community and resistance. The performance of Song of Lawino begins with an extraordinary solo by Pat hall-Smith. Moving cautiously, tentatively onto the stage at first, her back rippling to the sparse melodic sounds of Edwina lee Tyler playing the thumb piano, hall-Smith approaches a school lectern with an increasing ferocity of movement. The mythical creatures, ghosts, and ancestral power, 32 performance writings which had momentarily swelled her body in a wave of dancing, subside as she begins to read “let Them Prepare the Malakwang Dish.” But her body cannot stand still and separate itself from the anger and purpose of the words she recites. Soon hand gestures, indignant thrusts of the head, and impatient shifts of weight punctuate her speaking until finally her verbal and physical protestations join in a moment of deep, rich song. Aroused by the powerful authority of her rich voice and the drums that accompany it, other performers begin to sing and dance, setting the whole stage in motion. later in the performance, the women line up with their arms interlaced, their backs facing the audience. one by one, they turn around to spit back the insults their husbands have showered on them. Phrases like “he called my mother witch” and “he says i am stupid” give testimony to how these absent men have tried to belittle their wives’ “old-fashioned” identities and beliefs. This ritual of talking out—of verbally exorcising these insults—serves both to confirm the women’s community with one another and also to pull the audience into their emotional struggle. Because they have experienced the kind of double oppression of being both ethnic and female, these ten women from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds can make the bitter, sarcastic language in p’Bitek’s writing express their own anger too. The celebration of anger as well as the ecstasy of a communal release of pain through the lively physical rejoicing of dance and song makes Song of Lawino both politically alive and a pleasure to watch. This mix of brilliant, defiant energy and entertainment was particularly evident in a drum solo by Edwina lee Tyler. Coming after the upbeat, chatty chorus-line style of numbers like “i Do not Know the Dances of White People,” Tyler’s testimony is potently nonverbal. her drumming begins offstage with cadences of soft-mulling rhythms. As she makes her way across the stage, her body takes on the emotions sculpted by the sounds of...