REVIEWS

Chicago Dancing Festival

"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.

Dance for Life Chicago

"Dance For Life "

 

By Sid Smith

"Dance for Life," that annual admixture of artistic accomplishment and community good will, has once again come and gone, its 19th installment nicely managed and executed over the weekend at the Harris Theater.

This year's selections were unusually choice and varied, from Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theatre's bravura benefit debut--opening the show with gorgeous, swirling, red-drenched costumes and dynamite flamenco--up through and including "I've Got a Life," the original closer from Harrison McEldowney, replacing Randy Duncan and providing his own special signature on the finale's typical themes of struggle, grief, hope and determination.

Along the way, the participating troupes chose a nicely complimentary assortment. Thodos Dance Chicago, for instance, offered one look at the trio (three trios, actually), via "Fosse Trilogy," culled from Bob Fosse's late-'60s TV stylistics. A more mod threesome wriggling with rhythmic antics and squiggly higgledy-piggledy arrived later in "Three," Robert Battle's work for River North Chicago Dance Company.

The Joffrey Ballet demonstrated what a slightly larger ensemble can accomplish with the exciting third movement from James Kudelka's exciting "Pretty BALLET," this movement a male quintet that's fast, sharp and here and there funky, and yet all the while, too--a celebration of form and its possibilities. For spectacle, in addition to Ensemble Espagnol and McEldowney's finale, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago glowed with a terrific excerpt from Ohad Naharin's richly textured, dramatically designed "Tabula Rasa"-- often flowing, creamy dance serving as a patina slathered on a disturbing core.

Overall, the focus seemed more on actual dance than in some recent years. The raffle and auction were held offstage, replaced by a brief introduction of the artistic directors of the participating troupes--a welcomed move that put the spotlight on the artists who make the benefit possible. The whole affair seemed a bit more muted and serious, too. True, Dean Richards, the WGN and Tribune personality whose growth in the role of emcee over the years has been one of the benefit's more pleasing developments, cracked a few funny jokes, as always. But he injected some thoughtful notes as well and even offered up one very effective reminder of what's at stake for like-minded "Dance for Life" souls in the upcoming election. His comments carried all the more force after Gov. Patrick Quinn walked on stage to open the show and underscore the importance of preserving Illinois AIDS funding.

Even the audience seemed to sense the mood, not that their ovations were restrained--far from it. But there was a kind of dignity to the occasion, visible at the very outset when the crowd was hushed, as if spellbound, by the sheer glamour and spectacle of Ensemble Espagnol's opening, holding back their huzzahs until Dame Libby Komaiko's incandescent take on "Bolero" had ended.

McEldowney's piece, set to some outright anthemic Annie Lennox vocals, struck me as shrewdly building on elements he used in his ensemble piece last year, employed here more effectively, with better integration and ultimately more impact. The aerial dancing was back, choreographed by Jeremy Plummer and enabled by Flying By Foy. But it merged with the larger choreography more gracefully than last year, a single, a floating cube of metal bars serving not just as a trapeze device, but also as a bit of twirling geometric sculpture. A mobile for life.

The simple black-and-white costumes also helped unify the piece and give a Spartan cloak to a large, crowded, elaborately designed spectacle. "Life" avoided some of the clutter and everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink feel to McEldowney's piece last year, and, in addition, he pulled out the stops on this one, flooding the stage with more than two dozen dancers and devising both intricate choral designs and some gripping, short-lived personal dramas--near the finish two male dancers engage in an aggressive, defiant stolen kiss.

Towards the end, an industrial-like backdrop descended and a row of water buckets were placed in front of it so that the dancers, in small groups, could take turns soaking their hair and splashing droplets skyward. The effect was far from perfect, the buckets positioned towards the back of the stage, so that when the dancers wet their hair and then marched forward, the impact of the water imagery was pretty much dissipated. It's a great gimmick, just not perfectly used here. But again it served McEldowney's purpose, evoking thoughts of baptism and purification.

But by then I didn't care, and neither did the audience. Certainly it served McEldowney's purpose of injecting imagery of baptism and purification. And as a whole, McEldowney delivered the pop dance, feel-good extravaganza that's expected of the finale, a stirring crowd piece not relying at all on his trademark humor. It was a fine close to a get-together of thousands of dancers and enthusiasts celebrating the fact that art not only reflects our lives, but can save them, too.

20th Anniversary Rhythm World

"CHICAGO HUMAN RHYTHM PROJECT'S "JUBA! MASTERS OF TAP AND PERCUSSIVE DANCE""

 

By Laura Molzahn

 

Everybody was welcome at the big party Chicago Human Rhythm Project threw last night. The house was filled with percussive dancers, both students and expert practitioners. And then there was me. What I know about tap-dance you could put on the head of a pin.

Still, I felt at home and happy. We laughed, we cried. Stories and jokes were told, astounding feats of tap-dance magic were performed, standing ovations were enthusiastically conferred. The occasion? The 20th anniversary of Rhythm World, brainchild of CHRP cofounder Lane Alexander and the longest-running festival of American tap in the world. "JUBA!" is its three-day faculty concert, which continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art Thursday and Saturday with two completely different lineups from Wednesday's. The Vijay Tellis-Nayak Trio, blessedly quick on the uptake, provides live music.

"Faculty concert" doesn't quite cover what "JUBA!" is, though. Old hands and newcomers alike are welcome onstage. Thursday's performance features several youth tap ensembles, while on Saturday the MCA itself receives a 2010 JUBA! Award.

On opening night, JUBA! Awards were handed out to tap veterans and master teachers Dianne "Lady Di" Walker and Sam Weber. Video footage of each --- talking, teaching, dancing --- got the same riotous applause as the live acts. And for good reason. Both are clearly gentle souls whose passion for the art of tap drives their no-holds-barred teaching, which honors music and the individual as much as steps.

Weber was still recovering from a double hip replacement and did not dance. Walker did, and it was the most mature and personally expressive performance of the evening. Quiet sounds, slow steps, soft claps, pauses, stillness --- Lady Di had everyone in the palm of her hand. Shaking a finger at us, making a little joke about taking a shortcut on some steps, she took her own sweet time and let us see who she is.

Other old-timers included Jay Fagan and Alexander himself, head of CHRP's resident ensemble, BAM! That sextet (including Alexander) performed his "Prisms," which shatters the ensemble into individuals and duos, male and female. Still, our sense of the whole is primary, created by Alexander's strong and comprehensive choreography (Alexander, Michaels/Future Movement, the precursor of BAM!, blended modern and tap). Fagan proved incredibly entertaining, both standup comic and tap-dance chameleon, demonstrating such fusion forms as tap yoga and, at the audience’s suggestion, "tap-bo" (tap + Tae Bo).

Winners of CHRP’s first-ever Virtual Rhythms contest also got into the act. According to Alexander, the evening's emcee, 20,000 votes from 87 countries were cast online in response to posted videos. Matt Shields, from Austin, Texas, won in the choreography category for his quartet "The Night Before Tomorrow," and Chicago's Be the Groove won the videography award for its snappy, rappy video "Breath."

That leaves the middle generation, whose representatives on opening night were astounding, all in different ways. Ayodele Casel is a lightweight --- in terms of size, not talent. Small and slender and a little reserved (think Audrey Hepburn), she floats over the floor delivering taps so clean, light, and quick they're like a hummingbird's thrumming. By contrast Derick Grant, also featured on the first half of the bill, is a big lug. Taking a far more muscular approach, he could stand up to the trio's more muscular jazz. Freely expressive, he grunted, paused, attacked again. Responsive to the live music, he softened his taps when it quieted.

Jason Janas opened the second act. Oh, the energy of the young. Not yet 30, Janas delivered a barrage of taps at the get-go --- an arpeggio to match the piano's --- and just kept getting louder, harder, faster, and more inventive. He's not a pretty dancer, and I mean that in the best possible way. Instinctive, fierce, with the mannerisms of a hip-hop artist, he cut a strange figure in his dress shirt, tie, and white patent leather shoes, perhaps worn in honor of the occasion. And took the musicians on one hell of a ride.

Closing the program, Jason Samuels Smith covered a broad territory, from the moody and weird to the argumentative definite to the mellow and sparse. Overall his relationship to the live music was the most complex of the evening, a kind of friendly antagonism that challenged the trio to shift gears. In the process he challenged himself.

The "Shim Sham" finale brought all the dancers up onstage, tapping in unison. Seeing and applauding everyone once again was like delivering a round of hugs at the end of a family party. Icing on the cake.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show! Chicago 2010

"THE A.W.A.R.D SHOW 2010!"

 

By Laura Molzahn

The first three nights of this unique four-day competition proved a wild ride. As Dance Center chair Bonnie Brooks said on Friday, every dance created its own world --- so you're negotiating four worlds a night.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show! has ground rules, and I set a few for myself. I didn't stay for much, or usually any, of the postshow discussions. I didn't look at the posted winners on the Dance Center's site until each evening's review was finished. And I haven't rank-ordered the works the way audience members did at the shows, instead discussing them by order in the program, first to last.

Tonight, Saturday the 31st, the three finalists compete for the $10,000 prize; the winner and runners-up will be posted Sunday.

Wednesday, July 28

The battle of the Titans circa 2010 got off to an uneven start on opening night. Those vying for a chance at the big prize, to be used for the creation of new choreography, ranged from a recent Columbia College grad to the artistic director of a five-year-old ballet company.

Jacqueline Stewart's stylish, lyrical duet, "It's Not Enough to Close Your Eyes," is circumscribed by its focus on a downstage Fresnel light. Though the unusual lighting creates some cool effects, overall the stage is too dim during much of the piece to see the dancing. Hands fluttering above and near the light, which is pointed up, inevitably suggest moths drawn to a flame --- and the dancers, just as predictably, snatch each other’s hands away from the fire. Charlie Cutler and Grace Whitworth looked well rehearsed in Stewart’s sometimes challenging choreography.

Alicia Wilson, the recent Dance Center graduate, performed her own promising solo, "Sometimes/Always." Daring to be different, she dramatizes insecurity --- seldom seen in the dance world, which lionizes self-confident, decisive performance. Fiddling one hand at her side, Wilson allows the fussy, nervous motions to reverberate through her entire body until she’s twitching and swaying. Later, standing on half-toe, she reaches her arms forward while gradually leaning back with her hips, literally pulled in two directions. Though psychologically suggestive, Wilson’s solo is also more than a little self-involved. But her courage and emotional instincts are strong.

Mike Gosney, of Elements Contemporary Ballet, contributed an excerpt from "Curiosity." The only work on pointe in the A.W.A.R.D. Show's two years, this septet was also Wednesday’s most ambitious piece. Gosney’s take on contemporary ballet is both respectful of tradition and intriguingly, expressively new; he uses romantic longing as a metaphor for curiosity in a larger sense. A male solo and a duet by a central couple (Joseph Caruana and Gabrielle DelRe Ashley, both up to Gosney's challenges) set the mood of yearning. When a subsidiary couple and three corps dancers join the action halfway through, it does open out the meaning from the personal to the universal --- but it also dilutes the energy.

Kate Corby collaborated with her dancers on "Go," a trio filled with abrupt movements as succinct as the title. The piece essentially dismantles the opening section’s chaos into smaller, more comprehensible pieces --- though "Go" retains an agreeable mystery. Corby plays off the odd-woman-out aspect of a trio, suggesting swift, easily broken alliances and distracted, birdlike animosities. The dancers’ stares and changing expressions are amusing --- and crucial to the work's conclusion, when the audience becomes the odd woman out. With its strong structure, unusual movement, and half-menacing, half-humorous air, "Go" creates its own strange world.

Wednesday's winner: Jacqueline Stewart

*
Thursday, July 29

The second evening sandwiched two duets by relative newcomers between excerpts from longer works by two experienced choreographers. Apples and oranges doesn’t come close to describing the experience. More like escargots and ice cream.

Peter Carpenter's excerpt from "My Fellow Americans," last October's evening-length dance-theater piece, suffered from the drastic cuts he had to make. (A.W.A.R.D. Show! rules don’t allow works longer than 15 minutes.) The highlights winnowed from the longer piece: Carpenter’s rendition of Tommy Womack’s funny song "I Miss Ronald Reagan," cross-dressing performers vamping in Reagan masks, Donnell Williams’s reminiscence about the Reagan years. But this truncated version doesn’t begin to approach the political and dramatic complexity of Carpenter’s original. It feels like an overture, then a jump cut to the conclusion.

Rebecca Lemme offered a very presentable romantic duet whose intricate, occasionally inventive partnering was well performed by Hubbard Street dancers Kellie Epperheimer and Jason Hortin. "Rooms for Them" has a beginning and an end: two lonely, prickly people achieve rapprochement. But it's a rocky road. Conflicts are swiftly established, then resolved, all within seconds. Almost indistinguishable repetitions of the same psychological dynamic don’t create much of an emotional arc.

Conflict is more overt in Michel Rodriguez’s duet "Moi Aussi," which he performs with Jessie Gutierrez. The opening is basically a shoving match, and it too gets monotonous. But then the piece opens out. Something happens to Rodriguez; he turns away from Gutierrez, though she keeps pummeling him. While she watches him, he slides into a series of contorted moves near the floor. It’s no mistake that these resemble capoeira, a much more evolved martial art than adolescent shoving; hostility is sublimated, and each fighter must access the other’s mind. "Moi Aussi" also ends in rapprochement, even an embrace --- but it's equivocal, qualified. The arms drop, lax, and the dancers’ poses suggest the dance's beginning.

Like Carpenter's excerpt, Molly Shanahan's suffered from being forced into the A.W.A.R.D. Show! mold. In May, at the Epiphany church, Shanahan's evening-length "Stamina of Curiosity: Our Strange Elevations" developed her unique movement ideas over almost an hour, and set them in a magical historic space. The quintet "Gossamer Dominion" --- part of a new version of "Stamina" --- did not come across the same way. Shanahan's principles often read as self-indulgence, and her organic approach as a lack of structure. Despite the highlights (a repeated unison collapse and whirl apart, the still consideration of an extended arm, fingers curved), there wasn’t time to absorb Shanahan’s aesthetic or comprehend her storytelling.

Thursday's winner: Michel Rodriguez

*
Friday, July 30

The final free-for-all proved the most eclectic of the bunch. It veered from the utterly conventional to the totally bizarre, with stops at locations less easy to categorize or define.

Mary Tisa's sextet "Ecarg Grace" begins intriguingly, with recorded texts delivering isolated words that then are spoken backward, creating an incomprehensible language. But the songs that follow are all too comprehensible and ordinary, and the dancing is even less remarkable. Inventive movement is clearly not the point, but I'm not sure what is. In combination with the mellow music, the cheery bursts of the choreography begin to deaden the senses.

"Dot and Dash," by dancers Ginger Krebs and Andy Braddock, has a circuslike sci-fi flair. Sporting white shorts, camisoles, bathing caps, and fake-fur stoles, Krebs and Braddock exhibit a tortured symbiotic attachment, manifested most clearly in a complicated, laborious back-to-back roll across the floor. When it all becomes too difficult, Braddock begins propelling himself around on a little hassock on wheels; meanwhile they've attached white paper funnels to their bodies. Clinical, mechanical, puzzling, but with a certain “Godot”-like humor, the duet ends in pathos: the two are separated.

Philip Elson's "Mode of Duration," which he performed with Matthew McMunn, creates a strong emotional undertow. Also a bit mechanical at first, it begins with the limbs snapping open and closed like the blades of a jackknife. Elson’s sound score resembles industrial noise but also sometimes a heartbeat; the motley costumes hint at jesters, though these two are dead serious. Elson’s acrobatic choreography doesn’t look like wrestling, yet weight and counterbalance are crucial, and the men begin to seem respectful, even loving combatants. Elegant and powerful, the dancers create a strong sense of connection that makes their occasional swift attacks even more chilling.

Joanna Rosenthal of Same Planet Different World Dance Theater dives into the half-light of film noir in an excerpt from her "Grey Noise." Extremely well danced by two women and three men, it revels in the power wielded by the femme fatale --- a premise established, in the excerpt anyway, during the opening half-violent, half-tender duet. Rosenthal has a gift for the truly sexy, essential to any treatment of film noir, as well as for highly kinetic, electric, emotionally telling choreography, essential to building character. These characters, though, interact in ways that define them only as film noir archetypes and their world as dangerous, deceptive. The ground keeps giving way under their feet --- and under ours too. I longed for the whole story.

Friday's winner: Joanna Rosenthal


Congratulations to all the finalists! Shake hands, and may the best choreographer win…

Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago

"Muntu Dance Theatre's Cultural Bridges...The Pearl Primus Project"

 

By Sid Smith

Though familiar and venerable, Muntu Dance Theatre is hotter than hot these days. Saturday's gala performance at the Harris Theater showed off a troupe that's never been faster, never been more animated, as it continues to push the limits of its cultural exploration into valuable new terrain.

Does the Harris stage still have a roof? I wouldn't have been all that shocked to wake up Sunday and read it had swirled away into the skies, as untouchable as Dorothy's farm house tornado-ing its way to Oz. Galas, of course, often result in a surprising benefit. To accommodate time, the performances are kept short and frequently intermission-less, as was the case Saturday. That gave Muntu the chance to program works that built to a feverish momentum while allowing for some quiet, reflective moments, too.

