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Chicago Dancing Festival
Chicago Dancing Festival
was founded by internationally renowned choreographer and Chicago native Lar Lubovitch and highly esteemed Chicago dancer Jay Franke to produce and promote the finest of dance to Chicago. It was founded to heighten awareness of dance in Chicago, increase accessibility to the art form and provide aspiration for local artists. Its mission is to present a wide variety of excellent dance, enrich the lives of the people of Chicago and provide increased accessibility to the art form, thereby helping create a new audience. Its vision is to raise the national and international profile of dance in the city, furthering Chicago as a dance destination.
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Chicago Dancing Festival "Opening Night Gala"
By Laura Molzahn
A program of duets provided an eye-opening history of dance on opening night of the fifth annual Chicago Dancing Festival, now bigger, bolder, and brassier than ever. Fest founders/organizers Lar Lubovitch and Jay Franke have definitely branched out from the ballet and balletic companies of yesteryear, though cutting-edge works seem clustered in the first half of the six-day run. Two excellent works on this program, Robert Wilson's "Shaker Interior" and Brian Brooks' "MOTOR," can also be seen Wednesday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Faye Driscoll's "Not...Not (part 1)," scheduled for Monday but not performed because of â??technical difficulties,â?? will be shown the same night.
Monday's CDF fund-raiser at the MCA began with the briefest of brief remarks by Franke, Lubovitch, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who quickly mumbled something about 19 companies and a fest that this year is expected to draw 19,000. So that's 1,000 audience members per company, and your point is...? Anyway, at this point all the "tickets," which are free, are "sold out" --- but there are always no-shows and procedures for snapping up leftovers. Check it out: CDF is now the largest free dance festival in the country.
The Joffrey's Victoria Jaiani and Temur Suluashvili set the benchmark for romantic duets by performing Lev Ivanov's White Swan pas at the top of the program. Oddly, though the two are married, it took a while for their passion to emerge. The first half of the duet in particular emphasized its fragility, almost its brittleness, which unfortunately enhanced the sense of its antiquity. In any case, it provided a strong contrast for the program's four other duos.
The duet from Alonzo King's 2000 "Following the Subtle Current Upstream," performed by Hubbard Street's Penny Saunders and Alejandro Cerrudo, only partly updated the mood and look of the 19th-century classic. Though decidedly more sinuous and grounded (it was performed right after the White Swan pas and brought home the significance of bare feet), King's work is almost as solicitous of the female dancer as Ivanov's. Though the man might rudely haul the woman along by a lifted turned-out leg, he's still the one moving her around the stage.
The woman definitely gains the upper hand in experimental theater director Wilson's breathtaking "Shaker Interior" duet, an excerpt from his 1995 hour-long homage to Martha Graham, "Snow on the Mesa." Performed by Graham company members Xiaochuan Xie and Tadej Brdnik, this piece definitely out-Marthas Martha. Ceremonial and ritualistic to the nth degree, it uses mask-like makeup, elegant costumes (by Donna Karan), and deliberate movement to suggest a timeless dream world of desire and loss. A vision of the woman bursts on the man like a thunderclap: when Brdnik first sees Xie, his empty encircling arms suddenly clap, then burst apart and his mouth opens wide in amazement or horror. Such borderline melodrama gets grounded in the late 20th century --- more earthy than the late 19th or mid-20th centuries --- when Wilson has the woman put her nose into the man's stomach, then sniff her way up his belly.
Brooks obviates the whole male-female thing in his 2010 "MOTOR," which he performed with David Scarantino of the Brian Brooks Moving Company. Brooks set himself an unusual ground rule: only one foot on the floor at a time, almost all the time. Practically speaking, this means continuous hopping on one foot for a while, then shifting to the other, then back. The result is hardly romantic, but the piece is as breathtaking in its bizarre way as Wilson's "Shaker Interior." Though the look is a bit comical, Brooks undercuts the impulse to laugh, partly through Jonathan Pratt's serious, sometimes nearly tragic music. Dancing in unison and often close together, sharing their exertion and exhaustion, the two men create a strong, almost romantic sense of union. And once I realized that the movement's hops were like the jumpiness of silent film, I could squint and see how lyrical the men's upper-body motions were.
Walter Dundervill's "Compression Piece (Swan Lake)" was the program's only premiere, a CDF commission. It definitely compressed my eardrums, with Dundervill's soundscape blasting Diana Ross and the Supremes, M.I.A., Public Image, Ltd., Sonic Youth, and distorted takes on Saint-Saens and Tchaikovsky. But, oddly, this repetitive remix of the classic ballet was in many ways not compressed at all. Performed by Dundervill and Jennifer Kjos, with costumes and set by Dundervill, it created a virtual explosion of white fabric onstage. Much of the action consisted of removing clothing, then replacing it, until finally our White Swan was no more than a pile of rags. Talk about deconstructing a dance.
