To Be Straight With You
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Dance review: To Be Straight With You
REVIEW ... NAC Ottawa
by Natasha Gauthier
The Ottawa Citizen | Friday Nov 27 2009
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“Religion is like electricity: it can be liberating or it can be destructive.”
The words are spoken by a dancer spinning back and forth like a human dreidel, arms bent at 90-degrees on either side of her head. She plays a world-weary, 70-year-old female rabbi disheartened by the increasingly violent forces of religious fundamentalism, in particular its intolerance of gays and lesbians.
To be Straight with You, by the U.K.’s DV8 Physical Theatre, is full of such moments, where uncomfortable and sometimes ugly words are tempered by arresting visual poetry. The award-winning work, which had its Canadian premiere Thursday night, exposes the raw wound of homophobia through the voices of ordinary people—victims and perpetrators both.
Lloyd Newson, DV8’s artistic director, taped hundred of hours of “vox pop” style interviews with subjects from all over Britain who have either experienced gay-bashing first hand, or who believe homosexuality is wrong and should be punished. Newson used choreography, film, lighting, music and his nine extraordinary, culturally diverse performers to bring their thoughts and experiences to life.
The most disturbing stories involve hatred based on intransigent religious beliefs, whether Christian or Muslim. An Anglo-Pakistani teenager comes out to his family, only for his father to chase him out of the house and stab him in an alley. A lesbian from devout Tanzania is hunted down by local boys and gang-raped with a beer bottle. The violent homophobia prevalent in Jamaican dance-hall culture, where singers boast about shooting “batty-boys” in the head, is also explored. Many of the interviewees fled beatings and death threats in their home countries, only to find persecution of a more insidious nature in the U.K.—for example, the London cops who are told in a memo to act “less gay” when patrolling certain ethnic neighbourhoods.
To be Straight with You is not flawless: it suffers from the episodic, anecdotal nature of its material. There is no real arc or structure, and at times it comes across like an especially earnest PSA. Still, there is no denying its punch-to-the-gut power, its honesty or its courage.