But it's the works themselves and the amazing talent of the dancers, in the end, that matter, and the Saturday line-up boasted both impressive newcomers to the troupe's roster, some breathtaking classics and a few guests and surprises. In an important move of cultural preservation, the troupe performed for the first time two classics by Pearl Primus, the dance pioneer and Katherine Dunham contemporary underappreciated and neglected in our era. Muntu performed two searing, fascinating classics, both accompanied by live narration by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, reciting the Langston Hughes' poems that serve as text for both works. Bruce was a fetching choice: her deep and deeply felt delivery is the narrative equivalent of fine singing, powerful in effectiveness and yet tinged with the most delicate pronunciations, particularly of words with the letter "s." The works are fascinating bookends. "A Negro Speaks of Rivers" manages to encapsulate much African and African-American history by means of poetic evocation of waterways, and Primus provides a stunning trio for three women (Errin Berry, Beverly Carrington and Shakeena President-Beckford) that is all by itself a study in mid-century modern dance, fused with African-American sensibility. Not for nothing was Primus an anthropologist, among her many accomplishments. The swoops, bright twirls and haunting hand formations have a mythic, iconic feel. The brightly colored, diamond-glittery costumes, by the way, were designed by Vaune Blalock and Muntu artistic director Amaniyea Payne, whose leadership of Muntu remains one of the strongest and most consistent in our city.

"Hard Time Blues," by contrast, is an exhilarating dance of joy, though one with struggle and defiance slyly laced into its high-flying qualities. It's an exuberant solo, as it happens, for Amansu Eason, who races across the stage diagonal in one signature segment, leaps into the air in noteworthy defiance of gravity and then grabs for invisible particles or maybe lifelines--the whole work is a gorgeous metaphor of human determination to not just battle the odds, but reach for the gods in the process.

"Pearl," as the combined works are titled, was tremendously backed up by Muntu's always delightful musicians, which, this go-round, included the sensational Alyo Children's Dance Theatre in the opening, a raucous, relentless onslaught of percussive solos, acrobatics and one amazing dance performed by an uncanny, demon-red-clad performer on stilts.

I'd not seen Moustapha Bangoura's Muntu works employing Guinea dance tradition, but what a great addition to the repertory they make. There's a relatively subdued quality to this strain of African dance, one flush with subtle design elements, soothing sashays and struts and bursts of lyricism and warmth--the circle becomes an inviting communal image. Frenzy nevertheless results by the end of these pieces, which involves a later circle of astonishing speed, a breathtaking finish and a flourish as colorful as the gingerbread costumes.

Eason provided an effective contemporary dance tribute to Michael Jackson, replete with images from "Thriller" and a moving finale full of gospel spirit and redemption. And then Muntu pulled out what stops were left with "Fangama," a dynamite showpiece with competition-like solos and acrobatics and as invigorating a cry to battle as any imaginable.

Deeply Rooted Dance Theater

"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.

Poonie's Cabaret

"Poonie's Cabaret"

 

By Sid Smith

In these days of comic fests and the danger that mass entertainment is all but neutralizing the gay factor in art (e.g. "Glee), it was a delight to attend "Poonie's Cabaret" Monday at Links Hall and learn that twists on gender can still be anarchic, irreverent and zany.

Rougher than rough, come-as-you-are, the indoor equivalent of the street musician, this benefit isn't about refinement, perfected technique or artful subtlety. The production unfolded with almost rehearsal nonchalance, partly due to the lean theatrics of the venue and partly arising from the bleacher bonhomie as palpable as Monday's heat and humidity. Jyl Fehrenkamp, who hosts in her guise as "Jyldo," dutifully spread mats on the playing area before the program began to provide extra seats for the crowd--usher as well as emcee.

Fehrenkamp's style proved part of the fun. Hers is an almost offhanded comic delivery, not so much a matter of telling jokes as slipping them in as asides. After predicting this would be "the greatest Poonie's ever," she quickly added, as a footnote, that she makes that claim every time. She makes appealing use of her gangly form and rubbery limbs, often appearing about to keel over or trip, but always, in fact, in sly command of her goofy little gestures and physical witticisms. She also provided a fine bit herself, a few song parodies and lots and lots of Tiger Beat-like pictures of the late Corey Haim, a teen idol around the time Fehrenkamp and her contemporaries would have been fans. All generations eventually tweak their tweendom, but Haim is something of a natural guilty pleasure, so promising once ("The Lost Boys"), so ignominious in decline. Mercilessly, Fehrenkamp offered a version of "My Favorite Things" that detailed Haim's drugs of choice, and, looking upward, comforted him that Lindsay Lohan is surely on her way soon to keep him heavenly company.

The other eight acts on the bill, mixing performance art comedy and movement, made for an inconsistent melange, but who cares? Each act was brief, and you didn't wait long until an individual hit a mark or the next act showed up to amp up the excitement. Amanda Crockett, midway or so through the line-up, is an immensely gifted comic movement artist, never saying a word her whole act but daffy and entertaining in scrunching her neck into her torso in such a way as to create a living cartoon character, managing a simple and "Stomp"-like interaction with the audience involving her entrance ovation and gracefully convincing us that she's under water for a time.

The duo from the Under Construction Dance Project delivered an engaging duet, colored by their own ingenious gestures and hand effects as by traditional dance, and Joshua Radcliffe's choreographic entry boasted interesting poses and offbeat arranges for its six women. Samantha Allen's gold-lame-clad diva does a mean, funny dance about a guy she's trying to get, replete with a priceless crawl set to "I Think We're Alone Now." Jessica Hudson took the lyrics to "Mr. Cellophane" from "Chicago" to literal heights.

An artist billed as Rocco Granite delivered a solid finale. Dressed in clownish attire and aided by two helpers who climbed on ladders and operated paper-cutting machines and emptied huge bags of shredded material, he/she danced, preened and survived a snowfall of paper, loving scored by Fats Waller.

Chicago Tap Theatre

"Chicago Tap Theatre "Tap Out Loud""

 

By Laura Molzahn

Think tap is monotonous? If you’re not an aficionado, a long program can seem that way.

But not when it’s in the hands of Mark Yonally, artistic director of eight-year-old Chicago Tap Theatre. "Tap Out Loud" --- a two-hour show of 11 pieces, many brand-new, performed Saturday night only at the Athenaeum Theatre --- didn’t always work. But it was never less than original and ambitious.

"The more, the merrier" seems to be Yonally's motto. He collaborated with three Chicago artists on cross-disciplinary works and opened up the program to company member/choreographer Kendra Jorstad, and to other company dancers in partly improvised pieces. Only one work --- the show's jaw-dropping finale, an extravaganza truly worthy of the name --- was a straight-up Yonally debut.

Dedicated to his brother, David, "The Queen Suite" memorializes the passion they shared for the music of Queen (David passed away three years ago, at the age of 40). This joyous piece often feels more about the music than the dance, but what it lacks in serious dance purpose it more than makes up for in energy and chutzpah. Rather than use recordings, Yonally divvied up the suite’s six songs among singer/pianist and composer-in-residence Anthony Edwards, the Chicago Red Line choir, opera singer Allison Setzke, and the Lakeside Pride Freedom Band, a brass-and-percussion marching band wearing Tweedledum-Tweedledee shorts and baseball caps. The closest the music comes to the originals is a karaoke take on "Under Pressure," while the band’s playing renders "Bicycle Race" almost unrecognizable.

Yonally has never shied away from kitsch, but he's outdone himself in "The Queen Suite," a heart-bursting celebration of love and life. He closes it by bringing dozens of amateur tappers of all ages up on stage, creating an overwhelming sense of joyful community.

"Thug Life" --- Yonally's collaboration with Kyle Vincent Terry, former artistic director of hip-hop-oriented Chicago Dance Crash --- takes a comic view of rap’s implicit violence and ties it to the traditional competitiveness of tap dance. The screaming, shoving, and slugging can get a little old, but Terry's tongue-in-cheek fight choreography neutralizes the antagonism; one dancer hauls off and “hits” another, for instance, while a third --- far downstage and a second too late --- provides the sound effect.

Yonally's joint effort with jazz choreographer Eddy Ocampo, "LAB," was probably the evening’s most ambitious piece in dance terms. Josh Weckesser's fabulous lighting gives this rather cold work a polished, highly dramatic veneer. And its Frankenstein-monster blend of jazz and tap works well --- though the nine dancers sometimes struggled with the balletic side of Ocampo’s Giordano-influenced movement. But I had to admire the attempt and the outcome, while "Trip Ticket," Yonally’s collaborative remake with lighting designer Jesse Klug, was a lost cause. Fussy and mysterious, with lots of lighting and costume changes, it was the program’s one instance of total lack of communication.

Jorstad, who choreographed a couple of humorous pieces for last December's "Tidings of Tap" show, revealed her serious side in two new dances. The clever "Click/Intrinsic" opened the evening with an assembly line of ten tappers who crossed the stage one way, then reappeared at the back going the other. Grave faces and stiff upper bodies suggest cogs in a machine, but their robotic look becomes more appealing as the performers begin to suggest tightrope walkers or birds on a telephone wire. Jorstad's gentle quintet “Sorrow,” performed with red balloons, is less successful: it didn't say sadness to me, and it seems derivative of Valerie Lussac's "Spyrographe," also in the company’s repertoire.

"Improvography" pieces, some of them superenjoyable, made up most of the rest of the program. Soloing to Edwards's cover of the Smiths' melancholy "Asleep," a sort of lullabye whose lyrics suggest going to sleep forever, Yonally responds to the music so freely that this small, simple piece has an oversize impact. Phil Brooks shows how far he’s come as a dancer in "Monk Indigo," "Waiting," and "Beggin'." Tall and spindly, he steals the show with his intricate tapping and long, loose limbs, flung around his torso like satellites orbiting a planet.

Brenda Bufalino's "Flying Turtles," created in the late 80s and first revived by CTT a year ago, is a sort of progenitor for Yonally's own brand of tap-dance experimentation. Choreographed arms might look modern or African, but the overall effect is orchestral as different parts of the body move to different rhythms and the dancers form and re-form into shifting groups. A symphony of visual and aural counterpoint for 12, "Flying Turtles" concludes with an a cappella section nearly as rousing as the close of  "The Queen Suite" --- but much quieter.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Summer Series

"Hubbard Street Dance Chicago 2010 Summer Series"

 

By Laura Molzahn

Without being lightweight, Hubbard Street's summer program goes down easy. For one thing, it's exceptionally well balanced --- remarkable considering that the scheduled theatrical premiere of resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo's "Deep Down Dos" was postponed at the last minute (issues with the music rights). Never mind. The current mix, running through Sunday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, takes off in three very different but all very satisfying directions.

Jorma Elo's "Bitter Suite," given its world premiere last October by HSDC, takes the place of "Deep Down Dos." The Finnish choreographer, who joined Netherlands Dans Theater 20 years ago, is now the acclaimed artistic director of Boston Ballet. And his sophisticated, sure handling of music, structure, and emotional tone make “Bitter Suite” this program’s standout.

Nothing about it is bitter; in fact it's often funny. Elo goes crazy with bizarre motions for the hands and arms, some recognizable: wriggling fingers suggest tickling, and a woman "types" on an invisible manual typewriter, even returning the carriage. The dancers often look foolish, prancing or kicking out straight legs, feet flexed, in little backward-leaning runs. When Monteverdi's stirring brass overture for "Orfeo" plays, a woman extends her arms in a cliched gesture of triumph, only to drop them unexpectedly and unceremoniously with a bored schlump.

But though at times Elo presents human beings as limited creatures with the attention spans of gnats, he also demands superhuman strength and speed from his dancers, especially during the pedal-to-the-metal section of Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor. What sort of fiendish mind would simultaneously denigrate and celebrate humankind? Yet Elo’s dual vision pays off in the unexpected close to "Bitter Suite," set to Monteverdi's moving "Pur Ti Miro" duet. Though ludicrous moves are never entirely abandoned --- a woman literally wraps herself around a standing man's head at the end --- Elo flips an emotional switch to make us see them as honorable, innocent, incorruptible.

"Bitter Suite" might be seen as classical, in the sense that form is crucial and human nature is fixed and predictable. By contrast, Aszure Barton's brand-new "Untouched" is awash in romanticism.

That's evident right away in the stage design: long, red velvet curtains are parted at the middle to create a dramatic entryway, and Nicole Pearce's lighting is often chiaroscuro or a deep, alarming red. I found it difficult to get into "Untouched" at first, but as the dance went on I realized I'd been dropped in medias res. The existence of a narrative and characters is eventually clear, but their nature is never obvious. There's a love triangle, I think, presided over by a mistress of ceremonies, but that’s all I’d hazard about the plot. This piece is all about feelings, however illogical or unmotivated.

A choreographer originally from Canada, Barton has risen swiftly from the ranks, with works commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov and ABT. And though "Untouched" sometimes seems to lack an anchor, Barton creates gorgeous moments. The dancers' clapping and some of the music allude to flamenco and tango, with all the vivid drama those forms imply. At its best, though, the dancing is not derivative but sharp and new as a thunderclap, and often psychologically suggestive. There's a swift kiss to the neck, more knife attack than affection, or a woman's nervously bobbling hips, an idling engine. Barton can also slow things way down, creating a backdrop for the action with simple walking patterns inflected by slight shifts of the arms and shoulders. It’s like the insistent swelling of a chorus underneath the lines of the soloists, the protagonists.

Toru Shimazaki's 2006 "Bardo" completes the program with a variation on romanticism: the faux-primitive dance. Set to pretend world music by Dead Can Dance, it features raggy costumes and what look like impulsive, instinctual tribal motions.

Despite the slight cheesiness, the dance works. The word "bardo," Tibetan for "intermediate state," is used here to mean the transition between life and death. And the most meaningful, intriguing parts of Shimazaki’s dance are the extended passages of leave-taking, epitomized in a central couple and reiterated in unison sections for five couples. These always seem to me visionary glimpses into the twilight world of Romeo and Juliet as they die and don’t die, saying farewell forever until it’s finally for good.

RTG Dance

"RTG Dance A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far"

 

By Sid Smith

Turns out that the RTG Dance performance over the weekend at the Drucker Center will be the troupe's last for a while--artistic head Rachel Thorne Germond will be moving to Virginia for the next two years, joining her partner, who's earned a fellowship.

Good for them, bad for us. The modest, threadbare presentation over the weekend, dubbed "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far," ably demonstrated Germond's inimitable talents and appeal. She is a stern, unfancy, intellectually enticing artist, tough in her aesthetic, though in a more muted way than, say, Atalee Judy or Jonathan Meyer. "Dance theater" is a buzz phrase of the past couple of decades, but, at Sunday's performance, I kept thinking instead of "dance drama," in that Germond works in a purely abstract realm and yet mines subtle conflicts and animosities inherent in movement and ensemble configuration. She doesn't tell stories, but she explores battles, alliances, break-ups and betrayals, rarely relying on the traditional beauties of flowing contemporary dance. Who her dancers are touching at any given moment--and why--are questions that keep recurring, just as the ever-changing patterns concern human will, control, isolation and even doom much more than aesthetic confection.

One compliment a writer can pay her: While the viewer remains most of the time compelled, wondering what's next, her work is very difficult to put into words. The four dancers in "A Wild Patience," the only ensemble piece on last weekend's fare, constantly change poses, arrangements and affinities. They begin in two separate pairs. Johannah Wininsky stands beside Celia Weiss Bambara and repeatedly thwarts her ill-fated efforts to move forward. At the other side of the stage, Becky O'Connell watches ominously as Christopher Knowlton threatens to crash himself into the brick wall. Escape, whether real or suicidal, is only ineffectually restrained.

Much later, Germond crafts a nifty sequence in which, one by one, each of the foursome gets isolated, one at a time, so that formations of three vs. one keep forming and changing in make-up--each, in his or her turn, is outsider. That's the type of imagistic drama that inhabits "Patience," which quickly melds from set-up to set-up, from mini-drama to mini-drama, with relentless propulsion. Rarely do these dancers indulge in smooth, sweeping dance, though, when they do, it's a relief akin to an oasis in a desert.

It's not an overstatement to labe Germond uncompromising. Her quartet in "Patience" is a motley crew, by no means an assortment of gorgeous or dainty creatures. In one of two solos on this same program, "Framed," Germond employs her own solid, earthy looks for a kind of "No Exit"-like tone poem involving a woman both partnering with and maybe trapped by an empty picture frame. Here, Germond never utilizes one of her own most appealing aspects, her vulnerable, inviting mien and facial warmth. Instead, her face remains rigid, even defiant, and "Framed," one component of what's intended to be a full-length piece in the future, is austere, vogue-like in its striking poses. She reclines along a diagonal line with the frame at one point, at another she poses with her hand on one hip, executing a brief series of plies. Modest, like much of her work, evolving quickly, changing every moment, it was rarely less than intriguing.

Our arts scene needs more, not less, like Germond. So, we implore her, hurry back. Meanwhile, God speed.

The Dance COLEctive presents COLEctive Notions

"COLECTIVE NOTIONS"

 

By Laura Molzahn

It's a big step for a performer to try on a choreographer’s shoes --- dancing is a much more passive art. (I've heard dancers say, "You never tell a choreographer 'no.' Never.") It's one thing to take direction, and quite another to make yourself responsible for the concept, the development, and the execution of a piece with your name on it.

