CHOREOGRAPHER MICAELA GARDNER’S FEDERAL DANCES WERE PERFORMED on three separate occasions over the weekend of June 27. Gardner began conceptualizing the dance’s eight vignettes two years ago and rehearsed with the accompanying performers for one year. The dancers came and went until there were seven: six women (including Gardner) and one man. The eight segments, parsed out on a distributed program to the hundred-plus voyeurs gathered at the Federal Park, describe stages of revolution, colonization, and industrialization.
Part of Gardner’s goal was to uncover New Mexico’s cultural history as well as to honor her own “hidden” Native American blood. Her mother’s family, the Valencias, settled in the Galisteo area in the 1600s, where, as Gardner cynically said, they “lived, ranched, and fraternized with ‘savages.’” “Urged by ghosts and echoes,” Gardner subsequently went digging through sources, among them the books of Marc Simmons, John Upton Terrell’s Pueblos, Gods, and Spaniards, and the first history of our state, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s account as the token intellectual while a captain of Don Juan de Oñate’s Spanish explorers. The sordid stories imprinted on this land are rarely brought to the surface, and yet we walk on impounded sites of tension every day.
Construction on the Federal Building did not begin until 1853. Originally intended as the state capitol, the site so grandly represents the triumph of cultivation, or as Gardner puts it, “its orderliness considered so much the hero of the wild New Mexico territory.” Built in two stages, the stone building is a mixture of Greek revival and Renaissance revival. In 1883, the same plaza was chosen to host New Mexico’s “Tertio-Millennial” celebration organized by LeBaron Bradford Prince (prominent historian and eventual governor). In 1884, a sandstone obelisk honoring Kit Carson was installed.
The sun beat the grassy sprawl through its stately trees while the dancers braved the dry heat in bare feet and hand- sewn white cotton smocks. They thumped the ground in ritualistic unison, jumped with angled limbs, showed fists of strength, and traversed the entire manicured arena like ghosts caught in purgatory—often pushing the limits of our personal space as the crowd moved to accommodate their flight.
In the third vignette, La Conquistadora, the lady surveys work and salvation, Gardner made her entrance as a shimmering matriarchal totem. Wearing a cardinal’s beret and regal teal-blue robes that glittered in the sunlight, this surreal figure rose upon a stone pedestal where she stood nearly motionless but meticulously swiveled in place, weaving spells with her encompassing arms and long, enchanting fingers.
Recognized as the first representation of the Virgin Mary in the United States, La Conquistadora was saved by the Spanish during the pueblo revolt and returned to Santa Fe with Don Diego de Vargas in 1693. De Vargas credited the figure’s motherly love for his bloodless conquest over the pueblos—an accreditation eventually adopted by the Natives as well. Now she is the honored guest during Santa Fe Fiestas. The third act of the Federal Dances paid homage to this figure as, in Gardner’s words, “a version of religious imagery that mystifies and lords over the encumbered slave dance happening below her.” Gardner’s personification invoked the idolatry projected upon this strange little doll burdened with keeping the peace.
In Etiquette Duets, the six dancers donned blue metallic heels and waltzed in the courtyard’s dust. Amid their courtly propriety, the duet would turn on each other and digress— then seamlessly assume their entitled statures. Spencer Toll, the token male, was unblinkingly graceful in high heels and only pushed the absurdity of this removed cultural practice to its extreme: role-playing. In The Doorway, the dancers were contained on the landing of the Federal Building’s stairs, framed by its Greek columns, and moving at a snail’s pace back and forth, as if exhausted by war or pilgrimage. The dancers in their white togas evoked the Elgin Marbles’ characters carved in stone relief.
The most notable story about time-lapse and memory is Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which generically named lovers grapple non-linearly with history. In the film, He says to She, “You are not endowed with memory.” The Federal Dances was not just a performance piece in Santa Fe—a rare occasion here—but was also a haunting use of bodies in space. Gardner’s thoughtful orchestration ceremoniously imprinted the land, and this overlapping of time and narrative pinpricked the sunny bright geography with memory.