SeeChicagoDance: News and Reviews

Review: Chicago Human Rhythm Project "Windy City Rhythms" by Laura Molzahn

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

By Laura Molzahn

The world of tap dance, like a family, has its traditions, and older family members pass them down to the younger generations. At the same time, this relatively cozy universe can be all over the map stylistically. So it makes sense that the Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s annual “Windy City Rhythms,” celebrating National Tap Dance Day with performances by Chicago artists, would be both varied and inclusive. And, by the way, really fun.

The dancers at this year’s celebration, which concluded Friday night at the DuSable Museum of African American History, ranged from age 9 to --- well, let’s say 50. The takes on dance ranged from Chicago footworking to hip-hop to varieties of traditional tap. But a few elements unified the program: a sense of humor, a sense of history, and love. When the third- and fourth-graders of the Bronzeville Lighthouse Charter School Tap Ensemble took the stage, one woman called out, “We love you!” And once they’d performed, we loved them too.

The astonishing FootworKINGz have become a brand, with corporate clients that include McDonald’s and Nike. Springy knees and ankles (like the flexible ankles of tappers) allow the six dancers to attain both warp speed and a goofy, floppy clown look. Plenty of show-off stuff brought the right amount of tongue-in-cheek ‘tude; in fact, what the FootworKINGz mostly communicate is a good-natured, firmly maintained work ethic. They were impossible to resist, especially in their chameleonic second piece, “ABDC – AGT Re-Mix,” danced to samples from five songs. They’ve reached the top of the charts in part, I’d say, because they never seem to take themselves too seriously onstage, even as they perform some serious feats.

At the other end of the age spectrum was Mr. Taps, aka Ayrie King III, who’s been in the biz 30 years. A true king in his white gloves, white tie against a black shirt, and sparkly vest, Mr. Taps proved both a dance impersonator par excellence and a get-down comedian, issuing a steady stream of jokes and impersonations, his targets ranging from a supposed old girlfriend to Michael Jackson to Mr. Bojangles himself (whose birthday is the occasion for National Tap Dance Day). King even enacted a credible approximation of footworking as he followed the impossible-to-follow act of the FootworKINGz.

Bril Barrett, his professional company M.A.D.D. Rhythms, and one of his student projects, the Better Boys Foundation Tap Ensemble (which appeared to be made up mostly of, um, high school girls), all displayed an in-the-pocket groove unique to Barrett. It didn’t matter whether he and his dancers, inexperienced or experienced, were tapping a cappella or to recorded music, you could bop along to their swinging rat-a-tat beat.

Barrett has long participated in youth outreach programs, and the talented BBF dancers were bold, decisive, and literally outspoken. The M.A.D.D. Rhythms ensemble --- dancing “To the Point/Gone,” choreographed by Starinah Dixon and Jumaane Taylor --- gave losing control a new luster. Another person who doesn’t take himself too seriously, Barrett specializes in a humorous off-balance style, torso raked perilously to this side or that; the added momentum of swaying seems to boost the tapping’s swing.

The two pieces performed by BAM!, headed by CHRP founder and director Lane Alexander, mined the vein of classical tap. Unfortunately, Ted Levy’s “Three Little Words” seemed more stodgy than classic. But Alexander’s “Reflections” --- a world premiere made up of three sections, set to a Bach gigue, minuet, and prelude to a fugue --- brought tap up to the minute by revisiting the past. Alexander, also the evening’s MC, delivered a prologue linking Bach’s devotional music and the fact that percussive dancers have often been shamans. But the rightness of this dance has nothing to do with religion --- unless you think swing is a gift from God. Bach swings, and “Reflections” swings too, when it works. The too-polite first section never quite takes off, but Alexander’s sure-footed solo (the second section) and the final segment echo Bach aurally and visually while providing counterpoint to his rhythms.

Like BAM!, Martin “Tre” Dumas III inhabits a quieter subdivision of the tap universe. He began his solo slowly, with no pyrotechnics, and proceeded to a soft-spoken, easygoing tapped conversation. Even when he accelerated into a flurry of super-fast steps, he was introspective and maintained his light touch.

I’m not sure why the overstuffed Boom Crack! Dance Company was included in this program. It’s not that hip-hop shouldn’t share the stage with tap and other percussive forms, but this group couldn’t hold a candle to the other companies. The dancing, portioned out among 17 people, was uneven, to say the least. And talk about taking yourself too seriously! All the sexiness and anger came across as clichéd and fake.