Margi Cole, artistic director of the all-female Dance COLEctive, says she has dancers now who are interested in choreography, which hasn't always been the case. Mentoring them, she's produced "COLEctive Notions," an interesting but understandably uneven 75-minute program of five new works by company dancers plus Cole's own "Taking Hold." It runs through Sunday at Link’s Hall.

Maggie Koller's "Push" is engagingly eccentric. It has a unified look and retro feel, thanks to the four dancers’ black-and-white cocktail dresses, and an unusual concept: the dancers take turns pushing a button on a little plastic robot who then clicks and clacks briefly. He seems the reset button for AM Brother (Sean and Pat Cassin) as they channel disparate snatches of sound --- blips, old recorded dialogue, laughter, a slow horn playing lazy jazz. The dancers too can look robotic; or they seem reluctant, repressed, clapping their hands over their mouths or eyes. I thought of taxi dancers trapped in a seedy lounge, dime-a-dance girls.

Jessica Post's trio "Harmonic Breath," set to Bach music for solo cello, begins with an evocative motion for one dancer. Seated on the floor, she pedals her legs in and out while flowing forward at the waist and back upright; the movement, which suggests sobbing, goes perfectly with the slow, deep notes of the cello. When the music and dancers speed up, their quickened breathing mingles with the instrument’s “breath.” It’s a simple but effective frame for a dance.

Donnette Cannonie takes on a big ensemble piece in "Mon Confort," set to Adele's pop song "Hometown Glory." In the prologue, performed in silence, one woman seems to wake from a sad or frightening dream and looks around hopelessly, shoulders hunched. But Cannonie's true talent is her use of all eight dancers; when everyone bursts into movement at the song's chorus, the effect is dramatic. Cannonie has experience as a commercial dancer and choreographer for dance teams, and it shows in the close correspondence between music, lyrics, and movement.

Olivia F. May's quintet "Intermezzo" makes assured use of repetition and of the space. Four dancers walk slowly to surround a woman downstage, regarding her like caretakers. She begins to move, then they all start making strong arm gestures --- crossing them at the forearms, pushing them out forcefully. One gesture suggests Diana drawing her bow, or a musician bowing strings. Though the arm movements are distinct, they also rhyme. Set to lively, complex string music by the Kronos Quartet and punctuated by expressive breathing, "Intermezzo" is confidently made and performed. That makes it all the more disappointing it has no real ending --- the music just fades out and the dancers retreat into darkness.

More than any other work, Molly Grimm-Leasure's solo "Shhhhe" has a beginning and proceeds to an end. It's set to Balmorhea's "Barefoot Pilgrims," a piece for piano and strings that starts slow and thoughtful and turns agitated. Grimm-Leasure begins with her back to us, in a party dress complete with petticoat that gives her the look of a little girl though it also emphasizes her womanly shape. She’s sometimes shy, unwilling to show her face or extend her arms; but other times she’s defiant, fists planted on hips and legs wide. When she eventually turns to face us, she puts her hands over her eyes. Grimm-Leasure performs the piece exquisitely, with swift falls and leaps back up as if lightning had struck her down, then shocked her upright. Everything in the piece, even the defiance, suggests shame, and the ending seems to ask forgiveness. Grimm-Leasure makes herself very vulnerable in a piece so sparse and structured that the audience can give in to its feeling.

Sometimes revisiting a dance, as I did watching Cole's octet "Taking Hold," can be humbling. Though I called it "tenuous and unfinished" last January, this time around I recognized its emotional unity, created by anxiety. Cole makes equilibrium impossible, which might have contributed to my impression that the piece was unsettled and directionless. Set to cello music by Zoe Keating, it moves the dancers quickly in and out of various duos and trios full of grasping embraces and sudden rejections; it can be painful to watch. Even the final embrace is not reassuring, since all the other ones dissolved. Cole’s whirlwind of attempted and failed possession is all too effective.

 

Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak presents Blackbird/Stamina

"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.

Joffrey Ballet, The

"Joffrey Ballet's Farewell"

 

By Sid Smith

Watching a dancer's farewell is a little like a shot of Tequila--a quick thrill, a suffuse feeling of warmth and then a nagging doubt that regret will soon follow.

The Joffrey Ballet said goodbye to six dancers at the Auditorium Theatre Sunday, and two of them were given special showcases: Calvin Kitten and Suzanne Lopez. In a way, their retirements--both are in their late 30s--are part of the end of an era, as the dancers hired and honed by Gerald Arpino move on, and the company takes on more and more of Ashley Wheater's stamp. Kitten in particular seemed an Arpino trademark, a speedy acrobat in the tradition of Edward Stierle, whose choreographic and dance careers were cut short by AIDS, and Mark Goldweber, who worked here with the company before joining Adam Sklute at Ballet West, where Kitten himself now heads to work backstage
Certainly in the years the Joffrey has resided in Chicago, Kitten soared as one of the troupe's most delightful and reliable stars. He pretty much patented three roles in "The Nutcracker": Fritz, the Snow Prince and Tea from China, his Fritz delightfully puckish and spoiled, his Snow Prince a velveteen display of pure talent and style.

On Sunday, he danced George Balanchine's "Tarantella," partnering with Yumelia Garcia, and, as if in deference to his popularity, a last-minute schedule shift put his farewell at the end of the program. "Tarantella" proved a pungent choice, joyful and radiant with technical frolic and good taste, ideal for the impish, almost childlike delight Kitten often brought to dance. It was also nice that a dancer whose athletics so often rendered him a soloist on stage got to go out dancing with a partner, and the naughty, stolen kiss the he makes at the end allowed Kitten, pun fully intended here, a kittenish final moment. That tempered some of the bittersweet sorrow unavoidable in knowing we'll no longer have him to watch.

Lopez didn't enjoy Kitten's singularity, his role as a special kind of dancer for the troupe. Instead, she vied with all the other ballerinas in classic parts and nonetheless shone brightly whenever on stage. I marveled as I watched her last performance, with Mauro Villanueva in Helgi Tomasson's silky "Valses Poeticos," how well-rounded a ballerina she is. No particular skill or classic position particularly shines in her execution. Instead, she made them all lovely, she brought them together into a lovely and sensuous whole and she glowed on stage, never more so than in this dreamy, romantic pas de deux.

The Joffrey's treatment of these farewells each season is infectious, with all the dancers marching on stage one by one and giving the retirees single roses until a whole bouquet is assembled--in a way, an apt metaphor for the mix of individuality and communal spirit that defines the art of dance. Lopez was even greeted by her two young children, reinforcing the idea of a dance company as a family. Whatever the differences and disagreements along the way, all of these folks deserve credit for succeeding in a merciless, cutthroat, incredibly idealistic pursuit.

It's also a fine occasion bridging that divide between artists and audiences--not just a chance to say so long, which is important, but a sudden burst of intimacy between watcher and watched, a personal connection in a business where a certain professional detachment is built into the enterprise. We watch these dancers year after year as strangers, removed, never even hearing them speak, for the most part, unlike stage actors. Yet, we feel a kinship, an affection, and that blossoms in these farewells, heightened by the very real emotions on stage that remind us these folks are human, real people with vulnerabilities and heartaches, who give up so much and work so hard to entertain us.

Four other dancers are leaving, and they, too will be missed: David Gombert, Thomas Nicholas, Megan Quiroz and Patrick Simoniello.
Bravo and brava! All deserve thanks for hours of immeasurable pleasure.

The Joffrey Ballet presents Eclectica

"Joffrey Ballet's Eclectica"

 

By Laura Molzahn:

No one expects ballet to stand still, but the Joffrey’s "Eclectica" program made me wonder what now defines the form. Clearly it's not pointe work or the standard steps. Not that I mourned their occasional loss on this refreshing program, which renews the Joffrey's founding promise to rethink classical dance.

The evening's three works, two of them premieres, are arranged in a kind of sandwich. (You can take a bite through May 9 at the Auditorium Theatre.) At least superficially, the opening and closing works are as light and fluffy as Wonder Bread. The meat is stuck in the middle: Jessica Lang's "Crossed," though it's not as heavy as it first seems.

Gerald Arpino's "Reflections," now nearly 40 years old, reveals that departures from the classical are a lot more radical these days. All-American skipping, sometimes with a cheesy smile, pops up often, and it's perfect for most of Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, the sole score played live. Only the minor-key andante sixth variation seems to have inspired something uncommon. Arpino’s duet opens with the man alone, executing a turning leap ending on one knee --- and looking down. His somber finish establishes the duet's tone, sustained through legato moves. As the apparently doomed lovers, Victoria Jaiani and Fabrice Calmels were one of the evening's highlights.  

Lang's "Crossed," performed in soft shoes, crosses a line between ballet and modern dance. With its religious music, varied moods, and pared motions, it reminded me of Alvin Ailey's "Revelations." But where he used spirituals and gospel songs, Lang relies on European composers from the 15th to 18th centuries, among them Mozart at his cheeriest and Josquin des Prez at his most lachrymose.

Lang’s design for "Crossed" --- four moving steel panels that often take cruciform shapes --- creates worlds within worlds. Because the panels can be shifted around the stage or removed entirely, they drastically change the look of each of the six sections, from threatening to sunny to a moody mix (with expert help from lighting designer Nicole Pearce). But they can also distract. When a horizontal one being lowered to the floor shuddered and seemed about to fall, the audience gasped. And dancers hopping or being hoisted over a lowered panel often looked clumsy.

"Crossed" can shift emotional gears abruptly. Its heart seems to be the mournful second section, danced by five bare-chested men whose camaraderie, partnering each other and holding hands, would be unthinkable in a classic ballet. Canon movement creates a cascade of feeling gestures, and the section ends movingly, as its key figure (Calmels, whose impressive physique is put to good use) turns away from the others, now in priestly frocks. But the next section looks like a cross between Mark Morris in his folk-dance mode and musical comedy, as one man (a sprightly Aaron Rogers) flirts with a trio of women.

James Kudelka's brand-new "Pretty BALLET" often looks frothy but has a serious intent: to update and caricature romantic ballets. Unlike the other two works, it both explicitly addresses ballet's history and takes it in a new direction informed by humor and tenderness.

With its wispy mists and clouds and wispy girls in long tulle tutus, "Pretty BALLET" screams romanticism. Yet Kudelka makes his first little joke quickly, riffing on the primacy of the romantic ballerina: the men are literally eclipsed by the women, springing up from behind their skirts. Bohuslav Martinu’s second symphony, like the sea of fluff the women sometimes resemble, can seem lightweight, even like musical theater. In fact the choreography to the third movement, for five jester/heroes, is as buoyant as any in Agnes de Mille's "Rodeo" (first performed in 1942, one year before Martinu's symphony).

Kudelka’s occasional angular, metronomic clockwork moves are foreign to the soft fluidity of romantic ballet. But they become poignant in the most distinctive section, a duet set to Martinu’s brooding second movement. When the man lifts the woman by her stiffened arms and swings her from side to side, she looks like a pealing bell, perhaps referring to “Giselle” --- or Martinu’s birth in a Czech church tower. And when he lifts her overhead, rigid and supine, her slowly pumping forearms and paddling feet make her as vulnerable as a sleepwalker.

Kudelka’s bold “Pretty BALLET” deflates classical dance to give it new meaning. In a motif from the duet, the man swiftly lifts the woman, drops her, and holds her in a swan dive. But at one point this grand, sweeping motion ends in the woman simply standing, erect and flat-footed, her back to the man, who seems at a loss. Suddenly standing alone, plain and small, proves more moving than the magnificent gesture.

Inaside Chicago Dance

"Inaside Chicago Dance, Revealed"

 

By Sid Smith:

Slick and snazzy, Inaside Chicago Dance presented a line-up of new works at the Athenaeum Theatre over the weekend, showing off its performance talent and the work of young choreographers in a collection dubbed "Revealed."

The six works shared bits of promise and some of the same shortcomings as essentially works-in-progress. Each offered potential, but could benefit from revisits by their creators. They boasted unusually tart, appealing, offbeat musical scores, from a selection from "Slumdog Millionaire" to the engaging, biting lyrics of the likes of Shemika Copeland and the Magnetic Fields. But all suffered a bit, too, from certain unfinished aspects, from absences of overriding dramatic structures--even abstract works can take on some sort of narrative, mostly missing here--and a curious failure to balance all the fine, large ensemble works with worthwhile solos or duets. When the choreographers did zoom in for close-ups, the results were either disappointing or simply too brief.

Inaside artistic director Richard Smith's "When No Means Maybe" is among the works with enormous potential. Evoking a kind of down-home setting without over doing it, the men in suspenders, the women folksy and radiant with their long hair flowing, the piece has rich music by Copeland and Anthony Hamilton. It began with the men posed in relief, the women employed to the max to mine the riches in Copeland's scrappy, hard-hitting vocals. But at times the dancing seemed a bit too smooth and decorative, given the harsh topics in the songs, and its attitude on love and romance never seems to leave the surface--little of the danger in the music was reflected in the dance.

But Smith is onto something, and could well make this a really successful work, something equally true of Autumn Eckman and her "A Lot Like Love," marvelously underscored by Magnetic Fields, the 6ths and Katherine Whalen. Frolicsome and fun, "Love" features moves that Eckman seems to devise with her own set of rules, jazzy and impish, while fast, inventive and playful. She hasn't settled on a clear narrative or persuasive organizational structure yet--a busy ensemble spectacle, a natural finale, occurs in the middle. It could play as formal mischief, but, the way the dance is arranged now, it just seems weirdly out of order.

I've written that works are too long, that they overstay their welcome, so many times that it's pleasing, for once, to argue the reverse: Jessica Deahr's flowing, sometimes geometric-tinged "At the moment, I knew" cries out for expansion. Its inviting moves for five women would probably benefit from another short movement or two, and it cagily employs the most melodic strains from "Slumdog" as part of its score.

Debra Nanni's ambitiously populated "Influence of 3 = 1" features two dozen dancers and often uses them arrestingly. Large clusters remain almost frozen for a spell, only to race across the stage in a sudden rush, still together, but now a compelling hurricane of a crowd.

Eddy Ocampo's "B-Trothed" and Mary Tisa's "Ecarg" both seemed trap in their overall image, "B-Trothed" too self-conscious and melodramatic, underscored by flowing but dreary costumes, while "Ecarg" is unconvincingly lush and lyrical, almost mushy in its New Age-y enthusiasm.

But, nits notwithstanding, Inaside deserves great credit for offering so much new work, for assembling such a beautiful group of promising dancers and for delivering an event that packed an enthusiastic audience of supporters, who happily filled the Athenaeum for a sunny program on a dark and stormy Saturday.

American Ballet Theatre's One-Night-Only All-American Celebration

"American Ballet Theatre "All American Celebration""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

Time travel proves perilous in American Ballet Theatre's "All-American Celebration" --- and there's a lot of it on this program. Only Jerome Robbins' 1944 "Fancy Free" is firmly, ecstatically rooted in its own time, while Twyla Tharp in "The Brahms-Haydn Variations" and Paul Taylor in "Company B" keep one foot in their own era and plant the other in the past.

The mix made for a slightly queasy experience on Wednesday, the only showing of ABT's "All-American Celebration" during its Chicago run. This one relatively modern program ushered in seven "Swan Lake" performances over the next four days, through Sunday at the Civic Opera House. Chicagoans last saw Kevin McKenzie's version of the classic in 2004, but there's always room for one more production. Or several.

Fortunately Tharp's 2000 "The Brahms-Haydn Variations" was new to Chicago. Brahms did his own time-traveling in his 1873 "Variations on a Theme by Haydn," which he believed was based on music Haydn had composed nearly 100 years earlier. But in the mid-20th century that provenance was called into question, and Brahms' main theme has never been definitively traced.

The mischief-making Tharp must have been intrigued by this confusion of sources and traditions. Her ballet for 30, especially in its opening, looks classical but adds millennial Tharp-ian touches as it goes on --- some successful and others bizarre. In one clever moment, a man stands behind a woman, both in a wide plie, and they tic their shoulders side to side. Blink and you'll miss it, but it's something like the little dance people do when they come face-to-face and, trying to avoid each other, keep going head-to-head. By contrast, in a repeated singularly schlumpy move, the woman hangs forward at the waist over the man's extended arm. Eventually it occurred to me that this might be Tharp's inversion of the much more graceful act of leaning back over a man's arm.

Love them or hate them, Tharp's perversions of classical technique are what set "The Brahms-Haydn Variations" apart from other, straighter neoclassical works. The dance's grand scale is likewise a two-sided coin. The busy stage can distract from duets by the five principal couples, but it can also suggest a rollicking sea, with dancers lifting off the groupâ??s surface like spume off waves. Among the couples, Gillian Murphy and Jose Manuel Carreno were particularly assured.

Taylor's 1991 "Company B" was not new to Chicagoans; the Paul Taylor Dance Company performed it here in 1993 and 1999. Set to Andrews Sisters songs, this suite of period dances often looks cute and nostalgic; it got plenty of warm chuckles. But it's literally shadowed by images of war: silhouetted men marching, shooting, falling. Sometimes a single fallen figure lies amid dancers jitterbugging, and many of the numbers feature man-hungry women in a world where men are scarce. They've gone to war, or they're dead. Or gay.

