Alida was born to dance. Her mom Diane Antoinette, a ballerina & dance teacher, is Aruba’s first lady of dance, revered and loved by artists of all ages. Her daughter naturally followed those tip-toes polishing her moves in her mother’s studio first; in later years Alida studied dance at the Boston Conservatory and the Alvin Halley dance school in New York.
During the last decade, as Alida went to school overseas, she periodically popped her head here, visiting her native island. Whenever she could she contributed to local shows and gallery openings, even to the Jewel Box Revue and to Carnival Queen-elections, as a choreographer; she stayed in touch with her audience during her school years.
That certainly paid off. A bit of effective PR by friend Marinus Wegereef delivered audiences to a peculiar, experimental work Alida conceived and executed, this weekend.
I caught her having her hair brushed, a few minutes before show time. The empty gallery rooms were abuzz, dancers were warming up; they eagerly posed for my pictures. The artistic community was all so excited about the new leadership; about Alida’s grand vision, in action.
Alida reports that during one of her island visits she watched her mom’s studio put on a retrospective and made up her mind to map out a plan for an introspective herself. The idea of charkas came to her as centers of function, as worlds within the human body, as sort of chapters. She outlined all seven and related their function to stages in her life and personal experiences she underwent as a woman/child growing up in the Caribbean.
The result is a 45-minute art workout, unfolding at Access Art Gallery. (A few more performances are scheduled for Friday & Saturday, check it out)
"When I met curator Renwick," explains Alida, "and found out the gallery has seven rooms, I knew it would be the perfect venue for the performance."
With Internal Energy, the audience follows the seven segments of the play against seven different backdrops, with seven different groups of performers, all Alida’s island friends.
You gotta give her credit. This is naturally not a paid performance. All involved give their time and appropriately their internal energy to the cause of artistic creation, free of charge. Still, Alida mobilized all of the island’s major dancers, male and female and managed to move seven female plastic artists to create an especially commission work on the occasion.
The first chakra, dedicated to our human root, enfolds in the foyer, the tiny entrance room with four young dancers practically sprawled at ticket-holders feet. The fluid music accompanies lyrical dance. The room smells of patchouli; the walls are scribbled with poetic shards, highlighting Belinda de Veer’s work, hanging on the wall. Incidentally, the painting is already sold. The artist is extremely popular on the island; she is a courageous woman who gave up a respectable career in order to explore a more satisfying direction, namely to mine and nurture her artistic calling.
The second room recreates a union of three mature dancers against the colorful art work of Eliza Lejuez who uses a projector to paint the dancers and incorporate them in her visuals. The performance is disturbing at first as you only hear the dancers breathe. Alida, wishing to incorporate the principles of Yoga into the performance uses breath as music. The room smells of musk, and the dance, an abstract sequence with Indian influences is mesmerizing. Jacky, Mayra & Samanta, are accomplished dancers living on the island. Samanta is the artistic director of Club Di Movimiento, dance school; Mayra a dance teacher for Aruba’s CKV school.
The two baby daughters of dancer Astrid Hagers-Arends were in the audience watching their mom perform in the third charka dedicated to intuition. I am convinced this will be a major event in their tender lives as they intuitively decide to follow mom’s foot steps or reject them.
The evening was refreshingly emceed by Fernando Mansur who is a living, breathing performance onto himself. He paired the fragrances with the sequences and explained the essential as the 45-minute happening evolved.
Alida’s list of thank-yous is long. She cashed a lot of chips to swing that thing, during the eleven months gestation period. All well worth it.
