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Corpo Dance Company
Corpo, Portuguese for body, was born of the vision from its founder and artistic director Christopher M. McCray. Corpo Dance Company is a multi-disciplined dance company committed to challenging, innovating and expanding the performance experience by exploring and exploiting the nuances of the human animal using a blend of classical and contemporary movement styles. Corpo Dance Company, a non-profit 501-c(3) organization, was formed in December of 2006 and performed its first movement play, Fisher’s Place, in September 2007 at the Josephine Louis Theatre on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus. The second performance in March 2008 was called b-sides. Outside of the company’s own dance concerts, Corpo has provided its talent to worthy Chicago based fundraising and community support events. In 2007 several charities benefited from Corpo’s benevolence including The Alexian Brothers AIDS Ministry, The Decades of Cabrini Project, The Beverly Arts Center of Chicago, AIDSCARE and TPAN.
Since its founding, and in just over a year, Corpo Dance Company has grown to be recognized by its peer organizations in Chicago as a formidable performance company. Chris is also the artistic director of Corpo Dance Company, and has been involved in the Chicago dance scene since 2000. Chris has worked in various Chicago dance studios, where he was a dance instructor and performer. In the last three years, he was the artistic director for another Chicago dance company, and in the fall of 2006, Chris was the recipient of the Katherine Dunham Award Best Choreography 2006 from the Black Theatre Alliance.”
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"Coppelius"
By Sid Smith
Corpo Dance Company's "Coppelius" is too long, too meandering, too unfocused and that's too bad--it's a terrific idea with lots of potential and already bursts of fine dancing.
We haven't seen a full-fledged production of the classic "Coppelia" in quite a while now. But Corpo's smart to sense in this venerable trope--stemming from writings by E.T.A. Hoffmann that also inspired a segment of the opera "Tales of Hoffmann"--a theme as apt now as in 1870, when the ballet "Coppelia" premiered. There was already a sense of industrial revolution woe then, and now, of course, technology has again revolutionized how we relate. In "Coppelius," much of the drama involves the creepy relationship of a human being and a mechanical doll--a substitute for real love not so far-fetched in a time of text messaging nd disembodied Facebook interchange.
That's not to suggest that Corpo updates the setting--the handful of set pieces at Links Hall and the costumes clearly cast this piece well into the past. A tall antique clock rests inside a decorative case, a gramophone sits to the side and the fashions of Dr. Coppelius, his puppets and his disinterested love, Belle, are 19th-Century. In fact, "Coppelius" is a prequel, setting forth events Corpo imagines happens before the events of the "Coppelia" story.
Here, Dr. Coppelius, played by the lean, lanky, rubbery Christopher Courtney, tinkers with various gadgets in his mechanical lab and trots out a small horde of life-size human puppets, boasting various names such as Spindle, Cala and Grey, entertaining him when he charges them up with Dr. Frankenstein-like ingenuity.
Artistic director Christopher M. McCray and his team have great fun starting with the jerky doll-like movement of not just "Coppelia" but segments of "The Nutcracker," too, eventually enabling the talented dancers to mix mechanistic images and wrist play with all manner of dance. The robotics, in other words, are a starting point, and the styles soon embrace a wide variety of contemporary dancing, evoking the 1960s frug in one large ensemble bit, and accommodating everything from a kind of rock and roll ballet to hip hop, which is a Courtney specialty. Act I ends with a sensational solo turn for Christina Chen as a spiky, Goth-tinged ballerina, and the idea of heaping all sorts of postmodern luxury onto the classic "Coppelia" riff is a delight. The best dance illustration of the theme comes in Act II, when Belle, invited to be wooed by Coppelius, falls instead for the puppet Grey, who keeps sputtering out, dependent for his very semi-humanity on Coppelius, who's forced to keep re-starting his own "rival." Nice irony.
But as a theatrical presentation, "Coppelius" is a dud. The creators seem to have no sense as to how to shape a story that's taut and compelling. Again and again they hover over meaningless details to the point of tedium--Dr. Coppelius dutifully fiddles with each of the window shades in the opening and then maddeningly does so again after the grand finale--and after the program should have ended. The occasional opening night flub Friday didn't help--at the end of Act I, for instance, there was a music miscue, part of a generally sloppy closing image.
Corpo is sure-footed in theme and dance, but hasn't yet found a way to encapsulate that in successful dance drama. Probably condensing to one act would help. The broad, drunken comic duet in Act II for Coppelius and Grey suggests the Corpo folks need to get out more--to visit some of the city's improvisational theater shops, for instance, or to catch a performance of the Joffrey Ballet's new revival of Jerome Robbins' "The Concert." Corpo's sense of comic dance is pretty rudimentary.
But I don't really mean to be all that discouraging. I think they're on to something that could work very well, and I love the idea of recycling classic dance myths to unearth new truths and relevance, the sort of thing the theater does all the time. Anytime someone dances in "Coppelius," it's nicely entertaining. It's the lax stage business between that causes trouble.
"Coppelius" plays at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 18 at Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield Av. 773-281-0824 or linkshall.org.