Opening and closing "Company B" is the Andrews Sisters' first big hit, "Bei Mir Bist du Schoen" --- a feel-good Yiddish/English love song with a fake German title they recorded in 1937, when Hitler was paving the way for the Third Reich. With the benefit of hindsight, Taylor makes the gaiety of the 40s look naive, even venal.

His sly attack feels a little unfair, especially in contrast with Robbins' wholehearted view of the period in "Fancy Free." Instead of Taylor's lurking soldiers, we get Robbins' sailors throwing themselves into a night on the town. If they refer at all to shipping out, it's to get a leg up on the dames. Leonard Bernstein's score perfectly sets the mood for the antics of Robbins' three sailors as they drink, chase tail, and dance up a storm for the ladies' benefit, then lose them during an all-out brawl. Daniil Simkin, making his Chicago debut and debut as the high-flying first sailor, was light and cheery as fluff from a milkweed pod.

Male-female stereotypes abound in "Fancy Free." True, it was a different culture, but Robbins might also have been working overtime to establish that his characters were "real" men. Gay and closeted himself, he wanted to distance his colorful scene from the notoriously homosexual painting it was based on: Paul Cadmus' "The Fleet's In!" Sixty-five years later, that time's stereotype of real men may be indistinguishable from a gay man's conception of them. They were both constructions.

It doesn't matter. Robbins made them real. They're still real. He painted a heartfelt portrait of his own time; he didn't mine the past in order to undermine it. Why can't we do that now? And why is it so risky for ABT to step outside the classics for more than a single evening?

Billy Elliot the Musical

"Billy Elliot the Musical - The Choreography Review"

 

By Sid Smith:

"Billy Elliot: The Musical" is different in key ways from "Billy Elliot," the movie, and that turns out to be a fine thing. The film endures as irresistible, but the stage show, which just launched its national tour at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago, is much more an exploration of ballet: madcap, daffy, silly ballet, at times, but ballet nonetheless.

Is this the stage musical for which balletomanes have been waiting a lifetime? Maybe. Certainly it stands as the most involved and intricate attempt by a musical to incorporate ballet since the days of George Balanchine's "On Your Toes" or the pre-eminent work of Jerome Robbins.

Peter Darling, who choreographed both the movie and this later effort, makes a critical shift for the stage. Dance-wise, the film is fueled mostly by Billy's wild, unfettered, unschooled and sometimes delightfully clumsy solos, his unbridled lust to move so wonderfully enacted by title performer Jamie Bell.
But the Elton John-Lee Hall stage show takes a step back and fashions the plot to portray young Billy as stumbling into the art accidentally (like the film), but then gradually, oh so slowly, warming to ballet and acquiring skills bit by bit like so many real students. Billy is not so much driven to dance as blessed with a talent undiscovered, and when he finally lets loose, it's to show off genuine ballet technique, culminating in an extraordinary solo showstopper set at his audition for the school of the Royal Ballet.

At Sunday's opening, Cesar Corrales, one of four youngsters playing this coveted and surely exhausting role, achieved with that scene an excitement rare enough in the concert hall. Corrales, 13, of Cuban descent, born in Mexico and trained in Canada, is one heck of a gifted ballet star. In the solo, he enacts most of the star turns given a male soloist at the peak of the classic full-lengths. Except that Darling, as if to maximize Billy's youth, compacts them in such a way as to leave the theatergoer breathless. Striking pirouettes, a couple of double spins and the requisite jetes in a circle lead to a galvanizing series of tours en l'air that come at you so fast I didn't even think to count them. I only know there were a lot, and by that time I was leaping to my feet like the rest of the audience.

The other three young men may vary in their ability to carry that scene, but Darling deserves a lot of other credit for his work throughout this piece. It's almost as if a schizophrenic bifurcation is at work, albeit one Darling smoothly stitches together, whereby Billy is mostly shown off in solo (and genuine ballet) and a cheesier, goofier hybrid of ballet, pop and theatrical staging defines everyone else. That's not a rule followed religiously--Billy has one infectious vaudeville tap extravaganza that's essentially a duet with his gay friend Michael, eventually backed by giant dress forms, and he's part of one wondrous trio involving his mentor, Mrs. Wilkinson, and her heavyweight but light-footed musical accompanist, Mr. Braithwaite--one of the more delightful dances in the show.

But often Darling employs dance-theater staging, movement that crafts haunting images of the miners sporting their headlights and heading underground near the end, or easing across the stage, carrying and dancing with simple wooden chairs, in a dark, reminiscent fantasy sung by Billy's dotty grandmother.

Darling walks a fine line superbly, employing such serious motifs to underscore the socio-economic hardship that's one half of the story while elsewhere infusing the group bits with just the right smidgen of wacky humor that's bread and butter to Broadway. The two styles pretty much synthesize brilliantly early on, when, during one of Billy's first lessons, the little girls in the class and the miners surrealistically enter into each other's worlds and dance together, the miners taking on some Trockadero-like ballet moves of their own.

But slapstick, funky pop and goofball comedy and here and there postmodern angst define the chorus--ballet, especially in its inimitable excitement for the soloist, belong to Billy and, in one scene, including a bit of aerial dazzle, his imaginary, older alter-ego.

Darling also slyly cheats a bit and saves for the curtain call the kind of blowout, razzmatazz, spectacle tap-and-pop ensemble finish so crucial to the stage musical--he's having his cake and serving the customers a jam-packed, omnibus slice. By then, you've been completely won over by the glories of the story, the bittersweet juxtaposition of Billy's artistry and the gloomier fate of those he leaves behind and Darling's wizardry in matching the complex messages of director Stephen Daldry's production with a complex but beguiling dance fusion abundant in entertainment while an intelligent paean to ballet.

Dance fans' alert: don't miss this amazing achievement.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

"Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater"

 

By Laura Molzahn:

"Take me to church!" yelled the noisy young man behind me on Wednesday night. The occasion? The opening strains of the music for Alvin Ailey's signature work, "Revelations." So what if the curtain was still closed?

That kind of fervor is a natural outcome of Ailey's brand of showy spirituality, epitomized in this 1960 classic. And the two 2009 works also on the program --- one of three in this engagement, which runs through Sunday at the Auditorium Theatre --- each followed a different branch of that Ailey aesthetic.

"Uptown," by company dancer Matthew Rushing, takes the showy route but apologizes for it. Both slight and heavy, this 40-minute piece tours the Harlem Renaissance at breakneck speed, loading up the trip with names, facts, and texts advising us what to think. Our helpful guide explains who Paul Robeson was and what a rent party is as well as informing us that Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith made lasting contributions to society.

Rushing, who wrote the texts with Gregor L. Gibson, clearly assumes a low level of cultural literacy. I could have dealt with that. I was more troubled by the repeated assertions that the accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance were not just about song and dance but were also intellectual. True, but the declaration seems defensive. And Rushing's evidence --- brief recorded texts by W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston --- is too skimpy to prove the point. By including so many facets and figures of that era, he devalues all of them.  

Rushing also devalues the best part of "Uptown" --- the dancing --- with his inflated claims about the importance of the mind. His choreography tends to repeat (though he creates the illusion of change with different settings and costumes), but the dancing itself can catch fire. In "Rent Party," one girl tossed up by her partner almost flies out of his grasp. The five street-corner loiterers in "Visual Art" sport an appealingly louche masculinity. And the solo set to Langston Hughes's poem "The Weary Blues" is a cut above the rest of the choreography: its emotional nuances show what Rushing is capable of.

Ronald K. Brown's "Dancing Spirit" follows a more soulful, less showy, much less literal path. Created to celebrate Judith Jamison's 20 years as the Ailey company's artistic director, it begins with spartan simplicity. Dancers cross the stage in a diagonal line, repeating a few pared motions: bursting the arms up and open, for example, then dropping them slowly as the dancer steps in releve. It’s impossible to watch without thinking of the deliberate opening movements of "Revelations."

I also thought of the importance of lineage, of the ancestors, in African and African-American culture. The seven dancers follow one another one by one, but as each reaches the downstage corner, he or she exits, essentially making room for the performer entering upstage. (One woman, however, literally steps out of line and does her own thing: Jamison?)

Brown's eclectic mix of music includes two versions of Duke Ellington's "The Single Petal of a Rose," a couple of pieces by Wynton Marsalis, an urgent string composition by Radiohead, and War’s funky 1978 "Flying Machine (The Chase)." The choreography also traces an unpredictable path. Brown beautifully dissolves his simple opening sequence to create a sense of chaos: each individual moves with complete integrity and continuity, but overall the ensemble doesn’t exhibit much congruence --- until the dancers suddenly surround a single woman (Renee Robinson on opening night). Left alone onstage, she steps forward only to retreat, turns this way and then that, but her fluidity and passion show she knows the way.

Brown incorporates African moves but pares them back, smooths them out. The effect, especially given the flouncy costumes, suggests Caribbean dance --- which in turn suggests the "Wade in the Water" section of "Revelations." Echoing Ailey choreography without recapitulating it, Brown creates but never belabors a sense of history. The repetitions growing out of the African movement create but don’t belabor a sense of ritual. African dance simplified and often slowed suggests a very American, very urban brand of cool perfect for the Ailey troupe.

"Revelations" closes every program. It's a keeper --- though I'm tired of audience members who applaud and hoot at discrete bits as if they were athletic feats. For me this work's heart lies in two quirky rather than anthemic sections. In the excruciating male solo "I Wanna Be Ready," the dancer must exert exquisite control to reveal the sinner's lack of control. Odd. Pinned under God's searchlight, this man is trapped --- and so are the three men in the following section, "Sinner Man." Part of me always wants to laugh at the John Wayne-cowboy excess of this melodramatic song and dance. But another part honors its maleness, its courage and strength, and mourns its characters' despair.

Wayne McGregor | Random Dance: Entity

"Wayne McGregror I Random Dance"

 

By Sid Smith:

Wayne McGregor and his Random Dance are the last of the Dance Center of Columbia College's visitors in its series on science, and while they're the simplest and most conventional technologically, McGregor's choreography is beyond doubt the most exciting--this is work both electrifying and unique.

McGregor is a major force back home in London, where he not only runs this modestly sized troupe, but serves as resident choreographer for the Royal Ballet--a title he earned despite a lack of classical training. Nevertheless, the assault of dance that is "Entity," the work on view through Saturday, boasts casual, unmistakable echoes of classical form, however contemporary and innovative otherwise. Whether that's a reflection of McGregor's days with the Royal or has always been a part of his aesthetic, I can't say--this is the first of his work I've seen.

But I can't wait to see more, and the classic underpinnings--arabesques, pirouettes and taut extensions--are merely a basis for an exceedingly original style energized by a decidedly modern tempo. Two stylistic aspects are striking and reflect his inimitable mastery. The nine dancers frequently and repeatedly employ a series of quasi-grotesque gestures and individual shapes, gnarled hands, twisted in contortion, or here and there a head dip and serpentine undulation not unlike someone briefly imitating a chicken. I found myself recalling David Threlfall and his memorable portrayal of Smike in "Nicholas Nickleby"--this is very much the poetry of the spastic.

McGregor employs these countless moves and twists as part of a cascade of unsettling imagery, the formal beauty at the base of the work counterbalanced, transmogrified and counter-intuitively expanded with moves and executions unique in their oddity.
Secondly, the design and pace of "Entity" overall is one of perpetual motion, ever changing, brief in phrasings and short-lived in the tensions, couplings, aggressive encounters and moments of harmony that generously populate it. Little is long lived, save for a duet here and there, and while there are plenty of conventional interactions, they're so quick in coming that the piece seems an onslaught of pure form and design. There's human drama, to be sure, but architectural that it has a clean, pristine purity.

In the end, what matters, though, is that McGregor is an absolute magician of movement, endlessly inventive in the way he designs and executes his choreography, just as he's cagey in his selection of fine dancers. For all the formal restraint, the energy, agility and endurance of the performers themselves comes through. In no way solicitous, thanks to its aesthetic distance, "Entity" manages to win its audiences' hearts by virtue of the skill and determination by which the performers survive its 65-minute marathon.

The technical details are clean, bright and minimal, though I should note that a flyer in the program explains certain technical changes had to be made to accommodate the piece here. A long horizontal screen hovers over the production, televising the image of a racing dog at the beginning and end of the piece, supported by a giant industrial crane. Otherwise, the lighting effects and the white playing area combine with bare-bones simplicity to create a kind of technological blank space--a plain canvas. Images are telecast on the screen part of the time, basic pictures of dots and the occasional photographic negative.
I can't pretend to be able to wed all this to information outlined in the work's literature, talk of cognitive processes and various experts who contributed their learning. "Entity" succeeds nicely as fairly straightforward contemporary dance, though it may well be that the background and subtext is critical to that success, however subtle and unseen.

As for the series as a whole, I may be in a minority, but my conclusion about the troupes invited to explore technology and dance lead me to think that, even today, technology just doesn't make that much difference. It's window dressing, just as it was during the '60s multimedia heyday, and much of the digital projections on view didn't seem that different from the cinematic clips of that era. Decor's all well and good, and artists are welcome to use any elements to concoct one. But it's the flesh and blood of the dancers that matters most, and the design and imagination of the choreographer, old-fashioned virtues that McGregor, for all his novelty, possesses in spades.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Spring Series

"Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Spring Series"

 

By Laura Molzahn:

A sense of loss, of human foolishness and mortality, hangs over Hubbard Street's shadowy spring program, running through Sunday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. The costumes are drab and often ordinary; the music is downbeat or strange --- or both.

But the mood suits our times. And though the evening's four works were often somber, I left the theater buoyed by the sense that dance could look so hard and seriously at the dark side of human experience, especially human relationships.

There's an element of romance, or anti-romance, in every piece here. The first two dances on the bill fit together as neatly as two puzzle pieces: Alejandro Cerrudo's new "First Light" and Susan Marshall's familiar "Kiss" both deal with partings, and while Cerrudo's piece ends with a sort of death knell, Marshall's begins with a tolling bell.

"First Light" is set to a piano transcription of Philip Glass's 1993 opera "Orphee," inspired by Jean Cocteau's 1949 film based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who lost Eurydice to the underworld. Cerrudo has been attracted to the mythic in previous, often cinematic works; "First Light" is on a more modest scale, but its duets --- creditably danced by members of Hubbard Street 2 --- do amplify the theme of lovers separated. Most of the piece sets up the final moment of loss, prefigured by the dancers passing in and out of shadow. Couples swing around each other, orbiting with the easy confidence that nothing will ever stop their perpetual-motion machine. Of course it does stop: to heavy single piano notes, the dancers retreat and disappear.

The three bells that begin "Kiss" are the opening to Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten," whose elegiac tone suffuses Marshall's love duet for suspended dancers. Unlike Cerrudo's parted lovers, these two are almost constantly entwined, yet within the limits of their ropes and harnesses they do separate and reunite, over and over, recapitulating lovers' magnetic attractions and repulsions. Their vacillating unions and separations are on a small, psychological scale while Cerrudo goes for the archetypal.

Terence Marling uses a lighter touch in his world premiere, "At 'em (Atem) Adam," but the moonstruck characters can be pathetic as well as funny. In his first mainstage dance for Hubbard Street, former HSDC dancer Marling, now an artistic associate, shows he has a knack for theater, transforming a red "heart" into a pale moon or lantern and using vastly different music to create vignettes with different moods unified by the sense that, in this world, lovers are bumblers.

Like characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," these ten can seem bewitched, switching partners swiftly during a sort of barn dance to music from the album "Appalachian Waltz." A section set to Ella Fitzgerald's smooth, seductive, devastating rendition of "But Not for Me" expresses both the pain and folly of love in vain. Marling doesn't always seem in complete control of the many elements in "At 'em (Atem) Adam," but he gives it a gleeful variety and freedom.

With Jiri Kylian's "27'52"," the program comes to a mysterious, breathtaking close. Hubbard Street is the first U.S. company to perform this 2002 work, whose stylish lighting and set pieces are trademarks of Kylian, former artistic director and now resident choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater. The six dancers, especially Ana Lopez and Cerrudo, do a masterful job with Kylian's clipped choreography.

Clocking in at 27 minutes and 52 seconds, Kylian's dance manages to be both claustrophobic and expansive, thanks partly to the set design: long swaths of white marley, suspended and laid on the floor, that both confine the playing area and give it a larger resonance. Dirk Haubrich's score, based on two themes by Mahler, is made up of odd noises melodically combined and includes recorded texts in various languages played forward, then backward. The dancers too sometimes reverse their movements, which makes the claim of a straightforward running time odd: Do the rewinds count? Does the opening section, with the dancers warming up?

Often harshly angular, Kylian's movement can give an impression of antiseptic, impersonal brutality. The dance proper is a series of duets that switch out partners and switch in new ones --- and the men in particular can look cruel, manipulating the women, even shaking them. But men and women alike show each other a dancerly disaffected affection that makes the final section of entombment, lit by a murky green, a vision of tragedy that the cataclysmic ending opens out.

