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“Hi, I’m David Roussève.” A lithe black man with salt-and-pepper dreadlocks appears onstage and welcomes us. 

He begins to tell a tale of contradiction—full of joy and pain, truth and fiction, hope and despair, abandon and inclusion. His dance teeters on the seam where these many elements merge. The dancers themselves are culled from a spectrum of ethnicities; they are tough, energized, and athletic and assist David in his journey of discovery. As he slowly navigates across the stage, David becomes characters from a past that is real and imagined, both deeply personal and more broadly drawing from the wider African American tradition. He is an old grandmother who remembers when she was a slave in the South and a middle-aged black man dying in the hospital. He becomes an old man describing a gnarled alley cat and a victim of Hurricane Katrina who dances out her rage and pain using guttural gestures. These characters intertwine with the dancers. The movement is kinetic, rough, vivacious, and bravura. BBC radio static fills the air with talk of genocide. Sickness suffuses the work, but there are lashings of silly humor. His dancers flit around the stage choking, gurgling, and tickling. An Indonesian dancer taunts the others to eat a raw chili pepper. Video is projected against a back wall. All the while, David traverses the stage—the line of his life—to gorgeous and sad Portuguese fado music. When he gets to the end of the journey, we learn that all the characters are imagined extensions of himself. We become Roussève just as Roussève reflects the history of African Americans in the United States. I was drawn to the work’s chaos, humor, and specificity—the many different faces and bodies onstage knitting together to make Saudade personal and broad all at once. 

Raphael Martin has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Court Theatre, Gate Theatre, and Bush Theatre, all in London. Most recently, he was Literary Manager at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club.