A Review of Sagittarius A.

The theatrical piece Sagittarius A. by Yara Travieso was clearly designed for EMPAC and did a good job of showing off the space, but it was also about women. The show starts out with a female creator SA with many limbs who is creating the universe. The male wolf mutilates her by eating her limbs and claims that he loves her. He becomes jealous when he is reminded that she can create life and he cannot, since women can give birth. In history this part of being a woman has been used to undermine them, but this performance portrays it as god-like. He then eats her and she becomes a black hole, like the one that may exist at the location called Sagittarius A* in the Milky Way. She remains powerful in some ways. After all, black holes are powerful and can cause objects to gravitate towards them.

Most of the performance goes back and forth between a woman giving a talk on stars (but of course focused on the personified Sagittarius A) and video footage a woman named Ana who is the same dancer as SA. Throughout we focus on her body parts, which is reminiscent of the beginning where the star’s limbs and body are so important to her. Ana has headphones in and is listening and dancing to music when she suddenly is in the middle of the woods. There is harsh electric guitar music and eventually she sees the eyes of a wolf. She runs but the wolf catches up with her and bites her arm. You see her with the injury later, and she starts bleeding from between her legs as well. She tries to clean her wound in a small waterfall but the water and the whole pool below become red like blood. She then seems empowered and goes back to attack the wolf. I had a harder time interpreting what came after. Ana sees several versions of herself dancing in the woods, but without the arm wound. This is frightening to her and she runs away.

Several times during the performance, video is shown on the circular ceiling. It all shows the dancer who is both SA and Ana looking like a star. First she looks like she could be an exploding star, and later she is back lit as though she is a void but she is still lively. You think about how when the star exploded many pieces of her were spread throughout the universe. At the very end of the show, she dances while moving large sheets back and forth on the walls and you can see her with many arms on the screen. I felt like she had somehow regained her body.

I liked how the performance used information about stars and the Milky Way to make the female characters seem mythical. The use of the wolf made me think of fairy tales where the female character is the victim and does not have much power over what happens to her. I also liked the creative use of the space, like using the ceiling to show video even though it’s not a flat traditional surface for showing video, and having the audience participate in being part of the galaxy by turning our flashlights on and showing the lights on the screen. I was a little unsure what the performance was trying to say in the end. SA seems powerful again, since she has taken over the whole theater and is portrayed with limbs, and maybe that could be a message to women that they shouldn’t let the oppressive parts of our society control them and keep them from creating what they choose.