In these times, there's been some shrinkage in Hubbard Street's ranks. But artistic director Glenn Edgerton has maximized his resources here, by including the appealing dancers of Hubbard Street 2, using work by two talented company members, and snaring an underexposed masterwork. He's also managed to create a repertory program with a single direction and mood, no small feat.

 

Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago presents Ovations

"Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago "Ovations""

 

By Sid Smith:

Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago is offering up something of a retrospective of popular works from its recent past in an engagement dubbed "Ovations" playing through Saturday at the Harris Theater.

One bright spot is the heavy representation of choreographers associated with Chicago. Randy Duncan remains based here, while Ron De Jesus and Davis Robertson both danced here for some years, at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Joffrey Ballet respectively. Gus Giordano, whose "Wings" is on the line-up, launched the troupe that bears his name.

The Giordano brand is fast, showy and fun, with an emphasis on entertainment, but the six works on view here also demonstrate that the company, now run by Giordano's daughter, Nan, can accommodate diverse tastes and styles. Robertson's "Entropy" and De Jesus' "Prey" share a moody, somewhat alienated look and harsh musical accompaniment. Christopher Huggins' "Pyrokinesis" boasts a knockout finale that's all fun-loving movement joy and a tinges of disco celebration. Duncan's "Can't Take This Away"(from 1997) is gospel rich in theme and silky in design, as billowy in execution as the costumes that play so much a part of its look. Liz Imperio's duet from her larger "La Raza del Barrio" is Latin sensuality, pep and sass.

The dancers, meanwhile, are all new since these pieces were first premiered. There are tough chores aplenty in these works, demanding breakneck speed and merciless precision. Here and there, that challenged the troupe on Friday. Some of the ensemble timing was off.

But on the whole the troupe masters these works solidly and colorfully, rising to the frequent show-off moments with gusto and pizzazz. For sure, that's true of talented Zachary Heller, statuesque, confident and more than up to such spectacular solos as Huggins' breathtaking series of ballet turns in "Pyrokinesis." Similarly, Ashley Lauren Smith and Martin Ortiz Tapia make the most of their spotlight moment in Imperio's duet. Smith is especially impressive, executing her tricky moves despite wearing heels, employing her striking legs to create both a sensual and dignified presence.

The early, satiny, pleasantly New Age moments to George Winston in "Pyrokinesis" hardly prepare you for Huggins final assault, an extravaganza that manages to employ just about every conceivable dance trick, and yet does so without any sense of a rigged, circus-like catalogue. Each moment, and they all fly by, seems to spring organically from the music or the one that came before, down to and including the cagily lit cakewalk across the front of the stage--the jazziest, cockiest, most exhilarating cakewalk you're likely to see.

Huggins "Pyro"-technics are in sharp contrast to Duncan's preference for style and design. "Can't Take This Away" is abstract, and yet its unusual clusters, the dancers easing across the stage in close contact and one by one raising one of their members, for instance, evoke a sculptural choir. Concert dance is not always comfortable with religious themes, but Duncan embraces them here, a contemporary piece with that rare ability to invite the audience into its world of hope, supplication and moving emotions.

"Entropy" and "Prey" are more enigmatic, slightly off-putting and even odd, but they both boast virtues. "Entropy" has an intricacy of design and movement that helps it stand alone on this program. While four women perform in front in one section, there's a strange gymnastic assortment under way in the back, and the piece boasts striking lifts and an exhilarating finale.

"Prey" is every bit as feral as its title would suggest, an unsettling piece that employs movement to imply seduction, conquest and conflict. De Jesus' own costumes, especially for the women, contribute to the air of primitive and yet elegant sexuality. The collapse of the backdrop for a finish is a stunner, all of it proof Chicago lost more than a dancer when De Jesus left our midst.

 

Akram Khan Company: bahok

"Akram Kahn Company: Bah"

 

Inarguably, London's Akram Khan is an engaging maker of movement. Just about all of the dance in "bahok," in performance through Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is intelligent and fresh, and some of it is spellbinding.

Close to the end of this 75-minute work, in what amounts to a climax, Khan and longtime collaborator, composer Nitin Sawhney, manage one of those rare apices marrying music and dance. Sawhney's seductive score, a rambling, intermittent symphony of noise and melody, reaches a soaring point in volume and beauty as the dancers lunge forward, at first, and then come to complete stillness in the sense that their feet stop moving. But their arms swing, like blades of a windmill, accelerating to near jet propulsion, repeating their circular gyrations as if kids gone mad on a playground. You are both moved at the artistic audacity and just slightly worried your own theater seat may take off in flight--there's that much energy.

Meanwhile, Khan's ensemble rearrangements, both before and after this stretch, are graced with a gossamer, minimalist design. As most of the dancers move in unison, one, two, or three break away into something else, but so beautifully dotted throughout the larger grouping, and so quickly changing, that you have to watch feverishly to follow them before giving up and surrendering to Khan's overall magic spell. As audience members, we're intrigued, then excited and finally rendered putty in his hands.

Unfortunately, "bahok," created in 2008, is better throughout in its dance than its dramaturgy. A fairly straightforward dance theater piece, it's set in a train station of the mind, its passengers a diverse hodgepodge of nationalities, its waiting area a Godot-like land of no exit and existential trap. In itself, that's trite now, going all the way back to such forgotten dramas as Sutton Vane's 1923 "Outward Bound," and Khan doesn't really do that much with it. The messages at the end meant as philosophical codas, broadcast on the computerized arrival-departure board that's part of the lean set, are too obvious: "Are you lost?" or "Where are you going?" And Khan relies on such shopworn emblems of sterile modern life as the cell phone. Moments of vaudeville intended as comic relief aren't that funny, as when, after a tower-of-Babel-like brouhaha, the cast goes in for a group hug, one loner left out to crawl around and atop the ensemble to try and force her way in. Second-rate Marx Brothers.

There is a moment of genuinely witty dance, when a somewhat short man, partnering a tall woman in a sequence of rough-hewn ballet, has to jump into the air to manage the classic position of a male partner holding the ballerina in place. There's also one intriguing dramatic sequence, wherein a woman and her Korean friend struggle to communicate with a customs official and each other, a sequence beautifully acted, funny, scary and apt--epitomizing the weariness and fright of traveling internationally today.

And, the disappointing dramatic tropes aside, "bahok" is flush with Khan's rightly respected mastery of choreography, performed here by a smart, daredevil and speedy company on tour. Khan employs classic grounded contemporary dance, tinged with bone-crushing danger and martial art stress, but often prettified paradoxically by the most delicate hand work. Right before or after you watch a dancer collapse painfully to the floor, the wrists will flick like grace notes, or, in the case of one especially liquid-like gentleman, the trunk will undulate with gorgeous serpentine silkiness.

Best of all, during the stretches of eminently viewable dance, Khan and company engage in a typical series of modern moves, backward runs and floor rolls among them, but with that inimitable drive and cohesion that marks truly compelling choreography. Plenty of contemporary choreographers employ the same moves. But it's rare talents, and Khan is assuredly one of them, who manage such a sequence so that, by the end of it, you feel not so much you've witnessed a string of unrelated moves as you've been grabbed unexpectedly and taken on a journey. For my money, Khan has no need of a traveler's setting to accomplish it.

The Joffrey Ballet's Cinderella

"Joffrey Ballet's "Cinderella""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

What's wonderful about Sir Frederick Ashton's sunny "Cinderella" is his heroine's independence; the few men in the ballet are singularly beside the point. Cinderella's father is kindly but weak, and her prince has no more character than the broomstick she dances with in the kitchen. But Cinderella herself knows her value from the get-go.

The Joffrey --- which holds exclusive rights to perform Ashton’s 1948 three-act story ballet --- stages "Cinderella" for the second time only (the first was in 2006, the piece's U.S. premiere), and it is delicious. Running through February 28 at the Auditorium Theatre, it's well danced and theatrically nuanced under the direction of Wendy Ellis Somes and beautifully tricked out with David Walker's vintage sets and costumes, which the Joffrey acquired four years ago. The Chicago Sinfonietta, conducted by Scott Peck, treats Prokofiev’s sometimes angular, sometimes lissome score with great feeling and sensitivity.

Ashton's remixing of standard versions of the fairytale makes this a grrl-power kind of dance. For the libretto, he relied on Charles Perrault's popular 1697 account --- with some significant changes, like eliminating the evil stepmom. This renders the first act a bit odd: the father, a grown man of sound mind, is completely cowed by the silly stepsisters in Ashton’s comic take on the story, embracing and reassuring his daughter only when they’re not looking. Nice guy, but a wimp.

Ashton also borrowed a few features from the 19th-century version of the fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, in which Cinderella's birth mother speaks from the grave through a hazel tree her daughter plants there. Ashton doesn’t go so far as to have Cinderella’s dead mother talk to her, but his heroine does hang her mother’s portrait on the chimney and place a votary candle on the hearth of the cavernous kitchen. Though we never meet the mother, she is literally a light, a beacon, for the oppressed Cinderella.

Who isn't all that oppressed in Ashton's ballet. In the Brothers Grimm tale, Cinderella is weepy, crying at every turn. Consistently described as good, sweet, and patient, she's also good, sweet, and patient in the ballet --- but seldom weepy. Instead Cinderella immediately reveals an innate self-confidence, especially in her dancing.

For Ashton, the stepsisters' moral failings are part and parcel of their excessive, clumsy movement, played for laughs: their moves are as frilly and overdone as their frou-frou costumes, with lots of gesticulating, wobbly running, and flapping of arms. Pulling out all the stops, Ashton prods them into stumbles, collisions, and Three Stooges-style pranks. At the height of one such scene in the first act, Cinderella steps in and --- with a single decisive gesture, spreading her arms wide --- brings everyone to a halt, just as the old hag/fairy godmother makes her entrance.

Those expansive arms are characteristic of Cinderella's first- and third-act solos in the kitchen, when her spirit transcends her circumstances. Her steps are quick and dainty but completely sure, the solid base for a fluid, expressive upper body. When everyone leaves for the ball, she regards the closed door a little sadly, then makes a flippant "so what?" gesture and executes a sky-high extension facing the audience, releasing it only to stab her toe shoe into the floor defiantly, once, twice, right on the music. On opening night, Victoria Jaiani played the role with the right mix of taut strength and easy freedom, self-effacement and self-assurance.

In Ashton's fairytale, all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking. Well, the prince at least. Despite his money and station, he doesn’t confer power on Cinderella --- he recognizes it. The closest any man gets to power in this "Cinderella" is the jester/emcee at the second-act ball (a highly athletic role well danced by a mischievous Derrick Agnoletti). And he's pretty androgynous. His female counterpart in the first act, the fairy godmother, grounds Cinderella in the natural world (another feature lifted from the Brothers Grimm fairytale), then provides the carriage, horses, gown. But the grace and force that Cinderella unveils at the ball are all her own.

What a novelty: plenty of powerful women while none are evil. Even the wicked stepsisters are men in drag (the hilariously foolish David Gombert and Michael Smith). Ashton --- who used to dance the shy younger stepsister himself --- lavished attention on these two, the bossy older sister and her slightly more demure sibling, the Laurel and Hardy of dance. But it’s a sign of this ballet’s gentle spirit that, when the stepsisters are banished at the end, they half tiptoe/half march offstage hand in hand. Even villains catch a break in Ashton’s generous, forgiving vision.

River North's Valentine's Weekend Engagement

"River North Chicago Dance Company Valentine's Weekend Engagement"

 

By Sid Smith:

Choreographer Robert Battle seems blessed with a limitless talent to entertain. The man who gave River North Chicago Dance Company "Train" is back with two more works, a new one called "Three" and a solo, "Ella," first performed earlier by his own troupe.

Both are irresistible and, like "Train," decidedly inimitable. Though it boasts one noteworthy solo, "Train" involves a modest-sized ensemble and a nod to choral imagery. Solos and trios are about something else, a more intimate artistry, and it's here that Battle maybe shows off his innovation, quirkiness and originality best, zeroing in for tight body shots that are the choreographic equivalent of a close-up. He injects both pieces with an almost infinite amount of gestures and modest, short-lived motions that are speedy and crammed, just this side of frenetic. These are feasts of detail, yet each work is distinct from the other.

"Ella" demands this approach by definition. Here Battle attempts the nearly impossible: Charging a dancer with illustrating, dipping inside and replicating the quicksilver wonderland and finesse of Ella Fitzgerald's scat. Vocalists, of course, are challenged to duplicate the great Fitzgerald's skills; dancers, you'd think, wouldn't stand a chance.

And yet Battle and River North's amazing Lauren Kias do just that. The score is a track called "Airmail Special," a scat amalgamating various songs, phrases and notes, and Kias echoes the vocals with an elaborate catalogue including spinning forearms, swoops, cartwheel-like exercises and one spectacular collapse to the floor. No single gesture or trope seems to last for more than a second, so that Kias is rapidly changing, just like Fitzgerald's vocals, few of the images repeated.

With a cagey sense of stagecraft and no small knack for design, Battle makes it possible by alternating the fast, dart-like echoes of the changing notes with slow, more languorous pauses and lilts, built-in retards to give Kias a chance to catch her breath. At one point, two male dancers, goofily attired, cross the rear of the stage, another reprieve for Kias and part of Battle's disarming use of humor to pull this off. Kias herself, while delivering a technical knockout, also manages a light, subdued rakishness, nothing cloying or overly solicitous, but an oh-what-the-heck air that serves both the dance and the spirit of the tribute to Fitzgerald.

"Three," Battle's new work for the troupe, somewhat takes up a similar mission in another direction. Here the music is a seamless mix of various percussive strains from the likes of Eleventh Hour, Art of Noise and Taiko Drums. The soundtrack is pounding, aggressive, like "Train," yet impish and delectable, too, an inviting serenade of techno-noise. The three men are mostly in two separate clusters--Michael Gross and Ricky Ruiz are paired, alternating with Christian Denice, who performs in solo. For all the sophistication, the movement both here and in "Ella" has a carefree, casual, pop and streetwise vocabulary--sass, hip-hop and even one miniature quote of the limbo in "Three" are part of Battle's arsenal. But it shifts so rapidly and so smoothly that the effect is more tour de force than eclectic list. Battle is also witty more than he's outright funny, which is a terrific strength. There's a guiding intelligence that make "Three" not just appealing, but audaciously clever. Almost off-handedly, the dancers find themselves standing on their heads. The tiny, embedded structures minutely ape and illustrate the pulses of the percussive score, whether it's a back and forth tug of war between Ruiz and Gross, or a mock superior strut from Denice. The finale is a carefully wrought bit of geometry whereby the united trio break up again: The Gross-Ruiz combo shoot Denice away, as if he's cannonball to their cannon.

Lauri Stallings' "Suppose" is a bit of a disappointment. Like Battle's "Three," it is redolent with offbeat, alien-like gestures set to a disturbing, other worldy score mixing Deadbeat and Gustavo Santaolalla. Some of the quirks and frenzied spasms for the seven dancers are interesting, as are some elements of the design and Stallings' shifting use of combinations. But "Suppose" somehow doesn't add up or come together, more a finely tuned exercise--or maybe a work in progress.

The engagement, which plays through Saturday at the Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph Dr. (312-334-7777), includes revivals of Sherry Zunker's "Evolution of a Dream," Monique Haley's "Uhuru" and Frank Chaves' "Tuscan Rift," "Sentir em Nos (Even for Us)" and "Forbidden Boundaries."

Koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO

"KOOSIL-JA/DANCEKUMIKO "BLOCKS OF CONTINUALITY/BODY, IMAGE AND ALGORITHM" "

 

By Laura Molzahn:

If you think the title is daunting, you should see the 75-minute work. Choreographer-director Koosil-ja has created an experience that challenges the ears, the eyes, the mind, and the heart. Her philosophical discussion of the project makes it no clearer; she says, for example, that she wants to "perceive body and movement algorithmically. I want to know about the body from a molecular level...and wash off all politics and stigma."

Problem is, a lot else gets washed off too. There's no doubting the seriousness and discipline of "Blocks of Continuality/Body, Image and Algorithm," running through Saturday, February 6, at the Dance Center of Columbia College. But Koosil-ja's whole enterprise---which involves the dancer "entering another body" through technological means so that she can become "free and pure" --- seems misguided. For me reality lies in the mess, in the individual, in the here and now, not in "underlying principles" or abstractions.

Here's what happens in a nutshell: In the first three-quarters of the piece, three dancers enact a series of solos, duets, and trios while watching banks of screens displaying still and moving images of the human body. These change regularly. Using a process Koosil-ja calls "live processing," the dancers copy and integrate the motions they see on the screens.

Meanwhile the four banks, one on each edge of the performing area, create a private domain for the performers, and the audience is outside, watching: voyeurs. Clearly Koosil-ja is evoking the overload of imagery and information that digital media enable --- "Blocks of Continuality" is like a six-ring circus. Straining to see the screen images, small and distant, I tried to connect them with the live dancers, then thought: why? But looking only at the dancers made me curious about their sources, and my eyes wandered back to the screens. It's the same restless search enacted every day as people struggle to wring every last bit of information from the Internet.

