Working with these phrases as a base, we designed a spa- tial pattern taking Eli and Shruti downstage center, forg- ing a runway path toward the audience. Once they reach the audience, they split apart, circling back to where they started. Shruti and Eli dance this sequence in unison, meet- ing again and again upstage center to start a new pass. Dance critic Heather Desaulniers wrote that for her, this reflected an act of treading water; indeed, our intention was to reflect ideas about mothers holding it down, cool moms at the park making it look easy and lovely while barely containing the inner churn, the fears, frustrations, and craziness of early motherhood. I rarely use text in my work, but early in the process I began feeling strongly that we needed to hear from Shruti, who has an amazing voice but had never worked with spoken text in dance. Shruti went for it, and her first improvised monologue became the words we used in the dance— the ten-year struggle to obtain a visa for her mother, during which time Shruti gave birth, followed by a more than two-year delay before Shruti’s daughter met her grandmother for the first time. We later added text for Eli, who describes her son’s birth like a shopping list: five days in labor, three visits to the hospital, two shots of mor- phine, seven days in NICU. The choreography in this duet explores how bodies hold the fraught, often extreme spaces of early motherhood—a difficult birth and caring for an infant, the greatest love of your life and the greatest challenge—and for many, in a new country and home, without family support, and how birth changes women’s bodies and relationships with the world. As a choreographer and dancer in my sixties I have learned that I can only move in this body, in this moment, offering intimate presence as connection and valuing dance as critical to our survival. I come seeking the dance that needs to be made, asking who we are in this place together. To me dance is rooted in hope, the work of small transformations. This is not about me as a dance artist; this is about dance, about the work of our work, knowing ourselves better, evolving, so we can better relate to each other and to the world. Sisters premiered at ODC Theater as part of their State of Play series, August 2024. RANDEE PAUFVE, artistic director of Paufve Dance, is a 2019 Fulbright-Neh- ru Senior Scholar. She has been a featured artist on NPR’s “All Things Con- sidered” and was named one of San Francisco Magazine’s 2017 “100 Artists Putting the East Bay On The Map.” Randee received the 2015 Isadora Dun- can Dance Award for Outstanding Individual Performance and the inaugural Della Davidson Prize for Innovations in Dance-Theater. She was nominated for the Theatre Bay Area Choreography award for her work with San Francis- co’s Cutting Ball Theater and is a two-time recipient of the E.E. Ford Award for dance research. Randee has taught on the faculties of UC Davis, Reed College, Lewis & Clark College, University of San Francisco, Cal State East Bay, St. Mary’s College of California, Cal State Sacramento, Marin Academy, and, since 1993, at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. paufvedance.org
Irene Hsi in Sisters
Shruti Abhishek and Elizabeth Zepeda in Sisters
folklórico /modern dancer Elizabeth (Eli) Zepeda. I’ve worked with Eli since she was a teenager, and I know Shruti from when we danced together in a 2019 duet cho- reographed by Nadhi Thekkek. Though we began by writ- ing about sisterly relationships, the conversation quickly turned to what was really on Shruti and Eli’s minds—their birth stories and early motherhood. I am not a mother, and while sometimes I feel sad about that, I’ve never felt evolved enough or secure enough to have a child. I’ve seen beautiful mothering, but also moth- erhood that looked grim. And the pain of childbirth; I’ve had endometriosis since I was a teen and know the excru- ciating pain of endometrial cysts bursting in my ova- ries. Pregnancy was recommended to thwart the endome- triosis, but I couldn’t accept the idea of pregnancy as a cure for anything. I didn’t feel I could make a dance reflecting something I’ve not experienced, but birth and motherhood kept sur- facing as the main thematic presences in the room, so I let go of my concerns and bowed to the dance, conscious of the challenge of honoring intimate stories that do not belong to me and translating them into choreography and performance without falling into a pit of literalism.
Shruti and Eli’s duet begins with all eleven women rush- ing toward the audience, a wild, space-eating phrase cre- ated in response to the question, “what is the movement of a pregnant woman’s water breaking?” In unison, the danc- ers hurtle forward while maintaining a tight cluster; they careen back and forth across the floor, as if on a ship in a storm. The sequence culminates abruptly with the dancers landing on one leg in a skydiving/flock of birds formation. They struggle, wobble and hop, reaching out to touch a nearby arm, foot, back, stilling themselves, finding bal- ance, and breathing together in community; Shruti and Eli emerge as a duo while the others melt away. Early on, Eli and Shruti expressed a desire to learn more about each other’s forms, so we devoted several rehearsals to their teaching each other Bharatanatyam and baile folk- lórico skills and steps. These sessions helped us expand on a repetitive sidestep devised in an earlier rehearsal, a foot pattern that speaks to dance traditions and human move- ment across the globe. We layered gestures—complicated, meticulous upper body phrases drawn from our stories of sisterhood/birth/motherhood—on top of the stepping pat- tern, working with a simple 4/4-time structure, no other sound but their light feet tapping time.
In the summer of 2022, as Roe v. Wade was overturned, my family learned that our ancestor Justine, who emi- grated from Sweden to Brooklyn in the mid-1800s, died at seventeen not, as we believed, of influenza, but of sepsis from a self-induced abortion. A series of newspaper arti- cles investigating her death revealed two things: one, that Justine, upon her deathbed, told her sister Johanna (our great-grandmother) the name of the father, and two, that Johanna vowed to carry this secret to her grave. Using Justine’s story as a base, the dancers and I began by writing and talking about our sororal relationships and the whisper networks of women. I COME SEEKING THE DANCE THAT NEEDS TO BE MADE, ASKING WHO WE ARE IN THIS PLACE TOGETHER.
by ZACKARY FORCUM | photos by ROBBIE SWEENY Sisters is composed of solos, duets, a trio and group sections all woven together into a cohesive perfor- mance. For this article I’ll focus on a duet created with Bharatanatyam dancer Shruti Abhishek and baile
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