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Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre
Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre is dedicated to presenting the most perfect embodiment of dance — dance that is evocative and enjoyable. SPDW Dance acknowledges that the audience is as important to the dance as the movements and steps themselves. The company presents work that is inspiring, vibrant and relevant. SPDW’s intriguing repertoire consists of work from formidable Chicago artists as well as choreographers from across the nation, with styles that incorporate classical and contemporary modern dance, jazz and improvisational experimentation. Since 1997, SPDW Dance has showcased repertoire that is rich and varied.
In this way, audiences as well as SPDW Dance Theatre’s performing artists are fulfilled by the work. The Company has grown to include an active Board of Directors, Executive Director Katie Saifuku, Artistic Director Joanna Rosenthal and more than more fourteen dancers. The repertoire includes works by national and internally recognized choreographers like Faye Driscoll, Ron DeJesus, Jan Erkert, Ginger Farley, Ashleigh Leite, Jodi Lomask, Shihrley Mordine, Molly Shanahan, Eduardo Vilaro, Sam Watson, and Sherry Zunker among others. SPDW Dance self-produces two shows a year, participates in regional and national festivals and is responsible for the acclaimed Guest Artist Program.
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Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre "12345"
By Laura Molzahn:
The pleasure of a repertory company like Same Planet Different World, which performs "12345" through Saturday, lies in discovering the worldviews of very different and-in this case-very accomplished dance artists. Still, this program of five works by five choreographers was bound to be a mixed bag. So SPDW artistic director Joanna Rosenthal added a clever, efficient concept: "12345" consists of a solo, duet, trio, quartet, and quintet, presented in that order. Smart. There's a natural progression as each work brings a bit more energy to Links Hall's small space.
Ultimately "12345" gives the satisfying sense of wandering into an art studio and looking over the shoulders of the artists at their sketches, discovering how many ways there are to see and render the world.
Most intriguing about Eduardo Vilaro's solo "De Vuelta," created for SPDW in 2005, are the ragged edges around its swirling turns. Set to flamenco singing, it follows both lines of the music: its rapturous, swooning, self-involved revolutions and the way pain or doubt can bring them up short. Dancer Liz Jenkins seems at times to be attempting escape in a staggering run or kneeling creep forward, belly nearly to the ground. She never makes it. Instead she turns back, hands clasped behind her.
Liz Burritt's new duet "Chasm" is a blinding mix of hot and cold, funny and horrifying. The only piece on the program to use props-two chairs-it begins and ends with a face-off between a man and a woman. In between they brawl all over the stage, their gestures of reconciliation or sexual overtures inevitably met by hostile, often violent rejection. War is the only viable metaphor for this relationship, which consists of attacks and counterattacks, skirmishes and battles, in a conflict that will never end because the combatants are locked together by their love and the impossibility of connecting. The mood is lightened, a bit, by the performersâ?? sometimes bizarrely delivered lines: "Shut it!" "Hyp...o...crite." "Really?" "I need...to tell you..." Burritt's difficult choreography is superbly performed by Rosenthal and Charlie Cutler, who collaborated on the movement and who make these characters strong, witty, sexy, and heartbreaking.
A new trio by Paige Cunningham, "Lionize," is cool, spare, open, marked by stillness and carved motions. Dancers Adam Gauzza, Carrie Nicastro, and Christopher Tucker made me think of siblings who constantly shift into different triangular configurations, with two people helping the one in trouble. Or ganging up on the one who's out of line. Sometimes these are fine distinctions. Perfectly attuned to one another, at one point they embrace-and burst apart at precisely the same moment. Emotion comes unpredictably, as if by accident: when an elbow pulls back, it brings the hand across the mouth in a lingering touch full of sadness.
Ashleigh Leite's spiky 2008 quartet "I Live in Perfect" manages to express both aggression and severe restraint. The dancers (Gauzza, Jenkins, Nicastro, and guest Jon Sloven) sometimes look like they're performing Irish step-dance, their arms held motionless at their sides while they take great leaps. Drawn into a tight circle, the dancers reminded me of lab rats in a too-small cage, ready to run or attack. Collin Bunting's costumes suggest gladiators, blending what looks like leather with tie-died fabric, each one different yet echoing the others. Leite's own scritchy-scratchy sound design adds to the anxiety.
Rosenthal offers the Chicago premiere of an excerpted quintet from "Grey Noise," a piece inspired by film noir that she'll premiere next fall. She's got the body language-heightened and formalized-down pat. The excerpt opens with a duet between a predatory woman downstage and a man, tie loosened, who remains for a while in the shadows upstage, watching her. And she knows he's watching her. Connie Fagan perfectly captures the hawklike head jutting forward, the shoulders pulled back, of the woman who's always onstage, always preening, always on the make. When another woman and two more men enter the arena, alliances are made and broken with bewildering speed and ease. It's all a bit chaotic, and maybe that's the point, but seeing the entire piece might make the characters and their relationships clearer and more satisfying.
The subjects in "12345" may be bleak or dark, but I came away from Thursdayâ??s show refreshed by the serious attention these choreographers had given their subjects. Sometimes it helps to look long and hard, when the looking is good.