Koosil-ja's abstracting approach produces a denatured body language garnered from anonymous, culturally diverse sources presented in short visual bursts without syntax. Yet at its best it can evoke something, have some human character through Koosil-ja's direction or from the performances of mercurial dancers Melissa Guerrero, Ava Heller, and Elise Knudson. Despite Koosil-ja's aim to create "a new networked body made of real and virtual," for me they were always distinct. Dancers are a cooperative bunch, and watching them watch their screens, I found their intense concentration on the deluge of images intensely human and moving.

Most affecting is the final section of the first part. In a danced diminuendo, a soloist slowly reduces the scope of her movements until all we can see are tiny inflections of the body: slight shifts in weight, a wrist rotated, flicking eyes. She begins to mutter words keyed to her motions: "nod," "palm," "elbow," "move to the side," "hold the center." Her minimalism, perhaps the pared-down effect of mental exhaustion, sharply contrasts with the rapidly shifting excesses of the images onscreen. The music is quiet, a song without words by Koosil-ja and Geoff Gersh that blends with the dancer's muttering, creating a sense of peace and intimacy.

By contrast much of the rest of the score, by Koosil-ja and Geoff Matters, is at best electronic wallpaper and at worst, aural torture. Then, for the piece's final 15 or 20 minutes, the music is --- well, both amazing and monotonous. Gersh is hooked up to a device, designed and engineered by Stephan Moore, that uses brain waves to activate a sound installation: meditating in a chair downstage, Gersh produces alpha waves that translate into a two-note percussive phrase like a heartbeat at irregular intervals, interrupting the machine's loud buzzing.

The whole fleet of tech wizards involved in "Blocks of Continuality" is especially crucial to the second and final part. Each dancer is outfitted with sensors that use Wii technology to translate live movement to digital animations projected on large screens, one for each dancer. This finale is initially impressive, the images chilling in the nightmarish stories they seem to tell and in their eerie video-game movement, both familiarly human and skin-crawlingly alien. But the imagery, going on too long and evolving with excruciating slowness, comes to seem mere gimmickry while the live dancers, still moving to their video screens in the dark onstage, almost disappear. I hated to see them go.

By the end, Koosil-ja has literally made her dancers the "open conduit" for information she aims to achieve: they're processing human movement from the small screens and passing it on, through the sensors, to the big screens and the animated human beings. Sure, it's cool. But all the philosophizing in the world can't make me see a point beyond that.

 

The Dance COLEctive

"The Dance COLEctive "Meet Me There""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

Three generations of women come face-to-face in the Dance COLEctive's winter program, "Meet Me There,” continuing through Saturday, January 30, at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. Most of the time these women are looking at themselves, not out of vanity but in the hope of self-discovery.

Artistic director Margi Cole has worked almost exclusively with female dancers since she started the company in 1996. And as a lecturer at the Dance Center of Columbia College, she must know a whole younger generation of mostly female dancers there. Meanwhile Cole’s mentor and former teacher, Shirley Mordine, has contributed a reconstruction of her 1974 “Three Women” to the program.

Cole occupies the middle ground between twentysomethings and sixtysomethings, and that queasy sense of being in-between permeates the new "IMe," which she created with Jeff Hancock. This thoughtful, well-structured dance for ten comes to no conclusions, instead wallowing in the slipperiness of identity and the easy entrapments of self-love masquerading as self-knowledge.

A response to self-definition in the digital age, "IMe" recognizes and even embraces the communities that spring up on sites like Facebook, where people --- especially young people --- assert themselves, express themselves, and in effect try out different roles. But some of the text in "IMe," written by Cole and Hancock, acknowledges the deceptive, confusing side of Internet communication, the potential to obscure identity, adopt false personas, and discover, to your horror, your doppelganger.

Like the Internet, "IMe" is a po-mo jumble. There's music, the sound of dripping or running water, voiceovers and texts delivered live, and above all, reflective surfaces: a tall Mylar "mirror" upstage, hand-held mirrors, mirrors sewn into costumes. A rectangular mirror being constructed from ragged bits of Mylar by a woman downstage also suggests a computer screen --- but the woman is seated on a classical-looking pedestal. In fact ancient mythology grabs more of the stage than the Internet: like Narcissus, the dancers avidly study their own reflections, even lying on their stomachs and smiling into small round mirrors like pools. One section suggests the way Echo stalked Narcissus by repeating his cries: in something like the Marco Polo pool game, a confused crowd of dancers rushes toward whichever person is calling out "I" or "me."

A subtle humor runs through "IMe" and disrupts the lingering threat of navel gazing. You can hear that comic edge in two letters, also referring to Narcissus and, in this case, his unrequited self-love: the first is adoring and addressed to "you," the second dismissive and addressed to "me." And you can see it in lighting designer Jacob Snodgrass's opening --- a portentous path of light to the upstage mirror --- and in the small, redundant photograph of each dancer printed on her T-shirt, courtesy of costume designer Atalee Judy.

In "Three Women," Mordine looks at female identity at three ages: the free child, the young woman discovering her sexuality, and the older woman. A reconstruction of the score includes unidentified voices and snatches of historic folk recordings, which give the piece a populist feel, a sense of well-worn, immutable archetypes. This 36-year-old trio feels both fresh and timeless, thanks in part to strong dancing by Cole, Molly Grimm-Leasure, and Maggie Koller.

The anxiety of "IMe," the sense of continual search for an anchor in a too-fluid world, is foreign to "Three Women." Instead these dancers have the solidity of sculpture --- though they're far from stolid. When they enter, arms around each other's backs, they're like children or beasts from a fairy tale, like the Wild Things in Maurice Sendak’s famous book. They enjoy the noise their feet make, slapping the ground with their full weight, and they clap their hands and snap their fingers to provide their own music. Solos at the end convey the different ages of woman, and the final one for the older woman (originally performed by Mordine and here by Cole) is by far the most powerful, a statement of potency and self-effacement, resignation and violent feeling.

In contrast to the other two pieces, Cole's world premiere octet, "Taking Hold," feels tenuous and unfinished. Though it has some of the evening's most intricate and emotionally laden interactions, they take place in isolated scenes without context or a sense of development. The piece originated with the idea of collecting, but except for a slight edge of obsessive acquisitiveness, you can’t tell that. There are seeds here, and good ones, but they need to be planted in more solid, fertile ground.

The Dance Center presents Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan

"CLOUD GATE DANCE THEATRE OF TAIWAN "MOON WATER""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

The words used to describe the body-ankle, nape, forearm, small of the back-are like well-worn, much-loved stones to me. But even when combined with muscular verbs, they are completely inadequate to describe what the body does, how it moves not as a collection of parts but as an integrated whole.

Clambering over the disjunct between language and the moving body is something I attempt all the time. But "Moon Water," which Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan will reprise Saturday night at the Harris Theater, has left me in a sorry spot for a writer: nearly speechless. How to put clumsy words to this irreducible experience of the ineffable?

My husband fell asleep. Two or three times, he said. But for once that didn't make me mad. Ten years ago, watching a performance of Merce Cunningham's "Biped," I struggled to keep from dozing off. But when my eyes flew open â?? which fortunately they did at times-I felt not just awake but reborn, both tranquil and bedazzled by what I saw onstage. It seemed miraculous.

Cloud Gate artistic director Lin Hwai-Min is the Eastern version of Merce Cunningham. Like the West's dead darling, he articulates the body at every conceivable joint-and adds a few we havenâ??t heard of. But where Cunningham's choreography is all awkward angles, Lin debones his dancers, except for the rare cocked elbow or toe, like a trigger on the rifle of the leg.

And like Cunningham, I think, Lin aims for contemplation, even meditation, both for his dancers and for his watchers. Thatâ??s why sleep is no shame: It is meditation's sibling. It is an honorable response to such a work.

Lin bases the movement in tai chi and sets it to selections from Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello. These selections differ, but many of them sound like breathing as the bow moves back and forth over the strings. The sound moves the same way the body does in tai chi, with an ebb and flow that's unpredictable, intuitive, organic, responsive to the inner and outer worlds.

I can see how the 70-minute "Moon Water" might be perceived as monotonous, amorphous, but it has a strong structure, a skeleton that moves the piece from here to there almost imperceptibly, hidden under the slow transformations of the movement, the flesh. Each of its eight sections is devoted to a discrete piece of the Bach music and separated from the others by short periods of silence. Yet Lin also knits them together, with entrances that transgress on the previous section and exits that linger.

In general "Moon Water" expands and contracts but with a gradual enlargement of scope and interaction. Touching-or rather, not touching-is a motif. The second section, a male-female duet, creates the illusion of touching and suggests the impulse to touch, but it's not until a trio in the fifth section that any man lifts or moves a woman about the stage. And in the sixth section, a quartet for two couples, men and women purposefully wrap their fingers around each other's forearms or join hands. There are no embraces or caresses, but then "Moon Water" isn't about romance.

Three solos punctuate the piece. "Moon Water" opens with a powerful male solo-but not in the usual macho sense. Instead Tsai Ming-yuan uses his man's body to move like a woman, in undulating collapses like a ribbon falling to the floor in slow motion. The fourth section is a female solo, to me the most anomalous part of the piece. Chou Chang-ning is a surprisingly regal, almost confrontational presence â?? and she swims upstream, exiting quickly stage left when everyone else has exited stage right in a slow, relentless procession.

The third solo, the seventh section, was for me the evening's miracle. Set to the prelude of Bach's Suite No. 4, the most moving selection on the program, it isolates dancer Huang Pei-hua in a golden pool of light so bright that it bounces off parts of her body and slams into our eyes. The energy concentrated in her movement, the music, and the light fills this section with a drama foreign to the rest of the piece, especially when she slips out of the light and her face is in shadow.

The final section returns us to a quiet place, the quietest place in "Moon Water" despite the size of the scene, which includes 15 dancers, and the grandeur of the scenic design. Lighting designer Chang Tsan-tao paints every section with simultaneous subtlety and power, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary and back again. And set designer Austin Wang has created an environment of astounding beauty, especially in the last section, when multiple mirrors and dripping, splashing, and silent water unite clouds and pools, sky and earth.

 

Chicago Tap Theatre's

"Chicago Tap Theatre "Tidings of Tap""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

Spreading good cheer? Check. Bringing together folks of different ages and religious persuasions? Check. Doing it all so well that nobody minds the cold? Check.

Unfortunately, a busted heater at the U.I.C. Theater on Friday night meant that everyone at "Tidings of Tap!" was cold – but there was enough goodwill coursing through the place that I could ignore my chilly toes. Chicago Tap Theatre's G-rated, secular, inclusive annual holiday show, a mix of old and new pieces running through Sunday, works for tap-oholics and dance newbies alike.

Artistic director Mark Yonally, who choreographed most of the works on the program, has never been afraid to cross the line into loopy kitsch. At the same time, there's something tidy and cheerful and very midwestern (he's from Kansas) about his vision. Over the company's eight years he's become known for his tap operas: "Masque of the Red Death" was based on Edgar Allan Poe, "Little Dead Riding Hood" on the fairy tale, you get the idea. And "Tidings of Tap!" has some of the same innocent strangeness.

Yonally works hard to make this program of 14 short dances cohesive and entertaining. "Name That Tune" interludes between some of the numbers keep the energy high, as individual dancers tap out a cappella renditions of holiday songs, challenging the audience to recognize them (usually in just a few beats) and sing along (everyone else is doing it, so ... ).

These interludes also prepare the audience for Yonally's a cappella numbers for all 12 company members, "Hava Nagila" and "Carol of the Bells." In these flippant, fun, ingenious dances, the dancers sometimes pass the beat-out "notes" of the songs from one to another in short bursts of one or two taps apiece. They're like kids playing with each other and the music, varying their speed and volume - an approach that honors tap's traditional eccentricity, creativity, and humor.

Other works bounce even further off the wall. In Yonally's new "BeatCracker," dancers Richard Ashworth and Phil Brooks take over a mic and start beat-boxing music from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," mixing in occasional samples of rap. Turns out the five dancers are considerably more inspired by the hip-hop beats than those chestnuts of ballet - though whatever the music, they just keep tapping. Yonally's odd duet "Baby, It's Cold Outside" could have been steamy given the song. But he makes himself a door-to-door salesman and the delicious Jennifer Pfaff a housewife more interested in his vacuum cleaner than romance. The jokey "Best.Gift.Ever" might be of interest only to Wii aficionados.

Yonally does best when movement is at least as important as concept. And he ends the show with a bang - a trifecta of energetic dances. "Ocho Kandelikas," set to a Ladino song celebrating Hannukah, intriguingly combines flamenco arms with tap-dancing feet. Three men perform the new "Hannukah, Oh Hannukah" in a fusion of tap and Cossack dance whose acrobatic jumping and stamping bring down the house. And "Carol of the Bells" is a visual and aural delight.

 Other numbers are quieter but not sad. In Yonally's brief new "Snowfall," eight dancers cleverly manage to suggest they're snowflakes swept by the wind. And in the solo "Christmas Time Is Here," Yonally reprises his "improvography" to the song (played live by guitarist Brian Citro) from "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Though Yonally has the same large, smooth, round head as the cartoon character, he's considerably less angst-ridden. The saddest thing about this dance is the prop: a very skinny Christmas tree.

Valerie Lussac's "Spyrographe" is similarly easygoing - the conceit is that the dancers are gently tossing Christmas tree ornaments. But it's hampered by its cheesy Cirque du Soleil musique for artistes.

Two pieces by company member Kendra Jorstad reveal a flair for comedy. First performed a year ago, "Jingle 'Belles" is danced to an a cappella swing-punk version of the song by the retro Puppini Sisters, whose super-speedy treatment Jorstad not only matches but exceeds. Her new "Stuck in the Airport" creates a whole comic scenario complete with a conflict, a resolution of sorts, and five different characters representing a spectrum of feelings about the holidays. It's amusing, but I could do with fewer comically exaggerated facial expressions, in this dance and others.

Guest artists InSync Dance Theatre repeat their "Winter Song" on Saturday night, and at the Sunday matinee, Footprints Tap Ensemble dances "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town."

Never preachy and rarely predictable, "Tidings of Tap!" doesn't provide the sentimental glow of self-approval that so many other holiday shows do. Nor does it trash the season or the human race for enjoying it. Instead it takes us on a mashed-up tour of holiday clichés, borne on the easy, breezy wings of tap-dancing.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Winter Series

"Hubbard Street Dance Chicago"

 

By Laura Molzahn:

Though Hubbard Street has never been all sweetness and light, Lou Conte did start the company off on a musical-theater foot-especially with his signature work, "The 40s." Even when Conte indulged his jones for Twyla Tharp's work in 1990 and brought in three of her early pieces, they showed that she's a hybrid: half Broadway showbiz whiz, half obstreperous modern dancer.

Nuances aside: over its 33 years, Hubbard Street has undergone substantial changes. (But fortunately not in the quality of the dancing, which remains superb.) That much was obvious on Thursday from the three repertory works in its winter series, running through Sunday at the Harris Theater. None is new, but all bear repeating. Notably, Glenn Edgerton-who replaced Jim Vincent as artistic director in August-chose to polish the saddest and most serious of the works Ohad Naharin has set on HSDC, "Tabula Rasa," which the company revisited with the Israeli choreographer on a trip to Israel earlier this year. No dance could be further from "The 40s."

First performed by Hubbard Street in 2005 and created nearly 20 years earlier, "Tabula Rasa" is even different from the often humorous or raucous "Minus 16," Naharin's best-known HSDC piece. Where "Minus 16" is a postmodern hash of vastly different vignettes, "Tabula Rasa"-also the title of the 1977 Arvo Part music-tests the limits of our patience with sameness. But both dances push the envelope of mystery, throwing out difficulties and extremes that the mind struggles to accommodate.

Part's music is crucial. Both sections are repetitive, but the first has a breathing rhythm while the second features constant high strings relieved-and dragged down-at infrequent intervals by a ripple and a very low, drawn-out note on a prepared piano. Naharin is a master at using repetitive music (like the repeated folk song of "Minus 16") to establish an emotional baseline, creating a combined dread and anticipation that underlines the performers' actions.

The most striking dancing of "Tabula Rasa" comes in the second half. Or rather, nondancing: it's as quiet as the music. One by one, each isolated and facing us in a slow-moving line, the dancers cross the stage by rocking from side to side on stiff legs, shifting their feet slightly with each shift of weight. After several aeons, one dancer near the end stops-and another bumps into him. And another bumps into her. The close of the piece is filled with triangulating interactions that are not necessarily love triangles. Instead they express a simultaneous urge to disrupt and reunite, to destroy comfort even as equilibrium is sought again.

Naharin manages to make the dancers look epic even when their movements are minimal. If "Tabula Rasa" is about romance, it makes love huge and tragic. Johan Inger's "Walking Mad," first performed by HSDC a year ago, is at the other end of the spectrum. Set to Ravel's "Bolero," it breaks love down to the lowest common denominator of adolescent madness, seen most clearly in a scene when the five men, decked out in dunce caps, form a girl-chasing pack.

Drawing on clown tricks and possibly Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, "Walking Mad" makes human beings small and funny. But by equating madness with sexual passion, Inger sets up an intriguing world where it might just be better to be crazy than sane, the life of the party instead of a wallflower. In the piece's more thoughtful moments, the characters make "sane" choices that separate them from others and from life.

