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Triptych: Three Dance Voices
By Laura Molzahn
Three voices, each singing its own songs, each song sometimes soaring and sometimes faltering, can make for a pretty uneven, unharmonious evening.
So it was in “Triptych: Three Dance Voices,” which opened Friday and runs through Saturday at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. Though the choreographers’ levels of experience vary, all are fairly well known here. Winifred Haun has had her own company for 20 years, and Jacqueline Stewart and Jessica Miller Tomlinson (former or current members of Thodos Dance Chicago) have both won the AW.A.R.D. Show’s top prize, in different years.
Everyone’s voice came through loud and clear, but I was often unsure of what they were saying. Overall “Triptych” reveals that, without passion and coherence, dance can feel like navel gazing.
Haun’s gift for focus and simplification is well suited to her 2011 piece for eight, “Bento,” the program’s only non-premiere. Modeled on the idea of a Japanese lunch box with multiple compartments, each for a different food, Haun’s “Bento” has nine sections, generally inspired by a famous choreographer or consisting mostly of contributed material by a local choreographer. Each section must have its own distilled flavor, and for the most part each one does, thanks partly to composer Barry Bennett’s clever musical compartments. Sarah Robinson, whose opening solo introduces the piece’s motifs, is measured, deliberate, calm: ideal for conveying these simple moves and giving them import.
Problems arise from the fact that not all the choreography is distinguished or distinguishable. For that reason, perhaps, the orderly final section of “Bento” --- which first sets each dancer in his/her own spot, then divides them into shifting groups in contrapuntal patterns --- was satisfying, recapitulating the feeling of a light, nourishing meal.
The simplicity of Haun’s new “Bemused,” however, makes it obvious. A frustrated artist (Zada Cheeks) sits at a table with his saucy, uncooperative muse (Katie Graves) perched on the back of his chair, mimicking him. Both dancers use aerial straps to lunge at or fly over each other, which adds to the generally humorous tone. But the basic concept repeats without really developing, and since the piece is never outright funny, it gets stuck in the cute.
Tomlinson’s two premieres are both, in essence, duets. “Run 1, Run 2, Run 3” is an actual duet, danced and co-choreographed by Tomlinson and Joshua Manculich. Missed connections mark the first third, while Tomlinson’s anguished solo takes up the middle. The couple finally connects in the last third, in the warm glow of an onstage lamp. In my mind, the piece begins with an elderly couple --- Manculich seems confused, pulling fitfully at a hanging drape --- then shifts to their loving, youthful past.
Tomlinson has a gift for odd moves, but little of the choreography looks unique in “Run 1” or “Transient Intersections,” essentially a single duet for as many as five couples at once. In ensemble works like “Forget What You Came For?” (Tomlinson’s winning A.W.A.R.D. Show piece) and “Architecture: Splintered and Cracked,” she handled both individual phrases and the look and direction of the whole group creatively. But here, she falls back on clichés of passive women tossed around by manly men. Add the unfortunate fact that the many unison passages in “Transient Intersections” are often not danced in unison, and you have a problem.
Stewart has a gift for the striking image. And her two pieces were well danced. The quartet “Manos: Frame 1,” which expands on a dance photograph Stewart took herself, is as disconnected as a series of snapshots, especially in the opening, when a woman in a red dress (Grace Whitworth) repeatedly flies out of the wings and gets yanked back by her partner (Manculich). A second woman (Graves) surprises by creeping down the aisle, bug-like, then skittering over the lip of the stage. Her partner (Charlie Cutler) seems a cruel type, whom the first woman seems to murder. Ultimately Stewart’s lurid story is so long, detailed, and dreamlike as to be incomprehensible. Too bad, given the intriguing elements.
“Coffee and Alcohol” takes dehydration as its unlikely subject. And though a couple of oversize water glasses appear onstage, this quintet is fairly abstract. Stewart, who’s living part-time in New York now and performing with Yin Yue Dance, uses some unfamiliar dancers, including Yin; overall, the dancers’ mastery makes the choreography snap. A brittle walk on half-toe, knees pasted together, is the most distinctive move, and some of the choreography suggests thirst, including sexual thirst. A woman in sparkly silver heels eventually wilts and hobbles along on the sides of her shoes. “Coffee and Alcohol” doesn’t have much emotional impact, but it’s sharply odd and original.
