Reviews & Previews
Preview: Becky Valls Memoirs of the Sistahood - Chapter Three: Ave Maria
The Movement of Life
Choreographer Becky Valls
Finds Inspiration in
Autobiography
By Holly Beretto
“We have a colorful Catholic family in Louisiana,” laughs Becky Valls, two weeks out from the opening of “Memoirs of the Sistahood: Chapter Three – Ave Maria,” (http://memoirsofthesistahood.com) the latest
installment of her multimedia collaboration with her sculptor sister. “And I used the content from our family as a springboard.”
“Memoirs of the Sistahood” began in 2007 with “Chapter One,” which examined female archetypes and continued two years later with “Chapter Two – House,” an exploration of home and the
possessions we carry with us. The projects bring to bear the talents of Valls, a Houston choreographer and performer known for her modern dance work; her sister Babette Beaullieau Wattigny, a New
Orleans-based sculptor; and Alaska-based filmmaker Deborah Schildt, whose work includes everything from documentaries to commercials. All of the chapters incorporate dance, art and film, telling the
stories of the six Beaullieu sisters and their coming of age in 1950s Louisiana, as well as echoing on a larger scale what it means to be human.
Valls, her sisters and “one lone brother” were raised in New
Iberia, Louisiana.
Their father was a doctor, but Valls says there was a great deal of creativity in their family, so there was no real surprise that she gravitated toward dance and the artistry and invention it
entails. While Valls and Babette are the only working artists in the group, Valls says that there is tremendous familial support for what they do. Valls is both pleased and proud as she points out
that her extended family has attended the opening of all the project’s chapters.
As fans of “Memoirs of the Sistahood” will recall, each piece in the ongoing story tells another tale of family life. And, even as Valls uses
her own family experiences as a jumping off point, she believes that the concepts of family and belonging resonate across cultural and ethnic lines.
“It’s a sensory experience,” she says of “Chapter Three – Ave Maria,” which opens at Diverseworks on Nov. 17. “I hope the audience will think of their own relationship to their own mothers.”
In it, Valls also explores the sacred devotion Catholics have to the Virgin Mary, and what the concept of motherhood means. She approaches her
examination of these topics with both humor and reverence. As the dancers tell their story, Valls’ sister Babette is on stage, creating a sculpture, and film clips from “Chapter Two – House” will be
shown.
“There’s such imagery,” Valls says of the staging. “Babette has these rocking boats that help define the nurturing aspect of motherhood, and
that offers a wider impact for the audience than just the telling of our family story.”
In addition to the on-stage dancing, film and art installation, “Chapter Three - Ave Maria” includes on-stage singing by performer Natasha Manley, and music from singer Hildegard von Bingen and Foufollet, a Cajun folk band whose contemporary sound impressed Valls and her sister. She’s also using work by
Vivaldi and Zoe Keating.
“So many modern dancers are attracted to Zoe Keating’s overlays and soul sound,” Valls muses. “And I love Hildegard; her airy voice just brings
you to a spiritual place.”
Valls appreciates both the inspiration provided by her family as well as the opportunities dancing has afforded her. She’s been performing and
choreographing for more than 30 years, and counts herself lucky in being able to still do so. Collaborating with her sister is an experience she
treasures, although she admits that while working on each aspect of Memoirs of the Sistahood, there were – and are – times when it seems that she and Babette are only talking about
work.
“We’ll be at a family gathering and instead of kicking back, being sisters and talking about life, we’ll be there talking about how the project
is taking shape. It’s a strain sometimes, but we still value that we can do this.”
Performances of Memoirs of the Sistahood: Chapter Three – Ave Maria run Nov. 17 – 19 at Diverseworks Houston. For tickets, visit www.diverseworks.org
Following the opening night performance, audience members can meet the dancers, Babette and Valls at a complementary reception.
And encore presentation of Memoirs of the Sistahood: Chapter Three – Ave Maria will be held at the New OrleansContemporaryArtCenter on March 2, 2012.
Connections and Crossroads:
Dancing After 40
By Toni Leago Valle
November 3, 2011
When I performed with Jane Weiner and the Pink Aware Dancers for six seasons, there was a video about Jane and her sister to show the history of how they started Pink Ribbons.
