A Review of Sagittarius A.

Travieso's Sagittarius A. captured the enduring strength and power of women in an environment that is persistently hostile towards them. Travieso carried this analogy across three main narratives that were deftly woven together using the technology and architecture available to her in the EMPAC Theater. The blend of dance, narration, projections, and audience interaction made the performance complex and hard to predict while remaining relatively easy to follow and to connect with.

The theatrical performance opened with a dancer (Jennifer Payán) on stage, who is introduced to the audience by the narrator as SA, a powerful being with many arms who creates the universe. She is dancing center stage and is controlling great lengths of fabric that show the power of her and all of her limbs. The narrator continues this story, which has an air of mythology, to introduce a wolf (Jack Magai) who is jealous of SA's power and therefore consumes all of her limbs. Even without all of her limbs, she is - at a great disappointment to the wolf - still much more powerful than him. This legend told through dance and narration is the first of the three not-so-distinct stories that Travieso tells in Sagittarius A..

At this point, the storytelling is interrupted by an entrance from somewhere behind the audience. A lecturer, Dr. Amalia (Catherine Correa), is here to give a lecture on the death of a star and the formation of the Milky Way. She’s a little late – the lecture was supposed to begin at eight – and very disorganized, her overflowing folders of lecture notes are giving her a lot of trouble, and she drops them several times as she tries to arrange them on the stage right podium. This whole process is very comedic and endearing – a great contrast from the narrated, mythical dance piece of SA that we all had just seen. The dancer, irritated, exits up through the back of the auditorium, heading into the booth above and behind the audience. Dr. Amalia’s lecture is the second of three stories.

Then, without Dr. Amalia seeming to notice, the projection upstage switches from her lecture slides to the view from a camera pointed up at the booth, where the dancer, who we learn to be called Ana, has left to. This camera that follows Ana brings us the third story in this theatrical performance. She is getting undressed and does not seem to notice the camera, which follows her closely and fixates on parts of her body. This camera continues to follow her on what is presumably her way home (through a local landmark, Prospect Park), and the mood quickly changes from carefree to suspenseful as Ana feels as though she is being followed. The suspense heightens, she sees a wolf, and she begins to run. The wolf ends up biting her, and she rushes to the Gorge, another local landmark, to clean her wounds. As she cleans them, all of the water (both upstream and downstream of her) in the Gorge turns red, which take this story from relatively believable to surreal. Even though she has been hurt, she is still strong, and she heads off back to the woods, where there now seems to be many versions of her running and dancing.

Ana’s story is told in segments, and between them we go back to Dr. Amalia’s lecture, which – like Ana’s story – gets more surreal as the performance continues. She teaches about the death of a star and the birth of a galaxy, her visuals start off scientific and end up more abstract, later on she is not teaching so much as dancing in different parts of the theater. To wrap up these stories towards the end of the performance, Ana is back and assumes her role of SA, where she is not even more powerful than she was at the beginning, before her limbs were by the wolf. She controls great sheets of white fabric that hang from floor to ceiling on either side of the audience, and the narration picks up again to tell that she controls everything in the universe, the creation and destruction of it all. This segment of dance and fabric is not the same as the piece at the very beginning, but it is similar enough that they bookend the performance and give a sense of resolution to the audience, which I greatly appreciated. Even if I was not able to follow every little detail when the stories of Ana, Dr. Amalia, and SA became less well defined, I – and the rest of the audience – understood that the power that SA represented is very strong. It is something that existed long before us and will continue to exist long after.