Internationally known Naharin and Inger give HSDC resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo some tough competition on this program. The impressive set piece of his "Off Screen," premiered last spring, is a huge length of sparkly, billowy cloth-a frame for the action that certainly suggests the glamour and transformative power of his subject, the movies. But it also nearly overwhelms the dancers and their movements. This time around, I felt I could barely see them. When they disappeared and a lush movie score took over the stage, I hardly missed them, though the music made the moment fraught and sad.

 

Step Afrika

"Step Afrika"

 

By Sid Smith:

In some respects, 20 years is really more than two decades in terms of Chicago dance survival: This was a city so supposedly hostile to troupes that reaching that milestone seemed elusive for almost everybody.

But River North Chicago Dance Company is now 20, and so is the Chicago Human Rhythm Project, the tireless endeavor that played a key role in the percussive dance renaissance of the 1990s. Founder Lane Alexander and his group may have performed at modest or off-the-track places over the years, but Alexander never thought small. His ambitions loom as large as his sunny optimism--he got Savion Glover to visit at the height of that tapper's stardom, just as an example.

The organization launched its 20th-anniversary season Thursday at the Harris Theater, an installment of its Global Rhythms enterprise and occasion for another round of Juba Awards, this time going to Alexander himself and Jam Productions co-founder Arny Granat--well-deserved kudos, to be sure. Meanwhile, the entertainment anchor of the various programs, playing through Saturday, is Step Afrika!, the Washington, D.C.-based company devoted to the art of stepping.

Founder C. Brian Williams runs a topnotch troupe wonderfully adept at this fraternity-sorority African-American tradition, an ensemble of fast, smooth stylists and musicians who take a fun-filled past time and turn it into art. The speed of their hands and feet, in maneuvers which involve both foot-stomping and variations on clapping, comes as no surprise. But the visual design and stage presentation are especially noteworthy. The troupe members ease effortlessly from one choral set-up to another, often mimicking ballet or modern dance in their lines, clusters and mini-kaleidoscopic patterns. In one especially beguiling bit, the group lines up from front to back and pound away with white wooden sticks, creating a sculptural image as well as a feast of percussion.

For my money, two stretches of the program weren't worthy. The comic dramatization of fraternity-sorority life seemed so-so, partly because it's difficult to hear the dialogue--the microphones set at the base of the stage are better at amplifying feet sounds than vocal ones, I guess. But the bit also seemed a tad conventional and silly, coming as it did amidst the delivery of an art so otherwise well-honed, sophisticated and original.

The segment involving audience participation didn't work as well as on some other percussive programs, either, a bit awkward and pro forma, somehow, maybe because we've seen so many other groups do something similar. Truth is, the performers in Step Afrika! command the stage so powerfully, they don't really need this bit.

The engagement features other guests, varying each night. Thursday included a delightful opening from the amazing youngsters with the South Shore Drill Team, who rank among the most exciting parade participants in Chicago you'll ever see. Thursday they proved they're equally impressive onstage, tossing their props and flags high into the air and catching them with phenomenal grace and precision, and offering a sweet salute to their home town that began with a smart soft shoe and other stylistics to Frank Sinatra and included a tip of the hat to Barack Obama.

The CHRP routinely brings in folks you've never heard of and then wonder why. Thursday was no exception. Jason Janas, a young man from Washington, D.C., who, despite wide ears and a slightly nerdy mien, is a firecracker in tap shoes, his lickety-split feet and intricate form matched by his unusually articulate and long-form phrasing--a joy to watch and hear.

It might be time to move the awards and speeches to the benefit portions of the gala, outside of the performance stretch. Thursday seemed long and sometimes slow because of them. True, they're an integral part of the respect for the art and reinvigoration of its educational value CHRP so rightly cherishes. But a lot has been achieved, and while there are miles to go, I'm sure the organization would remind me, the broader audience now being attracted may expect more straightforward entertainment, free of benefit-like ceremony. Oh, well, just a thought, and by no means a suggestion that the vast accomplishments by the CHRP in the past two decades should be minimized, ignored or go uncelebrated.

 

Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre

"Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre "12345""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

The pleasure of a repertory company like Same Planet Different World, which performs "12345" through Saturday, lies in discovering the worldviews of very different and-in this case-very accomplished dance artists. Still, this program of five works by five choreographers was bound to be a mixed bag. So SPDW artistic director Joanna Rosenthal added a clever, efficient concept: "12345" consists of a solo, duet, trio, quartet, and quintet, presented in that order. Smart. There's a natural progression as each work brings a bit more energy to Links Hall's small space.

Ultimately "12345" gives the satisfying sense of wandering into an art studio and looking over the shoulders of the artists at their sketches, discovering how many ways there are to see and render the world.

Most intriguing about Eduardo Vilaro's solo "De Vuelta," created for SPDW in 2005, are the ragged edges around its swirling turns. Set to flamenco singing, it follows both lines of the music: its rapturous, swooning, self-involved revolutions and the way pain or doubt can bring them up short. Dancer Liz Jenkins seems at times to be attempting escape in a staggering run or kneeling creep forward, belly nearly to the ground. She never makes it. Instead she turns back, hands clasped behind her.

Liz Burritt's new duet "Chasm" is a blinding mix of hot and cold, funny and horrifying. The only piece on the program to use props-two chairs-it begins and ends with a face-off between a man and a woman. In between they brawl all over the stage, their gestures of reconciliation or sexual overtures inevitably met by hostile, often violent rejection. War is the only viable metaphor for this relationship, which consists of attacks and counterattacks, skirmishes and battles, in a conflict that will never end because the combatants are locked together by their love and the impossibility of connecting. The mood is lightened, a bit, by the performersâ?? sometimes bizarrely delivered lines: "Shut it!" "Hyp...o...crite." "Really?" "I need...to tell you..." Burritt's difficult choreography is superbly performed by Rosenthal and Charlie Cutler, who collaborated on the movement and who make these characters strong, witty, sexy, and heartbreaking.

A new trio by Paige Cunningham, "Lionize," is cool, spare, open, marked by stillness and carved motions. Dancers Adam Gauzza, Carrie Nicastro, and Christopher Tucker made me think of siblings who constantly shift into different triangular configurations, with two people helping the one in trouble. Or ganging up on the one who's out of line. Sometimes these are fine distinctions. Perfectly attuned to one another, at one point they embrace-and burst apart at precisely the same moment. Emotion comes unpredictably, as if by accident: when an elbow pulls back, it brings the hand across the mouth in a lingering touch full of sadness.

Ashleigh Leite's spiky 2008 quartet "I Live in Perfect" manages to express both aggression and severe restraint. The dancers (Gauzza, Jenkins, Nicastro, and guest Jon Sloven) sometimes look like they're performing Irish step-dance, their arms held motionless at their sides while they take great leaps. Drawn into a tight circle, the dancers reminded me of lab rats in a too-small cage, ready to run or attack. Collin Bunting's costumes suggest gladiators, blending what looks like leather with tie-died fabric, each one different yet echoing the others. Leite's own scritchy-scratchy sound design adds to the anxiety.

Rosenthal offers the Chicago premiere of an excerpted quintet from "Grey Noise," a piece inspired by film noir that she'll premiere next fall. She's got the body language-heightened and formalized-down pat. The excerpt opens with a duet between a predatory woman downstage and a man, tie loosened, who remains for a while in the shadows upstage, watching her. And she knows he's watching her. Connie Fagan perfectly captures the hawklike head jutting forward, the shoulders pulled back, of the woman who's always onstage, always preening, always on the make. When another woman and two more men enter the arena, alliances are made and broken with bewildering speed and ease. It's all a bit chaotic, and maybe that's the point, but seeing the entire piece might make the characters and their relationships clearer and more satisfying.

The subjects in "12345" may be bleak or dark, but I came away from Thursdayâ??s show refreshed by the serious attention these choreographers had given their subjects. Sometimes it helps to look long and hard, when the looking is good.

 

Dance Chicago

"Dance Chicago"

 

By Sid Smith:

Skeptics sneered when Dance Chicago announced plans to leave the Athenaeum Theater and traipse near and far, playing various venues, including some in the suburbs.

But the ragtag charms and come-as-you-are informality of the enterprise appear intact, judging from Sunday's Choreographers; Showcase at the Theatre Building. The 1 p.m. performance sold out, forcing hapless ushers to scurry to find seats for patrons as if filling a jet liner, and the wide array of short works on view, 13 in all, is a reminder of what the fest does best: Throw everybody into the mix--young, old, veteran, newcomer, fun-loving and soul-searching-- and see what results. To keep to two hours or so, the works have to be short, robbing them of involved development, but enforcing a brevity that many experienced choreographers might be advised to heed more often. Sure, some of these pieces are little more than flashy exercises. But, at their best, these offerings are tiny gems that force their creators to work with a kind of haiku-like discipline, one reason you're almost always surprised at the quality, imagination and variety.

At the top of Sunday's list would have to be Dane A. Campbell and his zany extravaganza, "Be Our Guest." Campbell's Full Effect Dance Theatre is a hip hop troupe, and there's plenty of urban style in this piece to make the point. But there are also campy injections, daffy shifts in mood and music, accommodating saccharine Broadway and classical strains alike, in a piece in which 14 dancers deliver and then some. Clad in finery and ruffles, hosting, seducing and finally tormenting a woman dressed up like a satiny Red Riding Hood, the ensemble is wickedly funny, furiously fast and ultimately unclassifiable. Anything goes, delightfully so.

The best thing about this showcase and Dance Chicago in general is the chance to discover choreographers and dancers you may not have seen before. Sunday's group of dance makers was a pretty impressive, consistently entertaining bunch. Elijah Gibson's artfully casual "Just Another Day..." for Inaside Chicago Dance is a seductive opener, the dancers ambling in from the side, the moves gradually erupting as if improvised, carefully timed to the bluesy score from Floris. It eases back and forth from slowness to speed. Gibson has a wicked eye for grace notes: Just as they exit, back to their seemingly informal group, one dancer jumps into someone's arms as a goodbye. This one cries out to be joined by a follow-up movement or two for what promises to be a nice original.

Paul Christiano showed up as dancer and dance maker. In "The Lesser Known," he offered a complex piece characterized by his love of sculptural configurations, the dancers at times transforming themselves into cluttered transportation machines, living jungle gyms that roll each other along. The imagery is moody and edgy--one dancer exits by standing at stage edge, pulled by her feet by another dancer offstage.

Sunday the work's cast included an assortment of great Chicago dance veterans, Cheryl Mann, Mari Jo Irbe and Francisco Avina among them. In contrast, the exuberant, speedy athletes in Forum Jazz Dance Theatre appear to be all of 15 years old, their youth a major weapon in the pep of Brent Caburnay's ferociously acrobatic "Down the Rabbit Hole" and Eddie Ocampo's sultrier, subtler "updraught."

Some offbeat pieces were especially effective. Joshua Blake Carter has an impish sense of ensemble orchestration, his "Moura-Sion" ripe with its own movement logic, its own choral rules and a genuinely unusual design. The eight dancers in this pick-up ensemble often form groups and dance contrapuntally, in opposition to other groups or to the interesting score combining Arnaldo Antunes, Tom Ze and Gilberto Assis.

Consistently speedy this year, even the best pieces sometimes suffered from ragged execution, not every moment in perfect choral union and here and there a spill or stumble. The stage is large enough, but in a theater sometimes too intimate for these mostly quick and sizeable pieces--they'd be better viewed from a greater distance. But, even in a new home, the Choreographers Showcase endures, an unusual, unusually compact survey of the breadth of Chicago talent eager and waiting in the wings.

River North Chicago Dance Company

"River North Chicago Dance Company"

 

By Laura Molzahn:

River North's 20th anniversary show, Saturday only at the Harris Theater, starred artistic director Frank Chaves. Not that he ever got up onstage, even to take a bow as the troupe's leader for the last eight years. In fact he goes back further: he and Sherry Zunker began sharing artistic direction of the company in 1994.

River North even survived being shoved center stage in 1993, when HMS Media's half-hour WTTW documentary brought hordes of the curious to the Harold Washington Library to see Zunker's "Reality of a Dreamer," also the title of the video. It's not always easy to maintain your profile after a thunderclap moment of success like that one. For this program Zunker reinvented that 1992 piece, set to slightly different music.

Chaves deserves props not only for his prolific production of vigorous new dances year after year but also for keeping the dancers and dancing in mint condition. This is one sexy troupe, and not just because they're ripped. Watching them, I realized how seductive it is to be in the hands of performers so perfectly in control.

They fight for that control in Chaves's newest work, "Forbidden Boundaries." Talk about making lemonade out of lemons: Chaves drew on his own experience with a serious spinal condition to create this piece asking, as he writes in the program, "why, when we know how, do we forbid ourselves to succeed, to grow, to change?" In this ensemble work, devoted mostly to duets, one dancer personifying that regressive psychic force holds the other back-by the shirt. Then they switch roles.

And the issue with control? The shirts are stretchy, twisting easily into ropes that suggest straitjackets or leashes as the caught dancers strain to get away. Telling and crucial as these props are, they also add a wacky, difficult variable to the partnering equation, as one dancer holds another at a precipitously leaning angle or pulls his partner into an unwanted embrace. The most alarming and passionate of the dance's four sections- "the trio "Hidden Truth," for two men holding a woman by her sleeves-heightens these challenges. And the dancers not only met but surpassed them. Tiny Lizzie McKenzie, whether flying through the air or falling to the floor at the mercy of her captors, was amazing, embodying the pain of having your life spin out of control.

The shirt wars run pretty much throughout "Forbidden Boundaries" but work best when the stage is less crowded. All the holding and leaning and the shirts themselves make the first section of "Forbidden Boundaries" rather muddy. That's not a problem in the section called "Harmony," when the performers dance separately and their flying shirts look like wings, and it's less a problem in the concluding section, which often showcases one or two duets at a time.

Chaves's duet "Sentir em Nos" ("Even for Us"), first performed earlier this year, held the evening's biggest erotic charge. Though "Forbidden Boundaries" pretty much sticks to unisex choreography, Chaves works well with sharply divided, even stereotypical sex roles. Here the man relentlessly manipulates the woman in fiendish choreography, tossing her around like a scarf or rolling her up his arms into a high lift. Michael Gross and Melanie Manale-Hortin made it all look not only easy but fun. That is, if you like your relationships seasoned with some conflict.

Traditional sex roles also dominate Chaves's signature ensemble piece, "Habaneras, the Music of Cuba" (2005), dedicated to his father. The dancing was beautiful, but there's too much of a muchness, with most of the six songs coming from the 50s and so many pretty arms and swirling skirts you'd swear you were watching a Latin number on "Dancing With the Stars." It's too bad that "Habaneras" comes across as stodgy given Chaves's obvious love for the Cuban music of his youth.

Zunker's remake of "Reality of a Dreamer," now called "Evolution of a Dream," replaces the original music=the Eurythmics' 1983 "Sweet Dreams" with cowriter Dave Stewart's new 2008 recording. Its oversweet orchestral opening made me long for the onstage amplified bass fiddle that made Zunker's original seem so raw and yearning. Also, though a few solos popped out here from the matrix of ensemble moves, I missed the original's star turn for Wilfredo Rivera, whose snaky moves heightened the piece's dangerous edge. But Zunker does know how to work the music's dramatic flourishes, and she has a gift for the well-placed neurotic tic.

Also on the program were Monique Haley's wild, funny "Uhuru," Chaves's elegant "Tuscan Rift," and "Beat," an improvised solo structured by Ashley Roland and performed here by the magnificent Christian Denice.

Anna Halprin/Anne Collod & guests: parades & changes, replays

"ANNA HALPRIN/ANNE COLLOD and GUESTS: "PARADES and CHANGES, REPLAYS""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

Who'd have thought that undressing, baring every square millimeter of flesh, could be the least interesting part of a performance? The three men and three women in "Parades & Changes, Replays" take off all their clothes three times (and put them back on twice) at the top of the show, and it gets pretty ho-hum.

Fortunately the rest of the 75-minute piece is more exciting. In fact Thursday's performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (shows continue Saturday and Sunday) revealed the lasting power of a celebratory dance firmly rooted in yet transcending the hippie ethos of 1965. Set to Morton Subotnick's percolating, murmuring electronic and pop score, "Parades & Changes, Replays" figuratively takes off all our clothes to uncover the wondering, playful, delightfully serious children we are underneath, clothed or unclothed.

That's all the more needed in a time when we're even more regimented, more guarded and fearful, more litigious and judgmental, than we were in the 60s.

Naturally this 45-year-old work has a backstory. Created by Anna Halprin, now 89, "Parades & Changes" was banned in New York in 1965 because of the nudity, then reincarnated 12 times through 1967. First revived in 2006, it attained its current form this year, when Halprin and French choreographer Anne Collod jointly edited out some of the original movement "scores" and decided on the arrangement of the remaining ones.

The scores give performers a road map but don't tell them specifically what to do, so they improvise. But don't think contact improv. Halprin was the originator of pedestrian movement and task- and prop-oriented performance, a fundamental influence on such Judson Church artists as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. As a result of this orientation, Halprin's performers can seem somewhat isolated from one another, disaffected, almost like automatons. Combine that affectless approach with the piece's methodical pace, and you can see why undressing could get boring. Even though each iteration is increasingly personal and sexual-gazes meet, actions mirror each other-the undressing-and-dressing sections remain chilly, not erotic behavior but a dissection of it.