It began with, “Jane is a dancer.” I miss the days of Joe backstage, without fail, replacing the last word: “Jane is an archeologist. Jane is a hot-dog
vendor. Jane is an underwater aerialist. Jane is a quadriplegic performing artist.” However hilarious this always was, it is the perfect metaphor – that dancers
are so much more than the person on the stage.
Since turning 40 a few years back, I’ve been watching dancers, talking to dancers too, but mostly watching them. The dancers I’ve been attracted to onstage are the ones who also
attract me offstage. The ones whose lives are much more interesting when the curtain closes. People who not only take the diverse pathway, but also live it at
full throttle, glide the obstacles, and affect the world they live in with such powerful grace and dignity, that others cluster to them, not knowing what they seek but knowing they have found
it.
Putting existentialism aside, I am at a crossroads in my career as a dancer and choreographer. After leaving company life to take care my son Dante, last year I decided to
rejoin Karen Stokes Dance as a full season company member. This was my first time in six years that I would be dancing 5 days a week, between 3-5 hours a day. I
was excited to be a part of the concert The Secondary Colors, but I wondered if, at 42, my body could handle it. Almost before the thought took hold, I rejected that idea
and earnestly went into training.
In May, Becky Valls asked me to be in the third installment of the Memoirs series. At 42, could I rehearse and train two shows back to back? Could I
actually look like a sister next to performers in their prime: Kristi Farr, Joani Trevino, Mallory Horn, Nicole McNeil and Natasha Manley? The answer is
yes. At 42, I have found that I am not as physically strong as I once was, that my mind is slower and I cannot always keep up in ballet class, and I have to rehearse outside of
rehearsals in order to get the material in my body, but it can be done.
And while I’ve been eating, sleeping, training, and living dance since May, something else has been percolating in the wings. That I not only live to dance; I live for the
connections I make with other dancers. Over the past two years, I have served as confidante to four pregnancies before they were public, (like I’m the best person to keep a secret
- haha), the private life of a friend where hope and life can be different and better, and the backstage person to lean on. Knowing the person behind the develope, I feel full,
needed, connected, and important that others wish to connect with me.
By nature, the dance world is full of families and also by nature, as a dancer moves from one company to the next, family ties are broken to make room for new ones. I look back
and miss my families: Suchu Dance, Hope Center, Psophonia Dance Company, Dancepatheatre, Travesty Dance Group. Some friendships have endured past the working
relationship, but others I am lucky to see at performance.
SO, as I go into tech week next week for Becky Valls’ Memoirs of the Sistahood Chapter Three: Ave Maria, for me, the Memoirs family is a symbol of both the “Beaullieu sistas”
onstage and my dance family offstage. I’ve worked and played with all these women, including Becky, for years, and it shows in the ease of performing together. I have a
particularly stirring duet with Becky that touches my own familial roots and I’m honored to perform it.
Then I will once again be faced with the old dilemma: how to maintain my dance family once the show is over. So, heads up - I am beginning a journey over the next year to
connect with dancers and get their stories. I’m just plain bored with my own stories. Because, as you will see in Memoirs, it’s not the story that’s
exciting; it’s the telling.
Memoirs of the Sistahood Chapter Three: Ave Maria opens November 17-19, 2011 at 8pm, at Diverseworks. For more information, visit www.memoirsofthesistahood.com
Memoirs of the Sistahood Chapter Two: House
Becky Valls and Marlow Fleming (onstage), Kara Ary (video)
Barnevelder Theatre
Friday, October 15, 2009
By: Nichelle Strzepek
Members of a large Catholic family who experienced childhood in southern Louisiana during the 1950s, sisters Becky Beaullieu Valls and Babette Beaullieu build upon a rich soil of memory for their
dance theatre collaborations, Memoirs of the Sistahood. Nearly two years after the debut of Chapter
One, the duo has delivered their second installment, Chapter Two: House. A video recap opens the show. Even to the uninitiated, however,
the visual prologue is nonessential. This production is sufficiently distinct. Like a house, it is intelligently designed with pattern, substance, and mortar structured around a supportive
framework.
