Martin, Love, Sex & Rhythm

Love, sex, rhythm; more sex and some dancing; some Gaga. More Gaga. A jukebox-style montage of performance and social politics, and buried beneath it all, a fairly poignant question — what happens when the community you call home, one built on sex (and rhythm), no longer welcomes you inside?

Ballet Teatro Internacional’s production of Martin: Love, Sex, & Rhythm, created and written by Alvaro Maldonado, and directed by Jacamiah Ybanez, tackles some deeply important questions but too-often stumbles to express them. And it struggles visibly to get there, reaching perhaps a bit too wide in the process — part dance show, part cabaret, part soap opera family drama for the Grinder age.

It tackles HIV/AIDS, drug use, and the new-found perils of marriage and monogamy in the queer circles now struggling to navigate them. A few too many undercurrents — the typical growing pains of a still-developing piece. Too frequently the production felt strained, struggling to get through to the next song or dance (more Gaga), making the project feel a bit like a CD that was skipping.

But those moments of dance, collectively, did much to make up for it. The choreography, by Maldonado and Zac Norton (both of whom are company members), is artful and ambitious, and brilliantly executed by an extraordinarily talented dance team. And where this piece stumbles as a play, traditionally understood, it succeeds as a community-oriented, physically-expressed exclamation of the shifting joys and challenges facing the gay community in a post-DOMA world — a community that still struggles to reconcile a sexually-liberated past with a picket fence-future.

At the center of the play (and, in many ways, the larger struggle) is a sort of lost-generation. One caught squarely in the middle of a long-fought culture war — too young to remember the dawn of the LGBTQ rights movement. A bit too old to simply reap the benefits of the fight, as younger millennials can. This is a generation in-between, that came of age in the middle of a nationwide struggle —that has stood and watched the world around them change far faster than anyone could have expected. But the scars remain. Disease still challenges their social circles and their relationships; drug and alcohol use fluctuate between recreation and medication; and their bar scenes, so formative in the genesis of this community, have slowly gone digital.

The play, much like the issues it struggles to represent, ends with a far-from-satisfying conclusion. But perhaps it’s better without one. The element of this piece that stands out most — more so, even, than the dancing — is the lingering sense of the real. That these issues are personal; that they are close and well known. Both by the company and the audience which was there on opening night.

This is something more than a play, in that sense. It’s a fumbling, grasping attempt to chronicle and find meaning in a community that’s been changing faster than you can say Prop 8—and to define the still unknown ramifications it all will bring.

Take me to the DCTS 2014 Capital Fringe Guide