Youngin Chung | Phoenix Staff

Alumna Sita Frederick performs her solo performance “BitterSuite,” exploring the diverse dances of the Afro-Dominican diaspora.

BY ALEX HO

In print | Published March 5, 2009

When the lights came on in Upper Tarble this past Fri., Feb. 27 and its packed audience was able to reflect on and discuss the nebulous but affecting performance it had just seen, one of the first questions raised was why artist Sita Frederick ’97 had chosen to focus her multimedia theatrical and dance piece “BitterSuite” on, of all things, sugar.

“BitterSuite,” one of the events hosted for Afro-Latin Week and Black History Month, is choreographed and performed by Frederick. In the piece, Frederick travels through a seemingly boundless landscape of different permutations in Dominican and Haitian dance. Although “BitterSuite” is a solo performance, Frederick is nonetheless accompanied by countless Dominicans and Haitians dancing in footage that is projected on a screen behind her. She travels through a sparse but heavily symbolic set designed by José Ortiz, her collaborator and co-founder of their performance company, “Areytos Performance Works.”

Frederick, who is trained in modern dance, brings a rigorous theoretical edge to “BitterSuite” that allows the otherwise heavily abstracted and distancing performance to convincingly engage in a slew of issues in Dominican/Haitian history and culture. Evidence of her artistic vision is her decision to express her piece’s wide scope through the aperture of a single subject — sugar. The audience immediately notices two pronounced features of the set — a tall bundle of sugar cane placed slightly off-center on the stage that Frederick must constantly dance her way around, and the painting of a structure used to weigh sugarcane (as Ortiz explained to the audience after the performance) that frames the projection screen. Sugar literally cannot be avoided in Frederick’s meditation on cultural roots and cultural traumas.

For Frederick, sugar is inextricably linked to Dominican/Haitian race relations. On one level, “it’s a response to the [notion] that talks about white sugar being this exemplification of purity and brown sugar … representing the opposite,” Frederick said during the Q&A section following the performance. But on a deeper level, sugar represents “this amazing history that is one of the reasons that slavery became this machine in the Caribbean,” Frederick said. “In thinking about our African ancestry and African heritage, this is one of the major symbols of why that happened.”

Sugar’s ideological associations with race, class and authoritarianism are laid bare in the character that Frederick first appears as to her audience. Donning a white military cap, a suit and most notably towering platform shoes, Frederick alternately barks out, “azúcar” and “sugar.” Later, the character says, “We are all Spanish. But some of us are a little darker than others.”

Frederick drew heavily on the infamous Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo to create her character. According to Frederick, Trujillo embodied many of the contradictions in Dominican culture at the time. Although he grew up in the countryside and was rather brown-skinned, Trujillo was infatuated with the European elite and would powder his face to appear more light-skinned. At the same, Trujillo is famously known for popularizing merengue, considered to be a rural style of music and dance, by turning it into the national music of the Dominican Republic. “I’m looking at that kind of archetype of the dictator — the Latin American dictator in particular,” Frederick said. “But I think it translates in general to the contradiction of ultimate power.”

In “BitterSuite,” we see Frederick as the dictator character enthusiastically, if clumsily, dancing merengue. The image evokes the permeability of music and dance, whose lure is powerful that even those in the upper echelons of power must succumb to it. But gradually, Frederick sheds her costume and instead takes up a makeshift skirt of red, white and blue handkerchiefs. Along with her dress, her dance also transforms into a different style. Frederick explained that the second half of her piece was largely dominated by the dance tradition of gaga, known as “rara” to Haitians. “Gaga is a Dominican Haitian secular and sacred practice that began with the Haitian migrant laborers and in a special sect within the voodoo tradition,” Frederick said. She added that the tradition is both religious and secular and is also a product of a reconciliation between Catholicism and African traditions.

“As you know, these traditions are very much about blending,” Frederick said. Sure enough, many in the audience noted similarities to other forms of African and Afro-Caribbean dance. When asked about a very Yoruba-reminiscent leg bump movement in her dance, Frederick said, “I studied African Cuban for many years and I can’t really get it out of me. I enjoyed the Yoruba tradition from Cuba and I’ve danced it for almost ten years now.” She added, “And there’s a connection. It’s all from Yoruba. Haiti has those too.”

Luís Rodriguez ’09, who organized the event, also noted connections between Frederick’s performance and the African modern dance he has been studying at Swarthmore. “I noted that her knees were basically bent the whole time she was dancing and that just reminded me of the dance that I’ve studied here which is Afro modern … Even with all the jumps and leaps, the aim wasn’t to jump into the air. She was just lifting her legs to get back to the ground.”

As fascinating as “BitterSuite” may be, it frustrates and challenges its audience with more questions than answers. “BitterSuite” ends with a forceful action that leaves much open to interpretation. But neither Frederick nor Ortiz was willing to explain the ending to the audience. This was in part because of the highly personal and subjective nature of the performance. Ortiz said, “There’s something very attractive about the side of investigation, but all I can do is present my opinion.”

Artistic rigor is only one element of Frederick and Ortiz’s work. “We are really interested in both the excellence of art — the high art of making work that is sophisticated and complex,” Frederick said. “But also [we’re interested in] being in a community and having conversations with people. It’s just not about the high tower somewhere. It really has roots and legs and feet and in the community and in other people.”

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