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Deeply Rooted at Merle Reskin

By Sid Smith:

Fifteen years of survival in dance is impressive, and Chicago's Deeply Rooted Dance Theater marked the occasion with style and gravitas Thursday at the Merle Reskin Theatre, launching a season of anniversary celebrations.

Artistic director Kevin Iega Jeff wisely chose as the cornerstone of the retrospective of his own work the 1984 "Flack," a powerful, layered elegy on human struggle, bonding and survival. Jeff's is a Broadway-tinged, heart-on-its sleeve aesthetic, more attuned to force and sweep than subtlety or design. Except that with "Flack" he reaches deep inside and provides some of the most detailed and versatile movement and gestures available. Unlike some dance works happily and breezily set to pop favorites, "Flack" employs lesser known, more Jeremiad-like Roberta Flack selections, along with additional material from Quincy Jones and Donny Hathaway. This isn't even remotely about the Flack of pop, but a mournful, agitated expression of life's troubles and turmoil. The half-dozen or so dancers are each clad in everyday street attire, but in such a way as to evoke a kind of everyman community. Flack's "Tryin' Times," meanwhile, one selection, sets a tone that right now plays with extraordinary timeliness. That's one thing that makes "Flack" so stirring. Potent in its own day, it feels up to the minute in depicting a society full of all kinds of dislocation, strife and uncertainty.

This is a wonderful cast, and the men are certainly terrific, both strong and heartbreakingly vulnerable. But special attention must be paid to two women, whose solos in particularl illuminate the piece: Carolina Monnerat, whose easy-seeming arabesques and turns are somehow grounded and smooth without every being light or too dainty, and Tracey Franklin's stirring performance to "I Told Jesus," a dancer who brings drama and edge right up to the brink with her animated intensity.

A program note articulates Deeply Rooted's mission as "based on the African-American traditions of storytelling along with universal themes in contemporary modern dance," and "Flack" is about as worthy an expression of that idea as any, one wherein Jeff forges suggestive clusters of dancers, bits of conflict followed by harmony, and a mixture of lyrical dancing with disturbing, idiosyncratic gestures. One in particular disturbs and lingers: the dancers force their hands toward their mouths as if desperate for food or, maybe, regurgitation. Whatever, the horrific image of fed-up despair is unmistakable, tempered, overall, it should be noted, by Jeff's uplifting, though never sentimental, religious themes. Death arrives, met by the balm of communal mourning.

Associate artistic director Gary Abbott was represented by two works, and they're decidedly different. His 1994 "Desire" is just as its title suggests, a dreamy, ultra-sensual exploration of human sexuality and libido, with a vaguely tribal setting and an eroticism born of the natural beauty of dance as well as that of the troupe--Deeply Rooted always boasts some of the more beautiful dancers in the profession. Various duets, naturally, emerge, danced by Kathleen Turner and Drew Shuler, DeeAnna Hiett and Brian Harlan Brooks and Monnerat again, this time partnered with Joshua Ishmon.

Abbot's more recent "53 Inhale" is a more sculptural, metallic work, set to the sonorous melodies and unusual sounds of Nico Muhly, peopled by an other worldly cast of alien creatures. It's a mysterious and lilting work exploring individual curiosity and intermittent ensemble cohesion, elegant, though mischievous, the dancers for a time crawling on the floor as an ensemble or elsewhere beautifully raising their legs in choral union.

Alas, the area around the Reskin these days is a busy quarter, and the parking lots filled quickly on Thursday. I found one open, but it closed at 10 p.m., so I wasn't able to stay until the end of Jeff's signature piece for the anniversary, "I Am Deeply Rooted." My apologies. However, what I saw of the opening segments is stirring, a large cast clad in fiery scarlet, boasting a powerful solo, backed by the crowd, to Mahalia Jackson's incandescent version of "My Country 'Tis of Thee." It promised to be an epic work with various sections of dance replete with segues of recitations of famous commentary on artistry.

Reviewed by Sid Smith on 06/25/2010 at 11:15 AM