Of course, every house needs a hostess. In a vintage cinch-waist dress, narrator Kathy Hallmark delivers an introduction with the saccharine, matter-of-fact tone of a 1950's television housewife.
"All houses are dwellings," she quotes Paul Oliver's reference book on vernacular homes throughout the world, "but not all dwellings are houses. To dwell is to make one's abode: to live in, or at or
on, or about a place." Like Oliver’s book, Chapter Two:
House, examines different types and ways to dwell.
Becky Valls; Photography by Deborah Schildt
Valls
glides between choreographic modes as easily as one might move from room to room. She begins with a minimalist, pure movement approach, then displays skillful confidence as the work shifts to
burlesque. In Act I, which examines dwellings as structure, Valls shows restraint, choosing not to hide or overdress the circles, lines, and spatial devices that form the skeleton of her
choreography. Later, Busby Berkley inspired formations give way to a lively mambo, danced by sepia-toned housewives armed with cornflake boxes and kitchen gadgetry.
Veteran performers, including Valls herself, anchor the company. Dancers, Toni Leago Valle, Jenny Dodson (formerly Magill), and Joani Trevino are consistent in their actualization of Valls' smooth,
expansive movement style, and they transition easily to comedic and presentational delivery.
Clearly, the collaborators are all on the same page with House. Deborah Schlidt’s dreamy film
collage weaves in and out of the action as naturally as any performer making an entrance. Images of various types of dwellings, from hovels to tract houses, segue to demolished and water-logged
homes. Reclaimed by nature with the brute force of Hurricane Katrina, these homes (or ones like them) may have given up parts of themselves for repurposing in Babette Beaullieu’s found object
sculpture and set pieces. Dancers first appear in costumes the color of clay and mud. Attentively designed by Cherie Acosta, these basics are detailed with netting and natural fabrics that echo the
weathered patina of the doors, windows, and boxes Beaullieu has fashioned to represent the family homestead. Among these pieces, a playful dinner scene and a bed of sleeping children are given a hazy
luminescence by lighting designer Kris Phelps that recalls precious home movie footage of the Beaullieu family.
It all works together, even as these collaborators rather craftily bring their 1950s backdrop to the forefront. I Love Lucy clips play dreamily as the childhood game of playing house transitions effortlessly to a satiric portrayal of real life domesticity. Text from Housekeeping
Monthly's "The Good Wife's Guide" illustrates the expectations and constraints placed on women saddled
with running a home. Fifties era musical selections such as the Dean Martin classic, Sway, fuel the wry comedy which
culminates in a kitschy "mobile home" show. The dancers flaunt their best runway sashay in a segment that in lesser hands could have capsized the production.
The milieu of 1950's iconography remains upright however because Valls and Beaullieu, with their collaborators, thoughtfully maintain a through line. It is no small feat to coalesce this array of
concepts. Chapter Two:
House reaches coherence because the team has built a solid framework and follows-through with strong
images and clear ideas. The enchanting and harmonious collaboration brought the audience to their feet on opening night.
Nichelle http://nichelledances.wordpress.com
Memoirs of a Sistahood - Chapter One
Diverseworks
December 7, 2007
By: Nancy Wozny
dancesourcehouston
I thought childhood was pretty much about learning to tie my shoes, getting along with a slew of people who all have the same nose, and generally speaking, growing up. After seeing Memoirs of
the Sistahood – Chapter One, a new work by sisters and collaborators Becky Beaullieu Valls and Babette Beaullieu Wattigny, I see childhood in a whole new light—it's about gathering material, for
what else, a smashing show. All that time the Beaullieu sisters, Beth, Becky, Babatte, Bonnie, Bitsy, and Barbara, where trying to make it to church on time, they were really rehearsing. And what a
rich soup of material sisters Valls and Wattigny have to play with, growing up in a Catholic family in Louisiana during the 1950s.
