Ghost Dancer – Each Step You Take Has Meaning
by Karen Tortora-Lee on November 29, 2011
– How can you listen to music when your country is falling apart?
- Because music is what keeps us together
– Ghost Dancer
Playwright Robert L. Hecker’s new politically-driven play, Ghost Dancer, unfolds in a hypothetical world set on a fictional Caribbean island. So, in this way, it is both everywhere and nowhere at once. In not being beholden to the history of any one oppressed people, it allows itself to speak for all oppressed people everywhere who rise up against persecution and iniquity. But the revolutionaries you will meet on this island, and specifically in the Romero household, are not peaceful protesters who sit mutely, arms locked in silent demonstration. The people of Ghost Dancer are the splinter groups who blow things up, who sacrifice for the cause … who put the needs of the many before the needs of the one. Some are born to this world, some are called to it; some have the spirit of revolution in their blood, some must suffer before they are brought to action. What Ghost Dancer shows is that these roles are not always pre-ordained.
Ghost Dancer‘s first moments explode with life – movements of exquisite celebration; Francisco (Luis Salgado) and Rosaria (Rosie Lani Fiedelman) dance around their friends’ apartment in a whirl of passion, fire, joy and heat — even as they are being told to bring more intensity to their dance. Several hours later, Ghost Dancer ends with a violent, driven, brutal dance set to pounding tribal beats which invoke the warrior spirits as Lakota (Lilia Vassileva) and Tony (Arturo Castro) are staring down death. Theirs is a dance of a completely different sort, but there is no doubt that it spills over with a profusion of their existence.
What plays out between the initial dance of life and the ultimate dance of death is a complicated journey for a family who will be tested by the bonds of loyalty, the need for justice, the cry for vengeance, the darkness of obsession and the anguish of bloodshed.
