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A Giant Step for Womankind

Core artist Alena Cawthorne balances on the back of dancer Mariko Drew. \

By Neela Banerjee

Jill Togawa, artistic director of the Purple Moon Dance Project, leads her dancers through a series of hula steps. The late afternoon sun streams through the windows at the end of the long dance studio on Mission Street in San Francisco, silhouetting the fluid swivel of hips. Togawa’s eyes are vigilant, absorbing each minute movement of the women who gracefully sway in front of her.

“Watch your arms,” Togawa calls out sternly, her voice barely loud enough to rise over the strumming hula music. “Make it clean.”

It is barely two weeks before The Tenth, Purple Moon’s retrospective of work, opens at the Cowell Theatre at Fort Mason. Featuring two new pieces in collaboration with Vancouver-based instrumental group Loud, Togawa believes that this is the strongest group of artists her company has ever showcased.

Dance Transformation

It has been nearly 10 years since Togawa first orchestrated a performance by lesbians of color, which dealt with issues of intimacy between women.

At that time, the Honolulu-raised Japanese yonsei was on the verge of retiring from the unstable dancing life. She had been performing professionally for some 18 years.

“I was a little tired,” Togawa says. “I wanted to do work that would allow me to be more of a contribution to the communities I was interested in.”

As Togawa was deliberating a career change, she wanted to bring to life a performance that would express all the aspects of her life. After years of training in the western traditions of ballet and modern dance, she had turned back to her Eastern roots and spent time studying Japanese, Indonesian and Polynesian styles.

“My first language is in Western dance,” Togawa admits. “The other part of me that feels like home is non-Western. Integrating Western and non-Western stuff has made me feel more whole.”

As a step toward that integration, Togawa spent time dancing and choreographing with Asian American Dance Performances in San Francisco. But her life and work were still disparate.

“While working with the Asian American Dance Performances, I had the experience of working in a group where it was all Asian, all people of color. But I was usually the only lesbian,” Togawa says. “Then I had the opportunity to work with gay and lesbian choreographers and I was one of two people of color.”

The 1992 show was supposed to be a one-time thing but the positive response that Togawa received was impossible to ignore.

“I had no intention of turning it into a company or an organization,” Togawa says. “I knew how much work that was, and if someone had asked me I would have said ‘no, no, no.’”

But Togawa says that many of the decisions she makes in her life are intuitive, that she does things by what feels right. Expanding on the first show, Togawa describes Purple Moon’s work as “exploring the continuum of intimacy between women. Not just lovers, but all of the different ways we are intimate — as friends, sisters and sometimes even the way we are intimate with ourselves.”

Along with putting women of color in the spotlight, part of the company’s mission is to affect social change and healing and peace. A few years after Purple Moon started, Togawa wanted to see what they could do besides just performance. Now, Purple Moon’s core artists offer movement and dance workshops for women without formal training. They do a lot of work with older lesbians and with non-profits like the Alternative Family Project and Women and Children’s Family Services — often working with women who are in recovery for substance abuse.

Togawa is honest about the difficulty and frustration of this work.

“I learned that art is pretty low on the priority list of how to do effective change,” she says seriously. “We question sometimes, the impact that we have. But I believe that dance is transformative and that it can help.”

Fluid connections

Along with its strong emphasis on the relationships between women, Purple Moon is dedicated to showcasing diversity. To Togawa, diversity encompasses dance style, ethnicity, age and size. For The Tenth, dancers range in age from just 20 to 53; they stand from barely 5 feet tall to nearly 6 feet; they are trained in ballet, modern, Brazilian and African styles.

At rehearsal, Togawa listens to her dancers, picking up on confused looks or frustrated sighs and encourages their input.

“I really want to integrate my background as well as those of the artists I work with, creating work that does really require our experiences,” Togawa says.

This mix of styles and personalities brings a vibrancy to the two pieces premiering in The Tenth. These pieces are in collaboration with Loud, a Taiko drum and electric guitar group whose pounding rhythms blend East and West much like Togawa’s work.

In “Touching Down,” Togawa’s fluid, yet spare style moves the dancers around the stage in intricate patterns, weaving around the powerful Taiko drummers and guitar player of Loud. Hula steps combine with bold modern kicks, showing off the dancers mastery of various styles and symbolizing the way women of color are constantly moving between the different worlds that make up their lives. Each of the dancers comes out for a solo or a duet and we see them go from the fierce grace of capoeira to the arcing movements of modern to the intrinsic pairings of contact improv. Here, the tall, muscular Sharon Sato and Frances Sedayo, who stands barely 5 feet, dance together — emphasizing the connections between women. The differences in their bodies disappear as they move together.

The duets continue in “Blue Sky, Deep Inside,” another piece created in collaboration with Loud. Here, the women mirror each other in soft hula sways, the curve of their hips and necks like parentheses encompassing their shared sensuality.

The older pieces have a global feel, especially pulling from the music and aesthetics of Asia. “In Celebration” is danced to Indian folk music, with the dancers wearing Batik costumes. The silence and subtle movements of “Floating Lanterns” seem almost like a series of haiku about water because of the utter simplicity. You can almost see the rope the dancers seem to be pulling between them at one point. Along with Loud, percussionist Afia Walking Tree and Voices: Lesbian Choral Ensemble will perform with the dancers.

Due to the retrospective nature of The Tenth, Purple Moon’s themes and its evolution are emphasized, showing the importance of this first, and perhaps only, lesbians of color dance company.

“For me, dance makes me feel connected in the world, it makes me feel like I am contributing and I think it can do that for other people, too,” Togawa says. “I think it can really touch people in a deep way.”

The Purple Moon Dance Project presents The Tenth ay Fort Mason’s Cowell Theatre on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 7 and 8, at 8 p.m. Tickets: $21 advance/$5 at the door. For more information, call 4125-441-3687. Reach Neela Banerjee at
nbanerjee@asianweek.com.