The Beaullieu sisters create a dreamscape with Wattigny's sculptural pieces that transform into portals for Valls' dances. Using decorative back porch doors, intricate narrow closets that resemble
medieval alter pieces, and rustic window frames, Wattigny colors and covers the stage with entrances, exits, and hiding places. They serve to let the performers weave in and through their own
whimsical logical time line and completely free us from any linear narrative. Glorious stage pictures elegantly frame Valls' dances.
Valls crafts her choreography from a fluid post modern dance style, while also playing off recognizable gesture and everyday actions. As each sister enters from one of Wattigny's colorful back
porch doors in a slow motion dirge, they carry a sculpture crafted from nature on their backs, as if to resurrect something from each of their pasts into the present. One carries a collection of
sticks, another a vessel, symbolic of traveling through time, each with a distinct gift. One ensemble section completely conjured the tight living quarters six sisters must have survived. Valls
herself danced a sweet duet with Mechelle Fleming. One wonders if Valls here is a time traveler and is dancing with herself.
All collaborators contribute to Memoirs' sense of wholeness. The sound score combines eerie tunes from Dead Can Dance and the like with Misha Penton's ethereal instrumental pieces. Kris
Phelps' lightening emphasizes private spaces and a suitably dreamy atmosphere. A video montage by Deborah Schildt also hopscotches through time, landing on memorable moments, birthdays, holidays,
vacations, giving us a glimpse of family record without a litany of actual events. Costumes by Valls and Wattigny draw from Louisiana folklore, 1950s fashions, and southern debutante glamour.
On a post-show close inspection, one costume reveals a trim of doll parts, and other junk drawer delights. Both costumes and sets hold their own as an installation piece as well as a performance. In
fact the piece concludes by the performers bringing all the visual elements together for one last look, a final tableau.
The capable performers included Kara Ary, Mechelle Flemming, Jennifer Magill, Stephanie Rodriguez, Joani Trevino, Toni Leago Valle, and Corian Ellisor (as the solo male child). Valls and Wattigny
made smartly positioned cameo appearances as well.
A few bumps down memory road included: an occasionally overly cluttered stage, abrupt and long blackouts, and some sheer practical concerns about moving such intricate and complex objects on and
off stage.
There are many lovely elements to this work, but chief among them is the pair's commitment to telling a new story rather than falling into the dreaded page-from-our-journal-
autobiographical-syndrome. There's little attempt to use personal history as just that, the truth. Memoirs of a Sisterhood – Chapter One derives much of its drive from mining the power
of memory alone, most specifically the embellishment of imperfect recollection. Memory is a dance, an art in and of itself. Memory can only be a creative act. When we remember we re-create;
Memoirs enlists this process exactly.
A scene with all seven children waving from a speeding boat proved my point about the meaning of childhood. They are waving at us from the past, as if in that actual moment, they all knew that it
was a keeper.
I doubt I was the only audience member who wanted to wave back in thanks for the Beaullieu family coming into my life.
'Sistahood' exhibit returns to its roots
Beaullieu sisters focus on '50s in La.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
By: Linda Dautreuil
There is a buzz about a performance launched late last year in
Houston that's making its way to New Orleans this
spring. "Memoirs of the Sistahood - Chapter One" is coming home to Louisiana.
The performance is the first in a series of collaborative works between
sisters Babette Beaullieu, a sculptor and teacher in the St. Tammany Talented Arts Program in Mandeville; Becky Beaullieu Valls, a performer/choreographer living in Houston; and independent filmmaker
Deborah Schildt of Alaska. "Chapter One" focuses on the female archetypes of 1950s Louisiana and the six Beaullieu sisters: Beth, Becky, Babette, Bonnie, Bitsy and Barbara.
Based on the experiences of growing up in a large Catholic family, the series fuses individual
artwork created by the artist-sisters with childhood "sense memories," original music and film. Central to the interactive stage setting is Babette Beaullieu's life-size altar boxes of wood and
organic materials representing the complex personality patterns of family.
The sculptures appear onstage to house the dance performers and are exhibited after the
performance for audience viewing.
Recognized most recently for her exhibition, "Hidden Spaces: Mixed Media Sculpture" at the Shaw
Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge, Babette Beaullieu is known for her use of found materials to create large-scale three-dimensional sculptures and wall reliefs.
