Sunday September 21st, 2025 matinee – My 2025-2026 opera/concert/dance season opened with a bang this afternoon at The Joyce, where the dancers and musicians of Indigenous Enterprise were giving their final performance of a week-long run. The packed house responded vociferously to each number, and the afternoon ended with a thunderous standing ovation and screams of delight from the audience as the participants took their bows.
When we moved up to Inwood in 2003, I began spending a lot of time in the beautiful park two blocks away. There I found a rock which marked the spot where a venerable tree had stood for decades. It was in the shade of this tree that the Dutch are thought to have purchased Manhattan from the Lenape Indians. The location of the transaction is often disputed, but in my romantic heart, I’ll stick with the idea. It’s clear that the native peoples hunted the forests of northern Manatus, and whenever I am hiking up the wooded path and under the Henry Hudson Bridge and down to the river, or gazing out at Spuyten Duyvil, I imagine I hear their hunting cries and bird calls. If it’s a dream, don’t want nobody to wake me.
So my fascination with that story, and with the beautiful day when Kokyat and I were out photographing and I discovered the discovered the poignant “We Are Still Here” poster (at the top of this article) stuck on a graffitti-covered wall, I have kept these timelessly beautiful people in my mind.
Today, at the Joyce, we learned a great deal about the various Native American dance-styles that were shown as the all-too-brief hour sped by: the Fancy Dance, the Jingle Dance, the Grass Dance, the Smoke Dance, and the Hoop Dance. The dancers were Desirae Redhouse, Dezi Tootoosis, Kenneth Shirley, Josiah Enriquez, Jamaal Jones, Manny Hawley, Logan Booth, Jackson Rollingthunder, as well as a young woman from the Seneca Nation – whose name I didn’t catch – who did a lovely, swirling Smoke Dance. Drummers on the soundtracks (drumming being the heartbeat of the native peoples) included the Northern Cree, Calling Eagle, The Descendants, Wild Band of Comanches (!), and Blazing Bear. Mind-boggling rhythms supported the cacophony of celebrant voices, and a trio of onstage musicians – Daisy Jopling (violin), Adrian Thomas (flute), and Tristan Field (guitar) – were excellent, though they could have played much more…in fact, the entire show seemed way too short: another half-hour would have been more than welcome. On top of all this, there were the magnificent, elaborate costumes.
Central to the production is an animated film: a touching story of a grandfather introducing his young grandson to the various styles of dancing whilst adding stories of his own youthful dancing days, and of courting the boy’s grandma. When the boy’s mom comes to pick up her son, she finds that her father his given the boy a drum of his own: this is how the old traditions are kept alive. Lovely as the animated story-telling film was, I think it could be even more touching made into a film with real, human actors.
Later, films are shown as the back-drop to a Grass Dance duet; on the screen, dancers from years long past suddenly fade out and vanish: a reminder of the spirit world that summons us all away in time. At the start of the perfomance, dance and drumming were spoken of as a way of evoking our ancestors. As the years speed ever onward, we want to keep such meaningful traditions alive, passing memories from generation to generation.
As with most dance productions, there is inevitably one performer who makes a particularly vivid impression: this afternoon, a stand-out in an outstanding gathering of artists was a Hoop Dancer named Josiah Enriquez (photo above). This 22-year-old has mastered the art of Hoop Dancing, and his solo near the end of the show, in which he managed six hoops with immaculate skill, brought down the house.
~ Oberon
Oberon's Glade 