Review: The Moving Architects "Sector" by Laura Molzahn

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

By Laura Molzahn

Erin Carlisle Norton’s work is elegantly brusque; she doesn’t elaborate. That approach creates a kind of blank slate for the viewer, meaning that context becomes crucial. When I saw Norton’s “March of the Oys” at a Dance Union show in December 2010, its doll-like motions and the title and holiday season immediately suggested something like “Babes in Toyland.” At least as a starting point.

But when a very similar piece, also set to music by percussionist Frank Rosaly, opened Norton’s new “Sector” (running through Sunday at the Fasseas Whitebox Theater), it had a different context and connotation. A little over a year ago Norton and her company, the Moving Architects, toured Tajikistan and Krygyzstan, teaching and performing. So as I watched “Rosaly,” the first section, I was picturing these rugged, isolated, mountainous countries, riven by ethnic differences. And I had in mind a line from the press release: that Norton was exploring “disenfranchised communities, divided by political, social, or tribal borders.”

The program even includes a map of what looks like a country with five provinces, each labeled with one of the names of the sections in “Sector.” Each has its own distinctive movement and emotional tone, yet teasing similarities between the sections suggest cultural or historical overlap. And overall “Sector” suggests trouble, alienation. The air within and between the five sections is charged with hostility.

There’s nothing cute about the four dancers’ stiffly curved, toy-like arms in “Rosaly.” Their movement becomes less mechanical as the dance goes on, but their interactions are aggressive. Two of them hop at each other like birds squabbling over a crumb. Sometimes they look like prizefighters: elbows cocked and ready, fists clenched, heads and shoulders weaving to loosen them up. That sense of physical tension and the effort to release it reappears throughout “Sector” in jittery, jiggling, nearly hysterical out-of-control movement.

The next section, a solo, dissipates some of that implicit rigidity. Expertly danced by Bettinna Vaccarello to music by avant-garde cellist Hildur Guonadottir, the polished “Verse” seems at first the action of a piston moving in a narrow cylinder. Though there’s some relief in the solo form --- no one to fight with --- the dancer’s extreme constraint makes her look crazy. Eventually she breaks out, but the slow/quick dynamic of her chiseled moves doesn’t feel free. She’s like an engine trying to sputter to life, and failing, another of the motifs in “Sector.”

“Loneland,” the third section, seems militaristic, as five dancers (all guest artists) in harsh, tailored black move to bleak electronic music by Japanese sound artist Ryoji Ikeda. The way an arm is repeatedly raised high, palm extended, suggests judgment, and the circling of the group around a single dancer looks like a tribunal. A sideways “march” in deep plie on half-toe, the dancers linked by hands on one another’s shoulders, is like a tank gliding along. The strong shadows created by Francesca Bourgault’s dramatic side lighting multiply the figures, suggesting armies and mobs.

Another solo --- “Charm,” danced by Norton --- again provides a bit of breathing room. Also set to music by Guonadottir, it traces a slow diagonal to the rear of the space, then forward. Norton’s long limbs and physical authority make her an imposing but not powerful figure: her legs, spread wide, are largely trapped, stationary, while the fluid movements of her arms and tensile back suggest labor, maybe field work.

“The Groove” echoes “Rosaly.” But this quartet feels much more fluid and free; the dancers do groove, capturing the pinging, skipping-record rhythms of another Ikeda electronic composition. And here, instead of pointing their fists at one another, they raise them in what seems solidarity and defiance. Still, all is not fairies and balloons in “The Groove.” One image distinctly suggests a prisoner, and the piece ends where it started, this time bathed in a chilly wash of uninflected blue light.

All 10 dancers do well with Norton’s choreography, which requires passionate precision more often than polish. And overall “Sector” is suggestive given its context of divided communities. But there’s a nagging sense that juxtaposing these five sections is accidental, not crucial to Norton’s task, which remains somewhat unclear. Just as a country’s borders are often accidents of geography and imperialist history, which creates conflicts between ethnic groups forced into a single political entity, “Sector” seems a bit ad hoc. More unity, more intention, might give these brilliant sketches a power they haven’t yet quite attained.

Review: Blushing Poppy "disRuptureEnrapture" by Laura Molzahn

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

By Laura Molzahn

I haven’t seen much butoh. And now I’m sorry.

It may be strange to talk about enjoying the famously despairing and repellent form of butoh, born in Japan out of the rubble of World War II. But Blushing Poppy’s “disRuptureEnrapture,” running through Sunday at Link’s Hall, is a true source of pleasure. Directed by Nicole LeGette, who founded Blushing Poppy ten years ago, this lavish 80-minute show is a feast for the eyes, a treat for the ears, and a tease for the mind, which is tricked or enticed into imagining all kinds of connections. Running a gamut of emotions, “disRuptureEnrapture” exploits and erases gender, revels in material things and dismisses them, takes us to a tender, dark fairy-tale world without a happy ending.

