‘Masquerade’ looks to find life after loss
Lively, colorful performances amid audience cry out for social justice
The Rueff stage radiates with color. A team of four actors — black, brown, white — sashay across a set painted with boxes of magenta, pink and light green. Their bodies cut through the space with watery, fluid, yet crisp slashes. Rashad Pridgen, the choreographer and director, wears turquoise. He shows his actors the steps without wearing the final costume — “the Bio-Spirit Safety Suit,” tentacular, virus-like, and splotched with blood red on the top. The subject, the guiding spirit of this piece, is AIDS. Pridgen and the dancers are rehearsing the final “corner” of a four-part dance ritual performance: “Ethos de Masquerade,” set to debut Wednesday, Aug. 16.,at the American Conservatory Theatre’s Strand Theater, in the Rueff. Three other corners make up the performance: “Ancestors,” “Feminine Divine” and “Black Lives Matter.”
“This is to me the loudest that I can give voice to the ... desperation that I feel as a black human being.” Rashad Pridgen, director, Global Street Dance Masquerade
It’s a collaboration between Pridgen’s Global Street Dance Masquerade and the theater company Campo Santo, cofounded by actor-director Sean San José. It is augmented with texts by, among others, Star Finch and San José, who both co-direct with Pridgen. The writings of Luis Alfaro (“Oedipus el Rey”), Colman Domingo (“The Scottsboro Boys”), Chinaka Hodge, and Ashley Smiley will be woven around Pridgen’s masquerades.
On the process of asking these major California playwrights for their texts, San José says: “We wanted pieces with heart and spirit and color,” then chuckles at the apt pun.
“Ethos de Masquerade” is an elaboration of previous masquerade and social justice performances by Campo Santo and affiliates. The “Black Lives Matter” corner riffs off of a previous Finch, Pridgen and Campo Santo production, “Babylon is Burning” (2016), which used the language of masquerade as a response to the police brutality documented in Jeff Chang’s seminal hip-hop history “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” (2005). And just last June, Finch premiered her play “H.O.M.E.” at the Rueff — a work described as “an Afro-futuristic meditation on motherhood, femininity, sisterhood, and gentrification” — themes which are picked up in the “Feminine Divine” corner of “Ethos.”
“Masquerade” is Pridgen’s life work. He and San José are quick to clarify that this piece is not the popular image of masquerade as masked balls or Carnaval-esque reverie. Rather, it’s the pan-African combination of dance, movement and communal engagement, with performers moving in and out of the audience’s space in elaborate garb.
The many suits in “Ethos,” designed by Pridgen and created by Mary Hogue of Praxis Clothing, are unique to each corner. The Black Lives Masquerade suit, for instance, is covered with snapshots of black victims of police brutality and racialized violence. Emmett Till, Sandra Bland, Kathryn Johnston of Atlanta and Oscar Grant III of Hayward are prominently featured.
A key question: Why masquerade? Pridgen is quick to say the Black Lives Masquerade is the most honest form of protest.
“I’m not the type that is out in the streets and does the marches,” he explains. “But as a performer, this is to me the loudest that I can give voice to the oppression and the desperation that I feel as a black human being during this time of out-ofcontrol police brutality and oppression.”
Pridgen sees masquerade as a form of self-expression that “crashes” into an urban space where it might not seem fit at first. He takes hold of what is seen as a “traditional” form of expression and wrenches it from that typed past, animating the roving modern city in the process.
One of the many challenges of “Ethos de Masquerade” involves adapting what is essentially an improvisatory, abstract, movement-based art for a Western theatrical space. Masquerade seeks a special intimacy which can be lost inside the theater, where there is usually a neat division between spectator and audience.
“What (the texts) do for me,” says Pridgen, “is help articulate these stories around a visual concept. It’s a challenge to bring this experience that I really feel doesn’t live in the theater, shouldn’t be confined, shouldn’t be really talked about — it should just be performed.”
Words often fail us. They often seem inadequate to deal with necessary facts of life. This is especially evident in the AIDS corner, with texts by Sean San José. His whole life’s work has been haunted by remembrances of AIDS victims — a presence articulated through absence. In 1996, he created “Pieces of the Quilt,” comprised of one-act plays about AIDS and HIV by such playwrights as Tony Kushner, Edward Albee and Ntozake Shange, in honor of his parents, both of whom died of AIDS.
“When I feel and experience the masquerade, it speaks to loss and spirits that can’t be caught,” says San José. “If there were two buildings for those things, one would be called ‘AIDS’ and one would be called ‘Crack’ in my life. You can name them easily. But how do you express them? That’s a little harder.”
This profound inarticulateness, which San José equates to telling a ghost story, finds its vehicle of expression in the masquerade. San José refers to the AIDS suit as “an embodied altar” — a holy site to remember. “Ethos de Masquerade” is made up of four such altars, each giving sound to the voiceless.