Not About Iraq? Of course, it is. The dance is a lie

“This dance was a series of rescue attempts,” she says of her probing, quarrelsome new piece, “Not About Iraq,” “I wanted to rescue it from my own contempt.”

Of course, some of us happen to like the sweet seduction that dance offers, thank you very much. The youthfulness and vitality it celebrates. What’s wrong with a little escapism? Better than thinking about politics or, uh, the war…

We’re not thinking enough about the war, Marks say—and we’re not doing enough about it, either.

“I feel very critical of myself, because I don’t know how to act as a citizen,” she says. “How do I really know what’s going on? What is the truth? If you don’t think you understand what’s happening, how can you act?”

To find out how art and civic duty mix, Marks did what you won’t see the higher-profile dance-makers do: She plunged into the thankless, largely forsaken arena of political art. But the marvel of “Not About Iraq” is its ringing clarity. This is a work of quiet fueled by the way it raises disturbing questions, pared-down and unsentimental.

It’s also full of outright lies, the first being the title, as the piece is quite openly about Iraq, with piercing references to the cruelties at Abu Ghraib and the ambiguity of “evidence.” It is also not about Iraq; it’s more broadly about manipulation and reality and how difficult it is to tell the difference even when you’re in the same room with them.

Marks isn’t the first dance-maker to sound an alarm about a thorny, little-understood issue that defines an age, but she’s one of the few to do it well. Marks, unlike most choreographers, cannot physically demonstrate her moves: While in her 20s, she herniated a disk in her spine, saddling her with enduring discomfort. She is nothing if not resourceful, however. To break into the dance world, she had worked as a janitor and electrician at the experimental hub Dance Theater Workshop. Now, she became expert at directing other dancers with words alone. A Fulbright fellowship to London followed; she taught and made dance films at the London Contemporary Dance School. Then came the offer from UCLA.

In a new phase of life, combined with 9/11 and seeing dance from outside the bubble of New York, all fell into “Not About Iraq.” “Did I dare to do something different?” she asked herself. “As a dancer, there’s an ingrained passivity about the world. You don’t change the way things are done. You’re made docile by the discipline. I think it’s very productive to fall out of love with dance,” she adds. “Dissonance is interesting.”-Sarah Kaufman (LAT-WP)