I was intrigued by the set piece, a fringed length of white satin hoisted into the air to suggest an altar with a royal "red" (white) carpet leading up to it. And I'm generally a fan of innovation. But Dundervill's overall opacity --- the prince and swan queen march back and forth across the stage like the Wicked Witch's militia in "The Wizard of Oz" --- eventually left me cold.
Chicago Dancing Festival "Modern Masters"
By Laura Molzahn
If there’s one good way to see a range of great dance in one fell swoop, it's the Chicago Dancing Festival, now in its fourth year. And in the city's most incredible bargain, it's free.
The "Modern Masters" program on Thursday night at the Harris Theater made me ask, Who knew there were this many ways to be masterful? Despite the six works' overall stand-out choreography and performance, a program like this one invites viewers to compare, to pick and choose, to assess degrees of mastery.
Thursday's program won't be repeated, but take heart those of you who’d like to sample what some of these companies and choreographers are doing. Several are presenting works at Saturday's "Celebration of Dance" at the Pritzker Pavilion, open to all comers. You may have to sit on the grass, but huge projection screens show the dancing to outliers. You can check out Mark Morris Dance Group, two works by Robert Battle, and the Joffrey Ballet in Gerald Arpino’s 1970 "Trinity."
On Thursday, I was surprised to find that less was often more, even in the huge Harris. Christopher Wheeldon's 2003 duet "Liturgy," performed by New York City Ballet dancers Wendy Whelan and former Chicagoan Craig Hall, burst the bonds of reserve and impassivity Wheeldon wrapped around it, with the help of Arvo Part's "Fratres." The dancers are flooded by the keening notes of the music yet remain deliciously cool, methodical, precise. Joining hands, they pull back and apart, then Whelan’s toe floats up to gently tap an outstretched arm, a delicate, odd, yet deliberate touch, making a connection.
Battle's 1995 solo "Takademe," in an unscheduled appearance Thursday, also glittered onstage, every motion distinct and clearly motivated. Performer Kanji Segawa owns this dance, which interprets --- often humorously --- the stuttering rhythms of Indian chanting of bols, as expressed by singer Sheila Chandra.
It can be hard for viewers to shift gears, watching a mixed bill like this. And compared to such tightly wound pieces, Lar Lubovitch’s “Coltrane’s Favorite Things” looked loose, heads flopping. Performed by the Lubovitch company (which returns, solo, to the Harris September 22-23), this piece for nine at first seemed coy. But eventually the dancing’s relationship to the music --- a 1963 live recording of the Coltrane Quartet riffing on Richard Rodgers’s “My Favorite Things” --- becomes paramount. The dancers don’t hit on the sharp beats of McCoy Tyner’s percussive piano notes and Elvin Jones’s drumming; instead they connect the dots with lazy ease. It’s all about getting into a groove.
Paul Taylor’s 1985 “Last Look” is at the far ugly end of the vast spectrum of feeling Taylor has mastered. Watching it in 1993, I despised it for its over-the-top rhetoric on the subject of human solipsism. This time, I saw an unsettling resemblance to “Rite of Spring,” Vaslav Nijinsky’s brutal take on social structures; Donald York’s commissioned score even sounds a bit like Stravinsky’s. But “Last Look” is the poor man’s version, littered with obvious props and movement. It’s not chilling --- it’s ludicrous. The young Juilliard Dance performers put their all into Taylor’s compulsive twitches and spasms.
Like “Last Look,” Mark Morris’s “V” is highly repetitive. But where Taylor’s piece is emotionally monotonous, Morris’s comes across as soothing, a mathematical meditation on Schumann’s Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings (played live). Seven performers in brilliant blue dance together, then seven in pale green. Then they all dance together, their sharply different costumes underlining the different roles they play in relation to the familiar notes. There are tons of exits and entrances, and I found myself counting dancers --- plus three, minus one, divide by four, multiply by three --- in a vain attempt to keep up with what Morris was doing. But gradually I fell in with the piece’s agreeably anti-heroic mood, the low trajectory of creeping lunges, the unself-conscious bowed heads and embraces accomplished on the run.
The Joffrey performed Jessica Lang’s “Crossed,” which it premiered just four months ago. In Lang’s dramatic set design, looming vertical and horizontal panels get moved around the space to form crosses --- or not. But there’s a furniture-moving aspect to the choreography too, an unmotivated alternation between joy and sorrow dictated by Lang’s selections of religious music from the 15th to 18th centuries. Too often the movement in “Crossed” is standard issue, overwhelmed by the massive design and stirring music. Thank God --- and I mean this in the least religious sense --- there are moving, meaningful passages in the male quintet and female duet.