LeGette’s set and costumes are a big part of the initial draw. A burgeoning floor-to-ceiling backlit yellow-orange sheet of heavy, creased paper covering almost half the stage space creates a corner that’s warm and comforting yet vaguely threatening. A tall black curtain on the other side screens the seven musicians of Renee Baker’s Chicago Modern Orchestra Project from view. (Unfortunately, Friday night was the only performance they'll play live.)

Four soldiers appear first, looking as if they’ve filed in from the Land of Oz or Alice’s Wonderland. They wear heavy boots, puffy shorts, helmets of upside-down baskets, and what I thought at first were furry pelts around their necks. No: they were garlands of babies. Well, dolls. Next a bag lady (Carole McCurdy) enters, complete with a feather in her hair, a bubble-wrap shawl, and a couple of large bags, including a leopard-print carpetbag. An ashy smudge on her lips suggests a Pierrot. In fact all the performers are smudged with dirt, or ashes, or maybe blood, which definitely detracts from the fairy-tale aspect.

Another woman (LeGette) enters in a Bo Peep dress of heavy brown paper that creaks and crackles. Attached to her front are cone-shaped baskets filled with babies (more dolls), which she thrusts forward in a hellish parody of fecund womanhood, as if she were Madonna showing off swelling boobs and belly.

Sound plays a huge role in establishing the environment. The invisible orchestra’s crashes, pops, pings, and singing strings form a stirring backdrop for the action, whether rising or subsiding. Singer Louise Cloutier --- who drifts across the stage in ghostly 19th-century black, wearing a broad, flat hat of plastic cocktail plates --- deftly manipulates her wide-ranging, highly trained voice from a shriek to low, melodic crooning. Sometimes there’s no music. The performers vocalize. The soldiers drop to their hands and knees and bark or howl like dogs. Much later the women moan, forcefully, organically, a thumb to their lips, fingers on their necks, measuring.

Despite the barking and occasional aggressive behavior, the male chorus (Ari Rudenko, Jose Hernandez, Kurt Preston, and Eli Halpern) turns out to be distinctly subordinate, even wimpy. They’re reactive, not active, heralding the women and responding to them. Sometimes they’re played for laughs: they snap to attention, or duke it out on the floor in a flailing pile --- a brawl that turns into a slumber-party pillow fight. By the end, they’re outfitted in diaphanous dresses made of flimsy paper; their armor has dissolved.

Much of “disRuptureEnrapture” walks a knife’s-edge between comedy and horror. In this slightly uncomfortable but exhilarating place, the bag lady offers the audience an unholy eucharist of cheap “champagne” and candy, nuts, and business cards. Hauling in a fair-sized pile of detritus, she curls up next to it, making it her home.

But it’s no bulwark against the pathetic, appealing, horrifying final character (LeGette again): a woman with a short broom tucked into her sash and a child’s white chair strapped to her back, bearing a load of long wooden rods like kindling. The fertile goddess of fertility has become tentative, halting; she seems ancient. All traces of pomp and bluster have disappeared from the stage --- from her, and from the four men, who sometimes raise one hand, testifying or welcoming or bidding farewell.

This woman’s one goal seems to be to abandon her heavy load and rest, but it’s difficult. When she finally frees herself, she peers at us over the back of the chair like a little girl. Cinderella, she takes her broom and sweeps away the debris of the material world that’s accumulated on the floor: nuts, a wicker hat, a golden flower, the rods she’s finally scattered.

