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Epiphany Dance Experiment

By Sid Smith:

Dance and performance art can be similar. They can be different. And they can both blur in a single concert the boundaries separating the two disciplines.That fruitful but confusing cross-pollination has bedeviled artists for decades, and it served as the subject Sunday of the Epiphany Dance Experiment's mixed program featuring performers on both sides of the divide. A discussion afterward made clear that artists from the two genres find the distinctions complicated and enmeshed in larger issues involving the complexities of the creative endeavor--issues easy to ponder, tricky to resolve.Each installment in Epiphany's series, conducted in the large space inside the Epiphany Episcopal Church, is organized around a particular aesthetic issue, followed by discussions that enable both artists and audiences to interact and debate. The unusual physical attributes of the church make it an ideal setting for performance art. Home to a cavernous room, adorned with brightly stained glass and towering, timbered arches, the church is undergoing renovation, providing a singular mixture of sanctuary beauty and warehouse decay. The pews are movable, providing one of the larger playing areas in Chicago dance.Of the four works on view Sunday, Britt Posmer's "there is a way in which the body sleeps" made the best use of the space. The stage became one of the characters, in fact, as a small chorus of women, enacting sound artist Lisa Abbatomarco's sonorous wails and harmonies, wandered about like spiritual guides. Meanwhile, collaborator Joshua Kent roamed the playing area, too, at times armed with a pair of small wheels suspended on a string, a device he swung back and forth like an instrument of church incense.Posmer, who boasts a background in classical dance, remained in the middle, mostly sitting on the floor, her movement therefore deliberately limited to a kind of ongoing symphony of port de bras. Eventually, Kent's string unwound from a large spool and created a spider's web, trapping Posmer, part of the imagery invoking the ballet classic "The Sleeping Beauty." Posmer thus served as a prisoner of modern psychic displacement.Like much of the Epiphany program, the various parts didn't especially coalesce into a coherent whole. But some parts are arresting, including one segment wherein the four singers manage a spell of percussion made up mostly of the sounds of sharp intakes of breath.Space is a tool for the performance artist, more an obstacle to be overcome by the dancer. Rachel Thorne Germond made that point in the discussion by suggesting dancers learn to perform whatever the situation, church or bar, and she and the other dancers on this bill demonstrated the point. Their work seemed not so much to embrace the space as survive it.Both her "Not About Elvis Dance" and JulieAnn Graham's duet, "(s)he," featured ample walking around, as if to fill time and the necessities of the larger playing area. Both are contained and focused in ways better served by a more confined stage. In "Elvis," a work in progress, Germond shows off her inimitable, ever-so-feminine echoes of Elvis Presley's iconic pelvic thrusts and swagger. She wriggles, she writhes, but, beginning the piece in high heels that she quickly sheds, she does so with grace and a seductive delicacy. Some of it she enacts to a recorded backstage interview with Presley. Though rambling and currently too long, Germond's piece has the makings of a sharp, engaging solo.Graham's work depends too heavily on a single joke: her partner, Todd Kiech, wears a flimsy dress similar to her own costume. Role play is a topic. Part of the time he displays prissy, vamp-like femininity; she sometimes attacks him as a ferocious aggressor. Othewise, "(s)he" is a minimalist catalog of tiny gestures, dotted by acrobatic falls to the floor.Performance artist Marissa Perel chose to revert to a more traditional theatrical set-up by moving the pews from their spread out semi-circle back to a more traditional arrangement. In her piece, "Weak," she and two colleagues, Colin Self and Snorre Sjonost Henriksen, sit in the audience at first and intone chants. Eventually, Perel moves to the rear of the altar area, while Self and Henriksen roam the audience, coming on to various members, all to a mournful song by Chris Isaak.The proscenium set-up, and the church echo, made the lyrics sometimes hard to decipher. But, for the most part, they seemed more than cute but less than poetic. One set of lines near the end, for instance, goes, "To wear you like Humboldt Park/To be worn by you like Pilsen."

Reviewed by Sid Smith on 07/13/2009 at 11:20 AM