La Mezcla director Vanessa Sanchez has been wrestling with ghosts for years, and on a recent phone call she sounded elated and relieved that she’d finally wrangled them into Brava Theater.
Her percussive dance company concludes an extraordinary two-year run with the world premiere of the dance theater production “Ghostly Labor” Dec. 15-17, an evening-length work that tackles centuries of fraught history and cultural evolution on the U.S. and Mexican border. With a seven-piece ensemble led by bassist Ayla Davila on stage with the dancers, the production draws on a profusion of African diaspora traditions and rhythmic idioms.
“It takes us throughout the history of labor, opening with honoring the land and the people who tend the land,” Sanchez said. “We explore this whole section through African-American tap dance, Mexican zapateado, and Afro-Caribbean informed movements and rhythms.”
The music and dance can evoke indigenous farming practice that used three staple crops to support the health of the land (beans, corn, and squash), Sanchez said. The agricultural triumvirate is reflected in a succession of trio choreographies and polyrhythmic sections with three interlocking grooves.
“One section takes us through this concept of labor relations rooted in historical narrative,” she said. “The way we’re telling it is somewhat abstract, looking at National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which specifically didn’t cover agricultural laborers. We’re using Afro-Caribbean rhythms but a lot of times we’re all playing non-traditional instruments representing work tools, with wooden sticks and buckets used as percussive instruments.”
On paper, this might sound a little academic, but the abstraction is steeped into direct human experience, as La Mezcla spent a year volunteering with the Half Moon Bay Latino farmworkers’ organization Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS) “before they invited us into the space to learn about the work the farm workers do, their lives and experiences, and a lot of that is included,” Sanchez said. La Mezcla also worked closely with La Colectiva de Mujeres, the Mission-based organization that advocates for workers’ rights.
Presented with Brava for Women in the Arts, “Ghostly Labor” was created with the support of a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission. Some six years in the making, the work is La Mezcla’s most ambitious project by far. This weekend’s world premiere follows several workshopped presentations and the 13-minute dance film, “Ghostly Labor” (co-directed by Sanchez and John Jota Leaños), which has screened widely at dance film festivals and earned several Independent film awards.
Veteran bassist Ayla Davila, a versatile player versed in an array of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican and other Caribbean styles, worked closely with the dancers in designing a score for the production, which features musical arrangements and verses by Laura Rebolloso, Pedro Gomez, Javier Navarette and Sinuhé Padilla Isunza. The combo Davila leads includes Havana-born percussionist Carlitos Medrano, Mission-raised percussionist Pedro Gomez, and French-reared vocalist Christelle Durandy, whose parents hail from Reunion Island and Guadeloupe.
“The challenge is to make it sound cohesive,” Davila said. “The music has to be approached differently; not as a musical composition, but with choreography in mind first, both supporting and complementing the dance, while also standing on its own. You’ve got to really think about making sure the musical sounds aren’t in the same sonic range as the tap. I’ve been thinking a lot about the African diaspora and the travels of Mexican folks in this country. The music is rooted in that.”
Davila was also the music director for La Mezcla’s previous production, “Pachuquísmo,” which explored the Chicana experience of the zoot suit movement of the 1940s. After the company premiered “Pachuquísmo” at Brava in the fall of 2019, the pandemic preempted a national tour, but last year “we were all over the U.S. doing ‘Pachuquísmo,’” Sanchez said, including dates in Dallas, Washington, D.C., and the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow dance festival in the Berkshires.
She was determined to stay off the road in 2023 to work on “Ghostly Labor,” but a call from Lincoln Center foiled that plan. She drew the line at one out-of-town date, until the ATLAS México Biennial International Dance Festival in Guanajuato extended an invitation, “the first time they had a U.S. guest company,” Sanchez said. So in October, the company set “Ghostly Labor” aside and remounted “Pachuquísmo” in Mexico.
“It’s been such a special thing to be able to travel and tell these stories,” Sanchez said. “A jam-packed two years.”
Fundraiser for Pete Devine
Last week, drummer Pete Devine shared the bad news that he’s been diagnosed with cancer. This week, dozens of musicians who love and treasure him on and off the bandstand are performing at a fundraiser organized by pianist/organist Chris Seibert at the Royal Cuckoo, where he often presides at the house Hammond B3 organ. Running Sunday from 5 to 11 p.m., the event includes Meredith Axelrod, Aki Kumar, Andy Santana, Kim Nalley, Gunhild Carling, Marina Crouse, Rhonda Benin, Steve Freund and, of course, Lavay Smith, whose brother owns the joint.
Devine has been a force on the roots music scene for decades, since his early years with guitarist Craig Ventresco and Bo Grumpus, a band with a vast repertoire of rags, stomps, marches, and songs from the first decades of the 20th century. He worked widely as a founding member of Lavay Smith’s Red Hot Skillet Lickers, and the jazz combo Gaucho. But for the past decade, he’s been performing and recording with HowellDevine, a group he co-leads with guitarist/vocalist Joshua Howell (who’ll also be on hand to play at the Cuckoo).
In 2011, he was leading Devine’s Jug Band at a short-lived Mission District performance space called Kaleidoscope Free Speech Zone when first he met Howell, who opened the show with a solo set accompanying himself on harmonica and guitar. Devine sat in for a few tunes on washboard, and “it just clicked,” Devine said. “It felt like we were fated to play together.”
Working with bassist Joe Kyle Jr., HowellDevine has been one of Bay Area’s busiest blues bands since Arhoolie released the trio’s second album in 2013, “Jumps, Boogies & Wobbles.” It was the first new blues session released by Chris Strachwitz and his storied East Bay roots label in almost three decades and, in an interview at the time, he explained why he was smitten with their sound. “If I had been blind, I’d have thought I was in some little Mississippi beer joint in 1940,” said Strachwitz, who reignited the careers of country blues masters like Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins. “I was really taken by their mastery of the blues. Joshua isn’t trying to sound like a black guy … And he was accompanied by this incredible dude, Pete Devine, on washboard, jug and drums. The rhythm and syncopation fit to perfection.”