News: May Newsletter

Wed, 25 April 2012 11:48:40 -0400

By Sid Smith

Scholars have debated the meaning of the May pole for years, theories touching on everything from earthly rotation to fertility rites and, ahem, phallic imagism.
One thing isn't up for debate: The tradition embraces dancing, communal dancing in the form of highly public, whirling fun. The official season is winding down, but there's plenty of dance energy everywhere.
The Joffrey Ballet, for instance, continues its spring engagement began in late April, finishing May 6 at the Auditorium Theatre, works by Val Caniparoli, Jerome Robbins and Edwaard Liang on the bill. In something of an interdisciplinary mix, "Superman 2050" returns via Theatre Un-Speak-Able, relaying the battle between the super hero and Lex Luther by means of seven performers who conjure up all characters, props and scenery with their bodies, on view May 2-6 at the Josephine Louis Theater of Northwestern University in Evanston. Next, Erin Carlisle Norton is choreographer of "Sector," the Moving Architects' program exploring dance in its political, social and global contexts May 4-6 at the Fasseas White Box Theater of the Menomonee Club, 1535 N. Dayton St.
Kalapriya Dance touches on the immigrant experience in "Finding Home," through both Bharata Natyam classical technique and modern dance May 4 and 5 at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. In a numerological nod, NoMi LaMad Dance Inc. winds down its fifth season with five premieres in "Level 5," a program May 5 at the Athenaeum. That same night, Ballet Chicago makes its long-hoped-for Harris Theater debut with three classics by George Balanchine and a host of guest stars supplementing its studio company. "Rubies," the middle section of "Jewels," along with "Concerto Barocco" and "Who Cares?" make up the bill.
A wide assortment of local tap artists join forces for "Windy City Rhythms," the Chicago Human Rhythm Project's concerts May 10 and 11 at the DuSable Museum of African American History. Tre Dumas, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, the Boom Crack Dance Company and BAM! are among the headliners. The New Stages for Dances initiative, meanwhile, linking various pairs of organizations throughout the season, returns with a concert bringing together Muntu Dance Theatre and DanceWorks Chicago, performing separately but also sharing the stage in one new work, May 11 (matinee) and 12 (matinee and full evening performance) at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.
Colorado Ballet principals Maria Mosina and Alexei Tyukov will guest star when the Salt Creek Ballet's "The Sleeping Beauty" plays May 12 and 13 at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. That same busy weekend, CoCoDaCo Dance Chicago presents "Dance Forward" May 12 at 7614 N. Ridge Rd. Aerial Dance Chicago presents its student showcase May 12 at the Ruth Page Center, while the Center itself holds a gala benefit May 12 at the Chicago Yacht Club, 400 E. Monroe St.
And in a month rich with five-year anniversaries, Elements Contemporary Ballet celebrates theirs with a program including the company premiere of a work by former Hubbard Street Dance Chicago dancer Brian Enos May 12 at the Athenaeum Theatre. It's called "Dark and Lovely, Mmm" and was originally created for the Houston Ballet.
Aerial Dance Chicago presents three new works in its "Garden of Souls" line-up May 17-June 10 at the Ruth Page center. Margi Cole and her Dance COLEctive, in an effort to foster new work, offer a program of original pieces, all by company members, entitled "COLEctive Notions 2012" and playing May 18-20 at the Fasseas White Box. Much of May at Links Hall is devoted to the Standing Heat project honoring animal life via a variety of disciplines, including some dance. But, after that, "Dances to Songs I Hate" arrives May 21, curated by Tif Bullard and featuring work by a variety of artists with this challenging premise: find inspiration "from something that repulses." (Song titles won't be revealed until the start of the performance.) Sage Morgan-Hubbard provides "Mixed Mamas," an "autobiographical spoken word choreo-poem," May 25-27 at Links. Theatre Un-Speak-Able returns with "Murder on the Midwest Express" May 18-21 at the Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Av., 2nd Floor.
Last and assuredly not least, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago winds up its season May 31-June 3 at the Harris. The company premiere of William Forsythe's "Quintett" along with revivals of Ohad Naharin's "Three to Max" and Alejandro Cerrudo's "Malditos" make up the bill.

News: PREVIEW: Perceptual Motion, Inc. and Inaside Chicago Dance perform this weekend

