In Panama, a country of riches, but little for the arts, Milvia Martinez’s solo choreography flourishes
Haunting portraits—most painted, some hastily drawn—appear momentarily, waver, and fade to black on a darkened stage resonant with melancholy, almost dolorous string music. Some seem to never come fully into focus, while others overlap and intersect, reappearing at random intervals. The portraits are mostly of women, though a few male faces appear. Finally, a hand appears, caressing the length of fabric onto which a graphic portrait is projected, as the lights are slowly raised and a shadowy figure begins to move about the stage, removing the projecting cloths from lines crisscrossing her path. Suddenly the stage is bathed in light, illuminating the agonized, stooped form of a tiny, barefoot woman, shrouded in a shambling dark overcoat.
This is not your mother’s baile típico.
Milvia Martínez’s Cabanga is the artist’s first work of solo choreography. It received the Grand Prize at the Iberoamerican Festival Summit of the Americas in Argentina in 2005. Cabanga is a powerful, haunting performance piece, an amalgamation of Japanese and modern dance traditions more readily associated with expressionist choreographers like Pina Bausch rather than with the salsa en pollera, the wildly popular dance and costume of her native Panamá. Martínez, who has studied and performed throughout the world including Chile, New York, Spain, and Tokyo (as a member of the Min Tanaka Company), is a somewhat anomalous artist in her homeland, where she currently makes her base. Though she had classical training in ballet as a child, Martínez did not study dance seriously until after college. “At that time I wanted to be a writer, painter, poet—everything. I didn’t know what. Then I came back to Panamá after the U.S. invasion, and I went on to study psychology.
“While I was doing that I went to theater to see a piece of a French troupe. Something really clicked in me. This was very theatrical, so I went to Chile, and thought I would do dance and psychology together, but it’s just not possible to do [both] at the same time, and I went for dance.”
Martínez’s highly theatrical interpretations have found enthusiastic supporters at home and abroad. “It was a full theater each time,” Martínez says of the Panamanian performances of Cabanga, “and I presented [it] many times because each time I was invited abroad with it I would do sort of a warm-up thing at home.
“I was surprised because people were very open to it, very happy—I don’t think it’s what they’re used to—they’re used to very cute, pretty, entertaining things, so that part was surprising.”
Cabanga was initially inspired by a piece of music. “I actually thought it was going to be a ten-minute piece. The first time I presented it, it lasted ten minutes, but it just kept growing and growing and growing and growing. I think that more than inspiration, there was this thing in my stomach. I had such a big necessity to move, to dance, to get on with it. I think it was just the necessity to move from the inside out, not just gymnastically.”
When we speak in early October, she is about midway through a residency in Mexico with choreographer Lola Lince, who she met at a festival in Quito. Feeling a bit stagnated in Panamá, Martínez had approached Lince about possibly working together. “The whole thing about coming here was a big adventure. I brought my family, my six-year old,” Martínez explains, and although a discussed collaboration did not materialize, she is pleased with her residency work. “It’s good in the sense that there’s plenty of space and I can show her my work-in-progress.” Martínez is currently concentrating on another solo piece, ideally to be presented at the end of this year.
Martínez does not collaborate often. “I’ve been pretty much on my own for many years now. With the last piece—of course you’re always collaborating with your friends who are painters and they give you feedback, but in terms of dancers, not really.”
“I’ve always been under someone else’s troupe or direction or worked for somebody else’s choreography and this was the first time, out of necessity, that I decided to try something by myself. I still wanted to dance but there wasn’t a choreographer around.”
That necessity was brought about by Martínez’s sudden and unexpected return from Australia to Panamá in 2000 to care for her ailing mother. “I received a phone call saying, ‘your mom is going into the operating room in three days,’ and when she got out, they said she’ll live 3 more months at the most, so I just left everything hanging—my life—and stayed with her. And then life develops—my mom got really strong, she got over her cancer, then I fell in love and I got pregnant.”
Martínez is philosophical about the turn of events and their significance to her creative practice. “Now that I look back on it, I was missing a lot in certain real aspects of life,” she continues, “because my life was very nomadic, and very unreal in a way, being a mom and being close to someone who you think is going to die.
“I’ve always been a very physical person, in the sense that—even the spiritual part of myself I live it through my body. It’s like the body is the instrument through which I live, and I aim to create and to connect to something more than just the flesh. It’s always been the only anchor throughout my life that I can remember—through the craziness and intense things that happened.
“I think—not just dancers, but artists in general—become like some sort of special beings, or they live in some sort of elite world, and they start creating work to show in their same media—artists looking at artists’ work and saying how good or how bad it is. It’s a little bit like the difference of living out of dance but living for dance. It’s just part of everything— how you eat, how you talk, how you love, how you deal with sickness, how you become a mother—everything.”
There does, as always, remain the question of support, which for the arts in Panamá is “very poor,” the artist explains. “I don’t know if it’s the government, that it’s not interested at all, but it’s just that people there don’t have that urge, that thing that I’ve found elsewhere, in Chile, for example. It’s hard to find people who are willing to risk their little comfortable life to do something. Even if it’s not money, even if it’s just like the energy of other people who are putting their energy into something similar.” Since her return to Panamá, Martínez has continued to travel abroad, studying and performing, and does not rule out the possibility of relocating once again. “I’m really happy about this new seed that is growing,” she says of her current work. “I feel more alive inside.”
At the end of Cabanga, the painted portraits reappear—larger now, resolutely singular—dominating the dancer’s stooped, spent figure as she makes her way slowly off the stage. One face catches the eye this time around—a middle-aged man with graying hair and beard—which bears a strong resemblance to the father (the late mathematician, professor, playwright, and poet José de Jesús “Chuchú” Martínez, close friend and advisor to assassinated Panamanian President General Omar Torrijos Herrera) from whom Martinez was estranged until the age of eighteen. In discussing the artistry of life, she acknowledges the artistic impulse that they shared, and the way in which “art” can be applied to a vast array of meaningful practices. “It’s also spiritual,” says Martínez, “if you give yourself to whatever you are.”
COMMENTS