Choreography Explores Experience of Soldiering

Author: Kate Prouty

"Daughter of a Pacifist Soldier," performed this weekend in the Middlebury College Dance Theater, asked difficult questions of its audience and demanded that its performers investigate sensitive subject matter. The performance presented a remarkably thoughtful consideration of the post-war experience of veterans.

New York City choreographer Tamar Rogoff's multidisciplinary performance piece used six performers, audio recordings from veterans and text from Rogoff's father's war writings to explore the experience of soldiering and the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) it leaves in its wake.

Rogoff became interested in this material when she discovered her father's World War II diaries from Burma and dozens of love letters he had written to her mother. Wondering "in what way [she has] inherited the legacy of [her father's] war trauma," Rogoff selected a subject close to her heart.

The piece survived not only due to Rogoff's personal connection to the material but also because of the five dancers' emotional investment. They each spent considerable time fostering a relationship with a veteran before composing solos to accompany audio recordings created from one-on-one interviews with the veterans. Each recording played in the background as a soloist figure, dressed in army khaki or hunter green, supported the voice with her movement.

A repeated posture during these solo sections was a still figure with her arms rounded and gaze cast up towards the ceiling, as if her embrace was bearing the weight of the world. She may not have been supporting the entire world, but her movement decisions alone carried the traumatic story of one trusting veteran who relied upon her to represent his respective experience through dance.

The material generated for these solo portions of the performance was minimalist, repetitive and, as Rogoff insisted, not complex enough to exist independently from the text. Rather than interpreting the text, the movement accompanied the words, offering a supportive vehicle through which to better hear the veteran's voice.

The piece was cohesive, regularly returning to readings of excerpts from Bernard Rogoff's war diaries and love letters. These two sources from the same man presented remarkable contradictions in emotion. His medical journal was a collection of sparse observations of the horrific circumstances war creates: "Walked eight miles — knee gave out after five hours despite many stops. Slept through rainy night — back wet, left knee paining, picked off five leaches, prayed for light," for example.

On the other hand, his letters home to his wife were romantic and positive in contrast to the darker tone of the piece: "But honestly darling, they'll be bells ringing and elephants dancing, string ensembles will be constantly playing. We'll jump into pools of chocolate pudding flavored with sherry. We'll lie nude in the rain so no one will see our tears of joy," he wrote.

Although they starkly contrasted with the journal entries, the tone of the love letters that Rogoff selected to have read during the performance was perhaps too consistent, all ending with this abstract optimism. This represents a potential weakness of the piece: at times, especially during the ending, in which each dancer delivered a parting monologue to a video image of their veteran — the performance tugged too tightly at conventional heart strings. It was strongest when it relied upon the honesty of primary source accounts from veterans, but weakest when the performers tried too hard to emulate this level of genuine emotion.

The performers did, however, accurately depict a certain void that veterans experience after war. Each dancer, before performing her solo, walked to the front of the stage, took off the heavy combat boots she was wearing and placed them before the audience. The empty boots remained ominously on stage during the solo, suggesting the presence of the absent veteran whose voice was being heard and the countless veterans that each man represents.

Rogoff intentionally wove together a wide array of media, sometimes juxtaposing very serious subject matter with comical satire in order to keep the audience's attention. Like in war, this fragmented landscape presented a world in which things are never calm and simple. The layering of images and ideas was evocative of the scattered, often contradictory, memories of a veteran suffering from PTSD.

On three occasions, the dancers depicted satires that criticized societal insensitivities towards war — a mock audition for an overly glorified war movie, a fashion show debuting the season's latest camouflaged styles and a talk show panel of doctors analyzing a PTSD patient.

These theatrical shorts were so exagerrated that there was no mistaking them for satire. Although they received laughs, the satires seriously criticized popular culture's tendency to normalize war. Their message was clearly delivered: war is never something that can be taken lightly or adapted to suit a director's, designer's or psychologist's fancy.

Rogoff explained that, like so many things this year, the choreography was emotionally intensified by the events of Sept. 11. Having generated the majority of the solo material in the first weeks of September, the dancers invested not only their emotional attachments to the veterans in their work, but also their personal reactions to the terrorist attacks. The performance concluded with Rogoff's character addressing a photograph of her deceased father, wondering if she had inherited her father's, or the war's, nervous system, and solemnly delivering to him the message: "We're at war again."