Preview: Testimony at the MATCH

When choreographer Toni Valle, the artistic director of 6 Degrees Dance, first heard that Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture “Witness” would be installed at the University of Houston, it didn’t strike her as anything out of the ordinary.

“We get notifications about everything,” says Valle, a professor in UH’s Kathrine G. McGovern College for the Arts, School of Theatre & Dance. “I didn’t think it was a big deal, one piece of public art that was going to be put on the campus.”

Soon, however, the statue – a towering 18-foot female figure, golden and floating above the ground, with root-like arms and legs, a hoop skirt, lace collar, and braids shaped into ram horns – caught the attention of right-to-life protestors, who saw the horns as demonic and the jabot at her neck, a nod to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a symbol of abortion rights.

As a human rights activist herself, Valle says she had to see the sculpture, one-half of the Pakistani-American visual artist’s exhibition “Havah…to breathe, air, life,” with her own eyes.  

“I saw it, and it’s beautiful. It is such a testament to women taking up space, because it’s so big,” says Valle. “At that point, I emailed the dean and said, ‘If it ever comes up that you want some art done about this piece…I would love to do something.’”

The university did commission Valle to create a work inspired by “Witness.” Then, on July 8, 2024, with Valle and longtime collaborator/composer George Heathco deep in the creative process and Hurricane Beryl looming on the horizon, a man with a hammer beheaded the statue.

“It was too close to our performance for us to incorporate that new material,” says Valle. “We made, at that point, a decision that we were going to do this again as a full evening length with that new information.”

This week, Valle, Heathco, and singer-composer Misha Penton will premiere that full-length evening work, Testimony, an aerial dance and visual art installation, from visual artist Shelby Craze, that draws inspiration from Sikander’s work, the subsequent controversy, and eventual vandalism.

“Though the sculpture was our point of reference, Testimony is also about the much larger picture of how women in general have been silenced,” says Valle. “Personally, what affected me was that this woman made something so amazing. It said, ‘I am here, and you cannot stop me from existing.’ And then someone violently beheaded it. It’s such a metaphor for how violence is often used to silence artists, to silence women, to silence people.”

Penton, who joined the project after Valle and Heathco had begun work on Testimony, notes that “when voices are suppressed, the only antidote is vocal autonomy.” As such, she recalls telling her collaborators after seeing the first incarnation of Testimony from the audience, “I really feel like the sculpture needs to come to life and wail.”

For the upcoming performance, Penton will play the character of the sculpture with embodied vocality.

“I’m interpreting this as an archetypal feminine energy,” explains Penton, who is composing and singing the live voice work in the show. “Everyone in the performance is a facet of the sculpture, and my character serves as a way to focus the energy and also refract it into a prism of a zillion possibilities in a diverse spectrum.”

Though Penton will embody the statue, Valle says she also wanted Penton’s character to have a human element.

“My goal always is to bring humanity into a situation,” says Valle. “I want people to see this as the personification of oppressed people, and to be able to see it as human.”

Penton’s vocalizations will wind in and out and intertwine with Heathco’s original score, which features saxophones, guitars, percussion, and the interplay of lots of voices because, as Heathco notes, “this whole thing started with voices of people having some sort of descent and not wanting to see the statue on campus.”

Heathco says he decided to bike to the school to visit the statue and take notes, with the ambient sounds he heard inspiring his score in unexpected ways.

“Sitting in front of the statue this one particular evening, hearing the marching band, hearing the light rail, hearing the mechanical noises, hearing the wind through the trees, the rustling of leaves and students walking by… All these things started to really produce a sound in my head,” says Heathco. “Once I got home that night from the bike ride, the instrumentation was set.”

Like Heathco, Valle says she also visited the sculpture to take notes and pictures to begin developing the choreography, believing that she could not do justice to Sikander’s detailed work without spending as much time creating movement based on it.

“All the movement is based on the movement in the sculpture itself,” says Valle. “Rather than trying to put content in the pieces, like this is what Sikander meant, I took what she gave me in movement and size and statuesque breathing – everything about this sculpture almost feels alive to me – and tried to reiterate that in different moments, with a collage that speaks to tiny fragments of the sculpture that then makes this entire whole.”

Elements of Sikander’s sculpture will appear in the way the dancers will swirl and braid around each other like the roots, and in a bungee piece, where Penton will be lifted off the floor, supported by the other dancers, as the sculpture is supported by its hoop skirt.

Despite its embedded, heavy themes, all three collaborators agree that anyone can see and enjoy Testimony.

“My tester is always someone asking, ‘Can I bring my 12-year-old daughter?’ And yes, I think it’s fairly accessible and exciting to watch,” says Valle. “Even if they know nothing about this statue, even if they don’t get anything about this statue, there’s so much embedded in the work that I’m very proud to say I think anybody can come see this show, not get it at all and still like it.”

That said, Penton does hope that audiences will find Testimony “hopeful and liberating.”

“We’re not being didactic,” says Penton. “We’re not telling people what to think about anything. I feel like the statue and the character that I’m embodying is hopeful, grounded, powerful, and future-looking in a positive way.”

Testimony will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, September 25, through Saturday, September 27, and 5 p.m. Sunday, September 28, at the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, visit 6degreesdance.org. $20-$35, with a pay-what-you-can option on September 26.