Tue, 24 April 2012 11:23:09 -0400

By Sid Smith
Two veteran groups--one of them 28 years old--offer engagements later this week, and their leaders provide very different but equally compelling visions on the art of dance.
Perceptual Motion, Inc., launched in 1983 and still run by its founder, Lin Shook, performs Thursday and Friday at the Hamlin Park Theatre, 3035 N. Hoyne Av. Five of the seven works are premieres.
Then, Inaside Chicago Dance premieres three works on a program Saturday at the Athenaeum Theatre. Jazz is the style here, but, like Shook, Inaside artistic director Richard A. Smith is an eloquent, complex thinker when it comes to explaining his mission. "I think jazz is real, I think it's today, I think it's the most accessible form that exists," Smith said. "The step touch you do on the dance floor, the head isolation you do when you hear a familiar beat. That heartbeat, that rhythm that comes out in movement.
"It hit a peak in the '70s and '80s, and, as with any art form, there needs to be development, and that's where we are now," he continued. "We've lost Gus Giordano. We've lost Jack Cole. We've lost the pioneers. Like with any legacy, once it's established, it's up to us who grew up under it to move to the next phase. That's where we are. We've had the Broadway shows, we've had the concerts. Now it's our responsibility to take that reference point and push it farther so it's more relevant to the time we're living right now."
The Inaside bill Saturday has a mix of revivals and new works, as well as a range of jazz takes old and new. Smith cites Harrison McEldowney and Tony Savino's "Mink, Jazz and Swing: Dancing to the Music of Miss Peggy Lee," from last year, as providing "that traditional jazz flair that will stick with you."
But in his own new work, "The Sides of Every Story," he says he tries to push things forward. "It has movement everyone will recognize, but I try to use those fundamentals in a new way," Smith said. "To give it a different porte bras or direction. Multiple rotations in a non-traditional way. Pushing your technique."
The score is by Olafur Arnalds, who favors synthesized sounds of such classic instrumentation as drums and saxophone and who is considered a contemporary classical composer.
Other new works include Sinead Gildea's "capsule," which Smith describes as "easy to watch, one of those pieces you could watch over and over," and "The End of the World" by company member Courtney Kozlowski, set to Audiomachine and described by Smith thusly: "What may be the end of my world is not the end of yours, but at the time you're in it, it feels that way."
Serendipitously, one theme Smith highlights regarding his new work resonates with Shook's Perceptual Motion program. "We are products of multiple stimulation, over-stimulation for the most part, our audiences growing up behind computer screens and gadgets, removed from their social skills," he said.
That dovetails with the inspiration for several works on Perceptual Motion's program inspired by modern texting and steeped in Shook's discovery that, in the 17th and 18th Centuries, hand-held fans were employed in a system of secret signals and communication.
"If held against the right cheek, it means such and such," Shook noted. "If held over the heart, it means this. Over the left eye, it means that. It got me to thinking about how much we text today instead of calling, instead of talking. It's like a secret language. Maybe we don't want to be heard."
Shook has been working on a series of fan dances, and this week she'll premiere "Fan-Text-It" as part of the Hamlin Park programs. "She's setting up a secret meeting with her lover," Shook explained of the scenario, which includes projections of the text and voiceover.
Shook's connection to arcane, sophisticated science and art is fascinating. Another work revolves around the personality color test devised by Swiss psychologist Max Luscher, a dance work with specific movement assigned to various colors, peopled with characters created after Shook's own experiment with Luscher's methods.
Then there's a work inspired by the artistic process of British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, who sets up sculptural works in nature and photographs them there. After intermission, Shook has devised a way for audience members to enter the performing area differently and experience her own kind of re-enactment of the Goldsworthy process.
Shook's small company is now in its 28th year, clearly flush with ideas and innovation, though it's never easy. "Sure, a lot of funding goes to bigger companies, and it's a struggle," she said and then offered as keen and succinct an artist's credo as any imaginable: "I can't imagine doing anything else. When I choreograph, I'm always learning, learning about everything, learning about life."
Perceptual Motion plays at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday at Hamlin. Tickets at the door or in advance online: perceptualmotiondance.com.
Inaside plays at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport Av. For tickets:773-935-6860 or athenaeumtheatre.com.

Review: CLINARD DANCE THEATRE AT LINK'S HALL by Laura Molzahn

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

By Laura Molzahn

Fire and ice meet in Wendy Clinard’s new “From the Arctic to the Middle East (Broken Narratives by an American Flamenco Dancer).” American jazz also meets Middle Eastern song, and flamenco meets modern dance. Video projections take on nature (nature wins), and all of it runs smack into texts by John Steinbeck, Annie Dillard, Canadian writer Anne Michaels, Clinard herself, and Arctic explorer Gontran de Poncins, among others, delivered in voiceover.

Oddly, the effect of juxtaposing all these elements is to produce a leveling effect. The Arctic and the desert aren’t different, it seems, but simply two “harsh landscapes,” as Clinard put it in a post-show Q&A on Friday. Just under an hour long, Clinard Dance Theatre’s “From the Arctic to the Middle East” --- running through Sunday at Link’s Hall --- manages to cover vast geographical and metaphysical terrain. Yet it doesn’t really go anywhere.

Individual pieces of the show are quite brilliant, however. Steve Gibons, the violinist who leads the Steve Gibons Gypsy Rhythm Project, wrote the complex score, which ranges far and wide over the musical universe yet remains unified and unique. Performing the music live on the tiny Link’s Hall stage, Gibons, oud and bass player Alex Wing, percussionist Bob Garrett, and singer Mercedes Inez give it energy and purpose. Regularly stepping into the dancers’ space, the musicians create a synergistic effect.

And the singer delivers one of the evening’s most affecting movement sequences. Holding a square of white cloth-like paper, Inez folds it into a baby shape and cradles it, flips it at us in what seems an act of entreaty, drapes it diagonally across her torso like a sash or an ammo belt. Meanwhile, she croons and keens long notes, barely opening her mouth, in eerie accompaniment of her long, mournful looks at the audience.

