BUSCANDO A JUAN

Review|Mary Seidman

Ballet Hispánico and Artistic Director Eduardo Vilaro, premiered Buscando a Juan(Looking for Juan), in the atrium of the Robert Lehman Wing of the MET Museum as part of the METLiveArts Summer Season. A twenty-minute dance interpretation of the visual art of Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter (17th-century artist), Vilaro explores a genius and his unique position in art history. Once enslaved for two decades to world-famous Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, he was liberated to become an artist in his own right during Spain’s “Golden Age.”

Vilaro has uniquely positioned this modern dance amidst the MET exhibit of Pareja’s work, largely recovered by Harlem Renaissance collector and scholar Arturo Schomburg. The dance begins as Leonardo Brito, a strikingly handsome male dancer enters (as Pareja), sits on a table, and through head turns, arm gestures, and focus, defines himself as the protagonist and visionary. Six dancers then enter in unison, changing shapes from low to high, dressed in browns, purples, turquoise, to Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos, (2000), which combines several Latin and African musical styles.

The group embraces, then circles the large urn in the center of the atrium to choral music, eventually residing at the table to strip the “artist” of his shirt, in pieces, designed to look like remnants from the artist’s palette. They shape him like clay; then he manipulates them, seeming to represent the collaboration between artist and his forms.

The artist, now shirtless and more vulnerable, dances an angry and erotic duet with one of the men, possibly representing the tangled, complex, sexualized relationship between Pareja and Velázquez. Later, church bells and a female voice accompany a beautiful woman in blue (representing the “Christ image or Mother Mary”) in a compassionate and reverent duet with Brito, conveying the connection of religion and spirituality to Pareja’s work.

Brito, then dances a passionate solo, arching, contorting, twisting, balancing… the torment, anguish, and strength of the man who frees himself from the bondage of his past, to transform into the artist he becomes. The group enters again, sitting or standing at the table. He joins them with the woman leading; the group then surrounds him, protecting him and worshipping him.

Eduardo Vilaro sensitively conveys through this abstract modern dance the intimacy and involvement an artist experiences with the color of his palette or the figures represented in his paintings, and as an African-Hispanic, the
struggle to release from the bondage of history and assumptions.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Mary Seidman