She built the six altar boxes for Chapter One with recycled materials found on the streets
of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Windows, doors, wood and architectural details came from torn down buildings and trash piles.
Beaullieu notes, "I built a box, not really thinking at first which sister I was trying to represent. Halfway through the construction, I began to sense a specific energy, how it felt to be with that
sister. I could hear our conversations. I think of these altar boxes as spiritual totems that are also universal archetypes."
When Chapter One premiered in December 2007 at Diverse Works Art Space in Houston, critics may have expected a sentimental memory play, but the visual and kinetic storytelling
drew rave reviews as new material rather than simply reminiscences of the past.
The Contemporary Arts Center will present "Memoirs of the
Sistahood, Chapter One," with interactive sculptures by Mandeville visual artist and teacher Babette Beaullieu April 4 at 8
p.m., onstage at 900 Camp St., New Orleans.
Tickets for the general public are $20, $18 for students, and $15 for seniors. For more
information, visit www.cacno.org.
Published on NOLA.com Wednesday, March 25, 2009 1:22
p.m.
Published in The Times-Picayune Thursday, March 26, 2009
Photo by Audie Valls
Memoirs of the Sistahood - Chapter One
DiverseWorks
Houston, Texas
December 7, 2007
By: John DeMers
Copyright ArtsHouston Magazine, January 2008
Works of highly private inspiration have a long and distinguished history of being poor public entertainment. That fact alone makes this dance-filled “memory play” by choreographer Becky Valls and
her sculptor sister Babette Beaullieu Wattigny and achievement more than a little notable. As presented at DiverseWorks, Memoirs, was “private” in the way that a short novel might be, or
perhaps a small experimental film free of major stars. But it seemed a departure from most dance evenings – even from admittedly boundary-free “modern dance”. Memoirs was cinematic more than
anything else, an act of visual storytelling that used dance along with projected film, exquisite music and intriguing sculpture. In short, it worked.
We’re not sure exactly why “sisterhood” was expressed in the title as “Sistahood,” since that seemed “ghetto” in a way that neither the creators nor their creation were or wanted to be. The story
involved the interwoven lives of six French Catholic sisters coming of age during the 1950s in French Catholic south Louisiana. Anytime there was a specific reference in Memoirs, that was
the place and the time. Yet nearly all the individual, almost unrelated dance segments were either too ambiguous to be about anything, or too universal to be limited to any single thing. The core
experience was growing up, specifically as a girl with lots of sisters – through life with lots of siblings was common enough amongLouisiana’s French Catholics. The evening floated by as a series of
half-remembered, possibly half-dreamed vignettes, news clippings from a youth presumably remembered from the distance of age. That last conviction seemed to grow from the way Valls looked at even the
most light-hearted of family times with longing, as though reaching out to them across the decades without ever truly reaching them. Nostalgia? Perhaps. But not the cheap, store-bought kind. This was
passion for an essential past, coming from a very deep, sometimes dark and ultimately loving place.
The visible center of Memoirs was the graceful, loping, curling and circling choreography of Valls, who also serves as director of the dance program at Rice. There were clear debts here
to that other chronicler of ever-symbolized young womanhood, Agnes DeMille in such pieces as her ballet for the musical Oklahoma. The dancers always managed to entertain while emotionally
affecting us, and never more than in those segments featuring Valls herself. Her facial expressions and movements were the “voice” of the narrator, even though she and her sisters also provided
spoken words to set up many of the scenes.
All pieces were delivered with enthusiasm, capable of acting and absolute belief by Kara Ary, Mechelle Flemming, Jenny Magill, Stephanie Rodriguez, Joani Trevino, and Toni Leago Valle, with an
entertaining assist from Corian Ellisor, the lone male allowed into this sleepover. Sets and props were mostly pieces created from old wooden doors, windows and other found objects by Wattigny. And
the evening’s most touching backdrop was an incredibly edited montage of family home movies, tossed up on a screen in all the scratchy wonderment of people, places, and things never to be seen again.
Except that, thanks to this particular and talented sisterhood, they can be. And they were.
http://issuu.com/artshouston/docs/2008_01_issuu
Memoirs of the Sistahood
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