Clinard’s choreography for herself, Andrea Peterson, and Marisela Tapia --- flamenco and modern dance alternating or nearly merging --- can also generate synergy, each form becoming something more and different. Flamenco-like stamping opens the piece, but the torsos are more off-axis than usual, running at a perilous diagonal into widely staggered legs. Flamenco’s vehemence bordering on violence is expressed in one dancer’s headlong launch across the floor, brought up short when another dancer grabs her foot.

More traditional flamenco infuses some of the most stirring or ingenious sequences. Clinard uses the snakelike twisting of the arms --- rotating at the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers --- to suggest the way that individual moments melt together to become a single undifferentiated movement. A danced battle between Peterson and Tapia is spectacular. Meanwhile pure modern dance moves resembling Alvin Ailey’s (like a curved arm framing a tilted head, the three dancers nestled front to back, rolling heads and arms in unison) create a sense of unity and mystery.

The texts, however, are a problem. They’re too many, and too varied. Jumbled together in no particular order, delivered by various speakers, they force the listener to re-establish context every time one pops up. Or try to. They skip from algae to a Chicagoan embracing an undefined person in the state of Georgia to metaphysical whisperings about energy and action, heat and cold, fall and winter. A few are powerfully suggestive, like Clinard’s recollection of a trip to Syria a few years ago with her then-five-year-old daughter. When Clinard suggested the girl make a drawing of their surroundings, she chose not the stone carvings that had weathered thousands of years, but a plucked, two-day-old pink flower.

Often the words were frustratingly inaudible, or they were drowned out entirely by the music. Distractions abounded. A photographer stood in the aisle and snapped pictures throughout the show. The dancers inexplicably changed costumes constantly, which of course required many exits and entrances. They often used the entrance to the theater, behind the audience, which meant that we heard their rustling arrival long, long before they made their way onto the stage.

Ultimately, Clinard seems to have gotten so enmeshed in her metaphysical ruminations, in the connections she’s making between disparate sources and ideas and cultures and genres, that she’s forgotten the audience. She hasn’t made her vision and purpose clear. So, despite tasty elements, “From the Arctic to the Middle East” devolves into a surprisingly innocuous soup. When everything’s connected, differences are erased, and nothing stands out.

News: PREVIEW: Striding Lion Performance Group at the Viaduct Theater

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

By Sid Smith
History and popular myth mingle and collide in a pair of upcoming works from the Striding Lion Performance Group, two separate programs playing in revolving repertory at the Viaduct Theater, entitled "The Jenkins Farm Project" and "Remember the...(Alamo)."
"Jenkins" arises from Depression-era farm life in North Carolina and the personal family history of Annie Beserra, Striding Lion's artistic director. "(Alamo)" explores the historical facts and pop myths behind that legendary siege in Texan and American history. Both are dance dramas, with deep roots in storytelling and non-fiction. Both promise subjects steeped in the trope of personal struggle against all odds and the tragic heroism of the doomed.
The denizens of "Jenkins" are Beserra's own ancestors, a great aunt and great uncle who wound up the only survivors of a large brood living on a cotton farm during the Depression. Both survivors suffered from schizophrenia, but adapted to their condition in different ways. Jeanette stayed at home, eventually the lone mistress of the farm, while Glen took to wandering, essentially homeless and adrift for years. "The story looks at issues of memory, home, family and mental illness through the prism of the actual architecture of the farm itself and how it's now falling down," Beserra explained. "There's a toilet now coming out of the top of a barn. How did it get there?"
Clearly, the Jenkins' survivors make the devolving gentry of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" seem models of domestic functionality by comparison. And yet there are images of defiance and durability, too. Jeannette maintains an all-white kitchen interior, a meticulously maintained remnant of ideal purity, just as both relatives proved to be amazing storytellers, the fading past alive as long as they are. "Their memories from when they were young were incredibly poetic and detailed," Beserra noted.
The tale of the Alamo is, of course, a more national memory, but it, too, is striated with historical reality, mythic revisionism and pop cultural fairy tale. "In school, the version I learned was the pop cultural one," said Beserra, who grew up in Texas and dutifully visited the landmark as a school student. "In our piece, we're playing with how this actual event has been mythologized, and we look at everything from John Wayne in the movies to Johnny Cash in song and even Pee Wee Herman, who goes to the Alamo in 'Pee Wee's Big Adventure.'"
There is, she adds, relevance today. The Alamo featured in our colonial land battle with Mexico. She asks, "What does it mean now that we're building a wall between our two countries?"
Striding Lion has been around since 2001, though its make-up and aesthetic mission have changed and evolved. Beserra, on board in the beginning, left for a time and only returned last season. The group began as an interdisciplinary one and remains so, though she says the troupe now boasts a decidedly emphatic dance accent.
There are five company members, but the group also works with an additional six collaborators, and the projects evolve collaboratively, with Beserra serving as director and guide. "I'm the outside eye, I pull it together," she said. "But the making of it, and the substance, is deeply collaborative.
The two works play in repertory Thursday through April 29 at the Viaduct, 3111 N. Western Av. Tickets can be purchased at the door or at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/223255.

