‘Dancer, not terrorist’ reads a small, starkly painted signboard propped on the floor centerstage at Hong Kong’s intimate Fringe Upstairs theater.
‘Sep. 7, 2008’ reads another.
By the time Michikazu Matsune strolls onstage, the 60-odd audience members have brought themselves up to speed on the essential facts behind this terse signage, perusing program notes, madly Googling on their smartphones, and quizzing Siri.
It appears that, on the date in question, an African-American dancer of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, who was traveling with the famed company to perform in Israel, was whisked off to an interrogation room by border control officers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. They grilled him about his Arab-sounding first name and commanded him to dance in order to prove that he was a dancer.
Abdur-Rahim Jackson had been with Alvin Ailey for ten years, and even proffered a printed flyer that advertised the company’s performances, featuring a photo of himself in mid-leap. But this was not proof enough for the immigration officials. They made him dance, twice.
The contretemps fizzled out in the press after Jackson – and the company – appeared to shrug off the inquisition. Though artistic director Judith Jamison made a pointed remark to reporters at an open rehearsal after the incident: "We are artists. . . We are here to irritate you, to change your mind and make you think." Jackson mentioned that he had once been similarly profiled at an American airport. "Maybe I need to get used to dancing at airports," he said.
The peripatetic Matsune – who between 2005 and 2010 had been discreetly capturing his (less eventful) encounters with immigration officials around the world on video camera – was moved by this story to create a theater piece. Born in Japan, he has lived in Vienna for 20 years, lured there originally to join a dance company.
In a post-performance talk, he said he’d considered contacting Jackson but decided against it. Instead, he collected all his background material from public sources, including social media. (Among the things he learned was that Jackson has become a choreographer for the likes of Beyoncé.) The limits of his research provided rich fodder for the artist; into the gaps and around the edges Matsune injects historical tidbits, crumbs of insight into his own life, and enchanting flights of fantasy.
We learn about the Jewish organization that first offered a space to Ailey and his newly formed troupe; about the 1972 massacre at the Tel Aviv airport, instigated by three Japanese Red Army members recruited by the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine); and the hilarious tale behind Matsune’s subversive passport photo, for which he shaved his eyebrows and glued the shavings to his upper lip to mimic a mustache.
We witness his modest but winsome recreation of the first two dance episodes in Ailey’s iconic Revelations – “I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned” and “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, then why not every man?” – in preparation for which he instructs us to imagine the other dancers around him. Somewhere in an upper circle of heaven occupied exclusively by the giants of dance, Alvin Ailey must be smiling down at this lanky, nimble suppliant paying homage in his jeans, T-shirt and sneakers.
Matsune has no idea what Jackson actually performed for the border guards – whether he gave them a bit of Revelations, “or just floated around them like a ghost.” Matsune broods over how the impromptu performance ended: “Was he told to stop? Did he hold a pose, or slowly step out of his dancing body into his kept-in-the-holding-room body?”
Punctuating his monologue and fitful episodes of dances are video clips of Matsune’s myriad encounters with border officials, who appear variously distracted, suspicious, bored, amiable. The recurrent sound of passport pages being flipped becomes an ominous overlay to the otherworldly score from Brian Eno’s Ambient Music for Airports.
Underlying his witty preoccupations is an insecurity: “do I dance well enough” to pass the scrutiny of a border official? This anxiety appears to have transformed the idea of an airport in his eyes from a kind of utopia – “places that connect people,” where people like him, who live between cultures, “can blend in” – to giant, indistinguishable shopping malls.
Jackson’s misadventure has become the departure point for a philosophical, poignant and funny investigation of the absurdity and inhumanity of border policing, of the nature of freedom and the arbitrary privilege conferred by a passport. Matsune’s work feels particularly potent today, at a time when the U.S. President feels emboldened to bar Muslims from entering his country, and the American news network CNN solicits thoughts from young people around the world on “what freedom means to me.”
Upon taking his bow, Matsune trots out a sculpted bottle of perfume which he offers to spray on the audience. It is Beyoncé’s signature scent, which he imagines can be purchased in any Duty-Free airport shop. A mischievous flourish that makes a perfect ending to this work.
