The
body as expressive tool
Dance is movement attached inexorably to music. But with Russ Ligtas it is more
exactly stated as movement attached not just with sound but with all the
elements of environment. His performance is dance in its most fundamental and
elementary form and music is often optional unless one begins to think of music
not just as structured sound but sound which is the result of everything that
is all around us including the molecular vibration of matter and the vibration
of all our thoughts.
The consequence of his performance is first of all to make us wonder about how
we define music, performance and dance. He makes us worry whether our own
biases are far too structured than they should be. But this is not to say that
Russ is at war with the whole concept of structure itself. Watching his dance
we become immediately that his are not structure-less movements. There is a
clear structure in everything that Russ does. His performances are always well
thought out, they follow after clear transitions having parts that follow
clearly after each other. There is of course a fair amount of randomness and
chance. But they move in harmony with the artist's clear intentions and
desires. The performances can be written down as a narrative with small
implosions of randomness set in between the lines. In this sense, Russ Ligta's
performance is metaphor of life itself, inevitably purposive yet subject to
chance and accident.
The body is expressive tool and Russ utilizes every part of his external self
to express what is is inside him in the sense of thought, sensibility and
emotion. And in the course of the dance, he leads us to various parts of him,
his fingers, his face, his feet, his torso, his mask. We see him in detail and
then in the whole. The astute viewer begins to realize that Russ has held us
under his spell and control. He has us attached to him in a most mysterious
way. And we immediately wonder how we should feel.
We should outgrow the wonderment of seeing something strange and unexpected.
Russ is only telling us a story with a clear message that we should take home
with us even if the message is hard to pin down into a catch phrase or a
sentence wrought from cliche. The message is almost arbitrary to us. It is only
a message such as one would get when one touches another person's soul. It is
not a message intended to save us from doom or doom us from salvation. Russ'
messages are of a wonderful confusion, such a confusion that comes only with an
understanding that life is irrevocably confusion and we would have to make
sense of it by ourselves and by whatever way we can. Life is irony. It is
mystery.
The costume as mask
With Russ Ligtas, costume is a mask which uncovers, not him but us. It uncovers
us to ourselves. Russ Ligtas is spinning for us a continuing narrative, as
story if you will. In fact, his story is a serialized novel with characters who
live through time. And we will always wonder how far he can take his story and
how we might follow him. We do not have to see every serial of his epic tale to
understand the tale itself. Every serial in a sense contains inside it the cues
of the larger narrative. Russ Ligtas' narrative is post-modern story telling.
It is a novel for the contemporary person, fractured, discontinuous,
suggestive, serialized. And we might understand several ways. At what point do
we draw the line between the story and reality? Who decides where the line
exists?
In a sense, Russ Ligtas' style empowers the viewer in a greater way than most
narrative forms we have been used to. In theater and cinema, there is always
suspension of disbelief. It is a devise that the performance aspires for.
Watching a performance by Russ Ligtas, we have to wonder if it aspires for the
same thing. In traditional theater, the stage is a different world into which
we are transported in the course of everything. Russ Ligtas' performance does
the same thing but we are not removed into the stage. Instead, we begin to see
that the stage is everywhere. We become extension of performance. It is Russ
which is the focus of everything, but we ourselves are part of it. Everything
do becomes act. Every sound we make become music. And our thoughts become part
of of the script itself.
Reality is instrument to fantasy
In a sense this is the soul of Russ Ligtas' art. Reality is only an instrument
of fantasy. And the fantasy that Russ Ligtas weaves for us is a fantasy that
makes us wonder at life and at ourselves. He will make us ask ourselves who we
truly are and we may not always like the answer. But if we are to enjoy Russ
Ligtas, we would have to enjoy those parts of ourselves we are not always aware
of nor do we think about too seriously. Not everyone will like Russ Ligtas but
then, not everyone is meant to. Russ Ligtas may not know it but he drives a
divide between people. He makes no a few of us uncomfortable. But this
discomfort may be what is at the soul of him. We would have to exceed this
discomfort to fall into the performance itself. And when we do we would then
see the performances for their true worth and in their true nature. Russ Ligtas
is not a glorified circus. He is not Cirque Soleil, not broadway. He is
theater, dance and music in its most radical down to earth form. He is all
these things as they might have once been before the rise of contemporary
pretensions and the profit oriented grandness of mainstream and popular art.
The awfully personal rebellion of Russ Ligtas
Russ Ligtas is engaged in a rebellion. It is a rebellion against concrete
un-abstracted things. He is not a modernist at war with conservative society.
His rebellion is more essential than that. He should not be there. He lives in
a society where true art is and has always been marginal. The traditional
formula has always been to collaborate with conservative society and dish out
regular fodder to established art patrons in the hope of becoming one day
famous and successful by their leave. Watching Russ perform, we always wonder
how far he will go in life. His is a tenuous survival. How would a person doing
this make enough money enough to survive? And yet he is there. And he has been
there longer than we once estimated. Thus, we have no recourse but to ask if
our own estimation of the world is truly correct. Does Russ know something we
don't? Whatever, we wish him to win. We want him to last. He certainly deserves
all that a great artist ought to have. We can only hope the world is better
than what we think.
-Prof. Raymund L. Fernandez