Review: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater "Program 2" by Laura Molzahn

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

By Laura Molzahn

New artistic director Robert Battle gives the Ailey company a shot in the arm --- a shot of fun. For a number of years the troupe has had a whiff of the museum to it. Yet as the Ailey ur-text, "Revelations," makes plain, the master himself never hesitated to mine the veins of humor and the everyday. Battle does the same.

The second program, which repeats at the Auditorium on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, includes his first commission for the 54-year-old organization: Rennie Harris's hip-hoppy "Home." (It's about time somebody renovated the troupe's notion of street dance.) Also on the program: Battle's loopy, physically exacting 1999 solo "Takademe," which brought down the house, and Ailey's 1979 "Memoria" and 1960 "Revelations." (The first program, which repeats Friday and Saturday nights, features the company premieres of Ohad Naharin's populist "Minus 16" and Paul Taylor's "Arden Court" as well as "Revelations.")

Following in the Ailey tradition, Harris's "Home" is not just a pyrotechnical showcase. Harris made his bones by bringing hip-hop into the concert hall; his "Rome & Jewels," for example, riffed on Shakespeare. Here the subject is surviving HIV infection, which of course killed Ailey in 1989 (a fact Battle mentioned in his curtain talk Thursday night but that Ailey himself preferred to keep on the DL). By rooting "Home" in the 80s house scene, which made dance clubs a haven for many HIV-affected people of color, Harris gives a serious subtext to this mostly upbeat piece for 14.

You can see that subtext in the slow-moving opening and conclusion of "Home." You can hear it in the clapping that marks these sections, which recalls the African-American traditions of juba and gospel. Sometimes Harris slows break-dancing to contemplative levels. Tracks by Dennis Ferrer ("Underground Is My Home") and Raphael Xavier ("I See...Do You") include abstracted sounds of the breath and a barely audible recording of a fire-and-brimstone sermon. But where Ailey was churchy, and undoubtedly suffered because of that when he became ill, Harris is spiritual: he anchors transcendence firmly in the everyday.

Unlike Donald Byrd's "Dance at the Gym," created for the Ailey company in 1991, "Home" isn't about hooking up. Seduction isn't the aim; sweating it out together, in a community, is. Fast footwork and vigorous yet loose shoulder popping help that happen. Some of the Ailey dancers haven't yet got this style down, which means they look like they're performing choreography they're not very happy about. But for most of the 14 dancers, led by the expressive Matthew Rushing, it's like breathing, like home. Performative moments are what make this piece.

As danced by Kirven James Boyd, Battle's "Takademe" wowed this crowd. And it's funnier and more human than ever. Echoing the mood created by singer Sheila Chandra as she translates the rhythms of the tabla to the voice, Boyd is both just a guy trying to get through these exhausting three and a half minutes and a superhero anticipating and precisely replicating the Byzantine rhythms of Indian music.

When "Revelations" is about to begin, you can feel the audience both settling into their seats and sitting at the edge of them, anticipating something good, something that's as good as ever. Sometimes this dance is just gloriously right, and this time brought home to me Ailey's remarkable authority at this early point in his career. Carving the space as surely as a master sculptor, he's never simply majestic, confidently indulging his freewheeling impulses and shifting the mood to reveal the many facets of the African-American Christian experience.

Ailey's "Memoria" --- a tribute to his friend Joyce Trisler, a former Ailey dancer who died in 1979 --- is, like most of his works, a pale copy of "Revelations." Both solemn and rollicking, it achieves liftoff in the second half, when 25 Chicago-area dance students get added to the mix. As coached by Ronni Favors, they're accomplished and charming, falling with apparent ease into the Ailey style.

Overall the message of "Memoria" is clear: new generations will take up Trisler's legacy. And they'll take up Ailey's, but I hope not slavishly. Battle makes promising inroads into the new in these programs, expanding the range of acceptable sources to a world-renowned Israeli choreographer and a modern interpreter of ancient Indian traditions. Savvy but self-deprecating, he proceeds with both caution and a sense of adventure in his new role. I hope Battle breaks out even more in future and sets his own new work on this marvelous company.

