SeeChicagoDance.com

Leopold Group offers "Dancing"

 

By Sid Smith

In the midst of a busy festival flush with local and visiting stars, landmark works performed in posh downtown venues attracting the likes of the mayor and then some, it's pleasant to venture back out into the neighborhood, to catch dance on that fertile, formative level of studio experiment.
Just such an opportunity presents itself as the Leopold Group performs through Sunday at the Fasseas White Box Theater of the Drucker Center. Lizzie Leopold, the group's head, is presenting two new works, with different guest artists supplementing the bill at each program. (In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Leopold, the group's head, has helped produce this web site until just recently, returning to fulltime graduate work this fall at Northwestern University.)
"Dancing" is an outing with a lot of intellectual subtext. In notes, Leopold explains the elaborate background thoughts on both of her pieces. "Lips of Their Fingers," its title borrowed from disdainful attitudes towards pantomime some centuries back, is a dance in which the dancers gradually peel off "layers of clothing, the cast pits intensely physical movement against the most inanimate of objects, a floor lamp or the false naturalness of Astroturf, to find delineations between the dance and the body." Such conceptual background can be a burden, and both pieces are sometimes burdensome, spells of inspiration followed by stretches of mediocrity.
Still, the work that above analysis describes is much more accessible in look than her words might suggest. "Lips" is indeed built on a kind of striptease, though a strictly PG-rated one, involving a half-dozen women who start in penguin-like tuxedo wear and gradually discard bits of clothing to wind up in leotards that resemble what the Miss America Pageant used to routinely call Catalina swim suits.
Though there are moments of kittenish allure, engaging ones at that, "Lips" is less about eroticism or seduction than self-awareness and personal attitude. The styles employed are deliciously pop, whirls of fast-moving arm work and gyrating hips that Leopold identifies as referencing "the Hustle, Electric Slide and slow dance," among others. A handful of antique armchair lamps rest by the side of the stage, brought into the playing area at times to rest atop the Astroturf and alter the mood and atmosphere. But the feel is one of purified show dance, public denuding an underlying motif of dance today, one potentially revealing, its tackier employments notwithstanding.
The moves themselves stem from what Leopold describes as a translation from "the most dense performance theory text I could find." That said, at its intermittent best, "Lips" is a rollicking good time, a keenly distilled mix of pop and art, alluding to sex and politics without ever bluntly going there. One seemingly shyer member, who takes her coat off the last during the first stage of disrobing, strips to her suit before the others and enacts a wonderfully detailed, varied, pertly executed come-hither virtuoso solo right at the front edge of the playing area. A journey, of sorts, within the larger one of the overall ensemble.
There are ample opportunities for fine-tuning. The complex subtext can probably be telegraphed to the audience more clearly, just as judicious editing could make for a more performance friendly piece. All that's even more the case with the program's other work, "une elephante," too long at more than 30 minutes for a duet and sullied at times by overly long pauses that hammer home the point rather than suggest it.
But the overall trope is enormously promising here, too, that of two women who move through various stages in some sort of relationship, from frolic and playful interaction through conflict, struggle and at least a partial reconciliatory return to the opening pastorale. One prolonged, agonized embrace is especially powerful. Nicole Romano Uribarri holds Melissa Bloch as if Bloch's life depended on it. There's a potency and affect here very different from most such physical confrontations in dance. Leopold has staged it so that Bloch seems feverish with some sort of irrational motivation to do something, awash in grief, say, or tempted to attempt a rescue of a loved one that would only result in her own death. Uribarri seems bent on restraining her not so much as a part of a contest of wills but to save Bloch from herself. It's a nuance, but a profound and absorbing one.
Unfortunately, "elephante" ambles into such discoveries and either hovers there too long or links them with often more pedestrian, ho-hum movement. There's a great piece here, one that's shorterand better focused. But it isn't there yet, an elephant in the room that sometimes just sits there, barely budging.
Friday's guests, Theater Un-Speak-Able, proved mildly amusing, if modest, a standard performance art duet involving two would-be circus performers (Amrita Dhaliwal and Marc Frost), who have no idea how untalented they are, grandly milking applause for the most routine of somersaults.

Reviewed by Sid Smith on 08/27/2011 at 10:53 AM