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STAMINA OF CURIOSITY: OUR STRANGE ELEVATIONS

By Laura Molzahn

Against a backdrop of ruined grandeur --- the most decayed and window-deficient wall of the majestic nave in the Epiphany Episcopal Church --- Molly Shanahan both transforms the quotidian into the mystical and pays tribute to such transformation.

Three women wearing knee pads under ordinary dresses and two men in unremarkable shirts and pants walk purposefully out into a big, open space cleared of pews and ringed by a single row of viewers. When the dancers start moving, the sounds of their feet on the floor, thudding, brushing, scraping, compete with the noise of car horns and buses accelerating on Ashland Avenue. The space is murky, filled with dying natural light, lit by just a few artificial slashes of powerful gold.

How is it possible to take these everyday elements and come up with something not at all everyday? It’s not the music, however stirring and appropriate: four pieces by Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadottir and Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s “Passacaglia for Solo Violin.” The sections danced in silence are just as affecting, sometimes more so.

Shanahan started the process that produced the hour-long "Stamina of Curiosity: Our Strange Elevations," a Chicago premiere, with her 2007 solo, "My Name Is a Blackbird" (begun in 2005). She revisited the solo on the first weekend of this two-week run by Molly Shanahan / Mad Shak, and "Stamina," which opened Thursday, continues through Sunday at the church.

"Stamina" feels like an adventure, a journey. And that's the way time-based art should be. Music, theater, dance --- if they don't go anywhere, why would we want to travel along?

"Stamina" starts with the dancers in a clump, all moving inexorably toward a floor-bound light though each dancer is moving differently. They seem to be a community drawn unconsciously to a common but uncertain goal, each approaching it in his or her own way. As the piece goes on, dancers shift in and out of the action, sometimes taking watchers’ roles at the dark edges of the space, sometimes dancing alone or with others. Their interactions might be soft and spongy, or almost martial, or nearly ordinary. When a man wraps his arm around a woman and places a hand on her hip, and she covers his hand with hers, they might be a girl and her beau out for a stroll. Except for their crouching, watchful posture.

The choreography's stunning shifts into unison seem to come out of nowhere and yet are of a piece with the individual movement that's gone before. Maybe that’s why these unison interludes, which might last a moment or a good stretch of time, are so surprising; there’s no visible preparation, and no warning when the dancing sinks back into the constantly churning sea of individual moves.

Lots of choreographers devise discrete phrases and then attempt, with varying degrees of success, to stitch them together. But in Shanahan's work, for the last several years anyway, each motion grows organically out of the one(s) that preceded it. The body flows seamlessly from some initiating impulse; hips slightly shifted from side to side turn into a belly dancer’s stirring of the pot, trailed by the arms, spine, and head in a soft tornado around the hips. Soon the dancers are lurching like robots.

The body is integrated, but the few recognizable phrases tend to disintegrate, especially when they're sharp, aggressive, and claim the space. A head thrust sharply to the right to gaze like a conquistador over a stiff, straight right arm pointing to the right turns into a less stiffly extended arm and a hand “writing” with the forefinger, trying to decipher a code. In another devolution of the heroic, the arm points right and the head looks left, droopy, uncertain.

The dancing is superb --- and what a pleasure it must be to move simply, expressively, rather than struggling to re-create a choreographer’s steps, to the fill the mold she’s created. Shanahan, who also performs, credits the other dancers as collaborators, and given her slow, intuitive choreographic process, they could hardly be otherwise. Kristina Fluty, Tim Heck, Benjamin Law, and Jessie Marasa all have their own distinctive movement personalities, tried in the fire of this physical marathon.

The lack of pretense in "Stamina" and its insistence on limitation, uncertainty, and the body's subjection to itself are ultimately what elevate the piece. Maybe grandeur can't exist without decay. Shanahan closes "Stamina" by highlighting the dancers' soft, relaxed hands, hands that make no statements or claims. Though they;re almost joined, they're not praying. They're like animal paws, like human humility. They're also just hands.

Reviewed by Laura Molzahn on 05/21/2010 at 11:02 AM