Review: Luna Negra Dance Theater "Carmen.maquia" by Laura Molzahn

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

By Laura Molzahn

Gustavo Ramirez Sansano's new "CARMEN.maquia" is stark and stylish. In contrast to the stripped-down designs, the dancing is as intricate, silky, and precise as a rich brocade. The characters in Bizet's interlocking love triangles are expertly drawn, and an innovative staging takes the performance almost into the audience.

Luna Negra Dance Theater's 75-minute piece opened at the Harris on Saturday night to an air of expectation. It closed the same night to clamorous applause. A huge and largely successful undertaking, "CARMEN.maquia" pares and reimagines Bizet's classic in Luna Negra's first-ever evening-length work. What it fails to do is fully communicate the story's tragedy.

There was much to applaud. Sansano's gift for physical comedy saturates the early scenes of village life. The factory girls flirt in mincing steps, rolling their shoulders; the soldiers show off in athletic moves that hint at break-dancing. More often they're confused, however, trying vainly to impress the girls or imitate Don Jose in his military drills. One soldier who's regularly asleep at his post must be nudged repeatedly to break up a catfight.

Especially given all the flirting, quarreling, and one-upmanship, the scene reeks of junior high. And Carmen's manipulations, her bullying of women and seduction of men, make her seem the school alpha bitch.

All the comedy leaches into Don Jose's character despite an opening solo that shows his troubled nature. With Carmen, he's a clown. When he wraps a rope around her wrists to take her to jail, she's the one who ensnares him. And when he courts Carmen in her cell, he seems a clumsy, coercive teenager --- in contrast to the genuinely sexy scene in which the bullfighter Escamillo exerts all his finesse to seduce her.

Whipsawed by one woman after another --- Carmen, girlfriend Micaela, and (by proxy) his mother --- as well as by his fellow soldiers, Don Jose seldom communicates a sense of agency. That compromises the tragedy of his final choice, which seems just another whim in his whimsical life.

Sansano excels at the nuances of movement: fleeting, telling glances and gestures; a deeply ingrained Spanish look and feel; the barely detectible inflections of forms like flamenco and hip-hop. In the final confrontation between Carmen and Don Jose, Sansano adds flashes of a tiny, courageous bull, as she lowers her head and brandishes invisible horns. But the big and tragic scenes, the ones whose stillness and weight should make the heart stop, elude him. Don Jose's final attack on his adored Carmen passed so quickly and unremarkably that I didn't see what had happened until she slipped from his arms and fell to the floor. Oddly, his grief is then expressed in the same flurries of upper-body movement that mark the rest of the piece. (It's as if the upper body has taken on the swift steps of flamenco.)

The tragedy in Sansano's "CARMEN.maquia" belongs to Carmen, whom Monica Cervantes gives an innate intelligence and, finally, true nobility. The only character who develops, who matures, she changes from a flippant girl casually and cruelly amusing herself to someone who sees her own doom: though her defining trait is the ability to make men love her, no man is worthy of her. That goes too for Don Jose. Given the bleakness of her options, her death is in a way beside the point. That's why it's so crucial that, whatever his failings, Don Jose register the tragedy of her loss.

Perhaps the chilly, abstract designs in "CARMEN.maquia" infect the rest of the piece. But in themselves, they're impressive. Luis Crespo's movable white boxes, which can be switched around to create the factory, jail, and other settings, generally work well (though, from my seat, a wall obscured the couple's final embrace). And Crespo's hangings certainly suggest Picasso. David Delfin's brilliantly understated costumes merely sketch the soldiers' holsters, the toreadors' short jackets. His designs all reveal the body, but especially the backless dresses with long, filmy skirts.

In this radically contemporary context, Sansano's choice of music is puzzling: fairly standard orchestral arrangements of Bizet. In an interview late last year, Sansano told me that he was searching out "weird versions" of the opera's score and added, "We've heard 'Carmen' many times." But those avant-garde takes don't seem to be here. And though the familiarity of the recorded score allows the audience to relish the dancing's musicality, I wondered whether more challenging music might have enhanced the tragedy in "CARMEN.maquia."

Cervantes was exquisite as Carmen, chiseled and bold and, finally, enlightened. Eduardo Zuniga was her match technically and in terms of stature, but I wondered whether his smallness worked against him in the role of Don Jose. Nigel Campbell was suitably imposing and arrogant as the bullfighter, and Stacy Aung as Micaela revealed a talent for deep feeling. It's a talent that this piece --- so near to genius --- could afford to cultivate.

Review: Triptych: Three Dance Voices by Laura Molzahn

Wed, 31 December 1969 19:00:00 -0500

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.