Then all hell-or heaven-breaks loose. To the strains of Petula Clark's 1964 hit "Downtown," the naked dancers begin ripping up and tossing around huge sheets of butcher paper. Rising and falling over and over like a fountain of bodies, with the shreds of paper lifted up and wafting down over and over, the dancers look like kids playing in a leaf pile, and the paper rustling and crackling sounds like leaves. But, awash in golden light, the dancers also seem pagan gods and goddesses. When they finally clasp big armfuls of paper before them as if to armor their nakedness, they're like Adam and Eve leaving the Garden-to the strains of the Beach Boys' 1964 hit "The Warmth of the Sun."

The first half of "Parades and Changes, Replays" begins with austere clothedness and ends in this rapturous nudity. The second begins with the dancers half-dressed and ends in exuberantly excessive adornment.

Funny how erotic it is to be partially rather than completely undressed. When the dancers reappear in the second half, they're wearing tighty-whiteys, some kind of footgear, and little else. Studiously setting out brightly colored wooden platforms, which they later stomp on, they're not performing actions anyone would consider sexual, yet their unglamorous movements hold an erotic charge. So does their familiarity with one another when a dancer calls out another's name and they meet and embrace.

But the real payoff comes in the final section of "Parades & Changes, Replays." In another methodical process, each performer receives a big bag of...things, and lays them out in a line from back to front of the stage. These items include a huge wad of tulle, shoes, a fox pelt, a Mylar hood, transparent coiled tubes, knitted and furry hats, wading boots, a crowd-controlling velvet rope, a long-handled duster. Each dancer gets about ten of them, and-you guessed it-proceeds to play dress-up like a kid.

In Halprin's creation, the end of any given action is often in clear sight, yet you watch, fascinated, as it inexorably comes to pass. The conclusion isn't predictable, however-and I don't want to spoil it. Let's just say that a king and queen are crowned, becoming figures of awe, strange and monstrous mountains sprouting a huge variety of accessories, scepters, headgear, footwear. And then they venture forth.

Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago

"Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago's MOVE!"

 

By Sid Smith:

Philadelphia's innovative choreographer Rennie Harris is a bright light of contemporary dance, broadening its vocabulary and bringing in a street vernacular startling in urgency, but ingeniously interwoven into classic concert hall presentation.

"I Want You" is Harris' new piece unveiled at the Harris Theater over the weekend by Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago--an important commission by the troupe. This is a company that in some ways prizes entertainment above all else, and Harris doesn't disappoint. This relatively brief ensemble bash is irresistible fun from start to quick finish, so fast and seamlessly put together you hardly notice how many different street styles combine to achieve its magical effects. You'd have to be sound asleep not to like it, but the infectious energy and rousing, two-part score (consisting of selections by Vikter Duplaix and James Brown) aren't likely to let you dose off. Harris' vivid imagination and pure love of movement shimmers throughout this seductive piece for 10 dancers, rushing to its finish long before the audience is ready--an embodiment of the less-is-more rule choreographers all too often violate. At the end of this very likable Giordano troupe line-up, it almost plays like a dessert.

Harris devises two separate looks and moods, two distinct components that both get your feet stomping and hands clapping. The first, to the Duplaix, involves short-lived but intricate foot patterns that give an almost ballet-like muscle to the breezy pop moves. Buoyant and explosive already, the first section makes way for Brown's "Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved," a score that all by itself heightens the mood into one of soulful hyperspace. A work that starts out as quick enough thus segues into the explosive, a streetwise hoedown that literally keeps going, as if we're still right in the middle, through the falling of the final curtain. The Giordano troupe has a great time with this one, and so does the audience.

Two other works by dancemakers closer to home also got their premiere outings. Autumn Eckman's "commonthread" for only five dancers shows off pleasing dance design and festive showmanship. Label her promising. The original, melody-rich, invigorating electric fiddle score by Dan Myers and John Ovnik was played live on the side of the stage by Myers himself, and to this Eckman provides a quintet who move with sweeping, undulating grace and who team up in various combinations for very brief harmony--a quick duet formed within the larger group for a spell, for instance. It's an eye-catching arrangement she uses time and again, and yet sparingly, too, in that the come-togethers are so short. Blink and you almost miss them.

"Gravity," the third premiere, by company dancer Lindsey Leduc Brenner, is a straightforward romantic duet, danced with spark and an easy sensuality Friday by Craig Kaufman and Meredith Schultz. Underscored by Sara Bareilles, who informs us this is a couple who can't always get along but can't keep from each other, either, "Gravity" offers a pleasing tension heightened by at times what seems long periods in which the two dancers don't touch. This is love deferred, but eventually consummated, amorous and even giddy, if somewhat conflicted.

The revivals showcased work by key Giordano contributors, beginning with Jon Lehrer's "A Ritual Dynamic," flush with the talents of this former Giordano dancer who now runs his own Buffalo troupe. Though not my favorite work from Lehrer, I enjoyed "Ritual" more on this viewing, rich as it is with exotic combinations, including one choice construct wherein one dancer jumps into the arms of another, landing and held aloft as if the partner were her chair. Lehrer's smooth direction and logical movement flow includes the eerie, hypnotic tableau of dancers caught in a mysterious, spellbinding stillness.

"Move!," as the troupe labeled this engagement, also featured revivals of Tony Powell's "Rapture," a jazzy exploration of Steve Reich, and Brock Clawson's "Give and Take."

Lucky Plush Productions: Punk Yankees Project

"Lucky Plush Productions "Punk Yankees""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

In honor of her company's tenth anniversary, choreographer Julia Rhoads takes a mad gallop through dance history-her own, her dancers', and a century's worth of concert and pop dance. Well, she does narrow it down a bit: the pop is mostly recent, the concert mostly modern. We all have our niches.

Most dance troupes celebrate anniversaries with a grand sense of their importance. But as Thursday's opening of "Punk Yankees" made clear, Lucky Plush doesn't. Initially intrigued by the idea of sampling her own work, Rhoads moved on to consider the phenomenon of sampling generally, the concept and history of appropriation, and the theft of intellectual property. Sprawling beyond the bounds of her own creativity, she decided to pay tribute to the many artists who've shaped the shape-shifting art of dance, and hers in particular.

You don't have to be a dance scholar, though, to enjoy "Punk Yankees." There's a joke or comic surprise around every corner, and the piece is larded with high-tech gimmicks: onstage computer terminals, live-feed video, and helpful projections of all kinds. Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video plays side-by-side with Bob Fosse's "Mexican Breakfast" trio in its "Ed Sullivan Show" debut. When two performers mime and name-drop their way through a long line of dance greats, a thumbnail portrait of each one appears on the rear wall.

Rhoads and the other seven dancers talk a lot, seeming to chat off-the-cuff about what they're doing though in fact Rhoads wrote the texts. (It's a tribute to her writing and the performers' delivery that this talk seldom sounds scripted.) In some ways the 90-minute "Punk Yankees" is like an illustrated comic lecture, with the emphasis on "comic." Its attitude is fundamentally paradoxical, tongue-in-cheek, and subversive, cutting the ground out from under itself in successive moments. That list of dance icons, for example, concludes with "Lucky Plush Productions." Yet Rhoads seems to wink at the hubris of putting herself at the end of this long, illustrious lineage, even if it is her anniversary.

Some of the paradoxes might flow from Rhoads's ambivalence about the value of attribution. A good portion of "Punk Yankees" is almost compulsively devoted to naming names. Some sections of the piece are like lec-dems, with the dancers identifying the sources of phrases; and more than 50 sampled works are listed in the program, in addition to three social dances and four TV programs or films. But the final section undercuts the aspiration to give credit where credit is due: feverishly written efforts to attribute little snippets of the dancing devolve into phrases like "classic group melt" and "do-si-do."

Piling reference upon reference, image upon image, dance upon dance, "Punk Yankees" can feel as herky-jerky, as cluttered as our overloaded culture. Having the world at your fingertips, thanks to the miracle of technology, can be seductive. And "Punk Yankees" certainly capitalizes on that. But Rhoads also provides some respite from overload, in movement sections without text or visuals. Near the end, a string of feverish dances set to a brilliant mash-up of variations on Ravel's "Bolero" (by Yea Big, or Stefen Robinson) produces both anxiety and catharsis.

The intellectual sampling in "Punk Yankees" is definitely fun. But the fluctuations in feeling tone can be problematic. The lack of a single choreographic vision, of a single vocabulary, makes it difficult for emotion to develop. And usually the mood is lighthearted, so when it sinks into something deeper, as it does occasionally in the second half, we don’t know how to take it. At one point two dancers, piled atop each other, suddenly turn on the audience, asking what we're laughing at? This is serious, they say, appropriation is nothing but stealing the fruits of another's labor. Their indignation at copycatting seems genuine, even though one dancer consistently mimicks the other, speaking a split-second later.

The intriguing but faint undercurrent of anger in "Punk Yankees" is tied to issues of money and identity. Health insurance is briefly mentioned near the beginning-many dancers don’t have it, of course. And they're unlikely to get it in a culture that is less and less inclined to reward artists for what they produce.

Peter Carpenter

"Peter Carpenter "My Fellow Americans""

 

By Zachary Whittenburg:

Many scenes in Peter Carpenter's "My Fellow Americans" are as barren and dusty as the Santa Fe Trail. In fact, dancer Atalee Judy, enacting a series of cliched gunfight deaths from old Westerns, even fakes an echo as she makes the sound of a pistol's shot through clenched teeth like a boy playing Cowboys and Indians during the Eisenhower era. The paradox of this new dance theater work, as in all of Carpenter's pieces I've seen, is how the simplicity of its surface contains such a densely-packed mass of codes, references, suggestions and arguments. Becoming absorbed by the dances he makes is like reaching nonchalantly for a block of styrofoam to find out it weighs as much as an anvil.

Judy clues us in from the get-go, marching up to the front row to deliver a brief rundown of the elements of theatrical framing (Carpenter is concert dance's Charlie Kaufman), which segues into an a capella rendition of Tommy Womack and the Jambodians' "I Miss Ronald Reagan" that's first resistant, then gleefully submissive, to the song's twisted showbiz flair. Other frames are left for us to discover for ourselves, thankfully, par for Carpenter's course of assuming an audience's intelligence and engagement. The aforementioned medley of movie gunfights - many in hysterically-funny slo-mo - coyly teases out its jokes in a stunning crossfade with what might have been going on in Ronald Reagan's head as the Hollywood soldier suddenly found himself leader of the free world.

"My Fellow Americans" does not leave its politics to mystery, but certainly owns them outright: Lisa Gonzales' Schadenfreude-drenched monologue on Reagan's descent into Alzheimer's Disease acknowledges full-bodied the anger many still feel at the former President's reluctance to address the AIDS crisis. It's an order of magnitude more powerful than even the nastiest stabs at George W. Bush's dimwittedness; a lot of this 90-minute piece is born of true and profound pain and Carpenter does not mince around trying to hide it.

The gulf between politicians' and Hollywood's fantasies and the nightmares they're loath to address in public is the canyon through which Carpenter's cast hikes, looking for a way out of the legacy of Reagan's agenda not just as champions of more accepting alternatives but as humans in an emotional bear trap, existing on the business end of policies hostile to their values. Everyone involved in this production is on the same page about what it aims to accomplish, which gives its five performers (Carpenter, Gonzales and Judy in addition to an excellent Suzy Grant and Donnell Williams) the heft of a freight train. Williams sings, also a capella, Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" like he's carving its lyrics into his arm during detention. "There are plenty of ways you can hurt a man/and bring him to the ground" becomes a eulogy for over a million Americans, "But I'm ready, yes I'm ready for you/I'm standing on my own two feet" an impassioned declaration of resilience and survival. They're all chameleons, though: Williams sings these lines just minutes after a solo in patent platform stilettos and a rubber Reagan mask. Tonal shifts, though subtle, come quick.

A solo Carpenter dances in a single cowboy boot feels like the pit of this work, the seed from which it grew. I've seen it a couple times a la carte and certainly responded to it, but in context here its images - fragile, collapsing salutes, gasps for breath, the slicing arm swings of an "angel of death" - are indelible.

That there's humor at all in this show may be hard to believe, but it runs throughout and is buffed to a shine. Reciting lines from Reagan's First Inaugural Address, Gonzales takes cues from an imaginary Cyrano de Bergerac reminiscent of Miranda July's "The Co-Star" - she's side-splitting - and Grant's mugging during recordings of some of the late president's more indulgent corny jokes is just as devastating. Some moments, like a slow dance to Gershwin, reflect a plea for the maintenance of simple humanity, even if paired with violently-contrasting imagery almost out of frame. I could go on but I think I've made my point: "My Fellow Americans" is a superbly-executed, brilliantly-constructed piece of dance theater that, after a summer postponement, is finally being seen. Go.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago

"Hubbard Street Dance Chicago"

 

By Sid Smith:

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's relationship with hotshot Jorma Elo pays off nicely with an original work created for the company, a piece sporting the pun-tinged title "Bitter Suite," unveiled during the company's engagement that ended Sunday at the Harris Theater.

"Bitter" isn't, as it happens, an adjective that comes much to mind in this unusual, richly gestured work. Much of the time, the hands are as important here as the feet. The odd, perplexing mini-drama taking place among the eight dancers is often signaled by repeated flutters and jitters of their hands. A dancer begins the piece by igniting the choral tableau with barely perceptible hand signals, and thereafter follows frenetic, Keystone Kops interaction, bodies bouncing up and down, frantic graspings as if at invisible bugs, and all manner of strange interactions and sequences.

Interspersed with all this, and gradually taking over, are flowing moves of more classical dance, lifts, though here and there with a twist, for instance, but fast-moving and lyrical dance that is one reason Elo has been getting so much attention. A lot of this, however eccentric, is beautiful.

On a more basic level, "Bitter Suite" reveals Elo to be the musical maestro most choreographers in the end aim to be. Besides some music by Claudio Monteverdi, two crucial segments are set to Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, one of the great works of Western art. Not Beethoven's ninth symphony, maybe, but right up there, as melodic and exciting as it is a bear for any violinist taking it on. Significantly, Elo all but ignores its actual concerto form, in that only now and then does a single dancer represent or articulate the violin solos by him or herself. Elo instead employs the wondrously gorgeous music for a feast of choral dances, breathless ensemble work, some of it loving, some of it singular and startling, moving towards the music's galvanizing finish as if to a typical finale.

But then he doesn't end. He instead returns to a more mournful score and a kind of elegiac finish, a reprise of the cluttered chorale image of the opening, segueing to a haunting romantic embrace--perhaps one laced with that elusive bitterness of the title--for his ending. This all flirts with the essence of dance--movement that creates its own universe and touches us transcendently in ways that defy words or language.

It's not a perfect work and may well be revised. I overhead someone in the know suggesting he'd already made trims between Thursday's opening and Sunday's matinee, when I caught up with the piece at the Harris. But Hubbard has a nice, new solid showpiece for its arsenal, one it can proudly boast it launched, and Elo demonstrates again, with his relentless exploration of hands and arms and his sometimes intriguing originality with choral arrangement, that he is a choreographer hell-bent on looking different, on creating choreography that's unique and distinctive.

This engagement was a glowing and pleasing one all around. Alejandro Cerrudo's "Lickety-Split" always impresses with its speed and imagination. This time I noticed how beautiful and sweet it can be. No wonder so many of us took notice when he premiered it as his first work for the troupe--this is clearly something much richer than a dancer simply trying his hand at dance making. Sunday, it also gave Kevin Shannon, in key solos, his best moments since Doug Varone used him so smartly. He's not so much a showy dancer limned with spark, a la former Hubbard Streeter Jamy Meek. But he's an ineffably smooth and articulate one, a dancer who commands attention without a hint of look-at-me overkill. He anchored the troupe in a work that, no matter how often it's viewed, always delights, always seduces and always works, and can now be remembered as the one that launched the career of the troupe's first official resident choreographer.

Lucas Crandall's "The Set" is another Hubbard-grown work that's showing remarkable resilience, remarkable in that it's a comedy, and humor often fades quickly in dance. Once you know the gag, you lose interest. Here the comedy stems from a goofball Edwardian menage a trois made up of a man, a woman and a man in drag. What impressed me this third time around is the subtlety, shrewdness and craft Crandall manages in the choreography itself--kicky riffs on ballet, ballroom and general movement that energize the humor, just as the humor almost naturally leads to the dance. That nifty synthesis is what makes "The Set" a true tour de force, recalling the heydays of Pilobolus, the Trocks or even Lotte Goslar. These are laughs unique to dance, from the way she kisses a hand and wipes it on the clothing of another to the silky way a swinging leg leads to comic disaster.

"Jardi Tancat" (Penny Saunders, among a solid ensemble, riveted my attention yet again) remains one of the best works from Europe the troupe has acquired, unimpeachable evidence of the power and majesty of Nacho Duato. Please, Hubbard, if possible, bring us more of his work.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company

"Merce Cunningham Dance Company"

 

By Zachary Whittenburg:

Art's treasure is its immortality, a constancy with which it communicates with generations past, present and future. Assuming responsible custody of the work, one doesn't just look at a painting or sculpture, but through its creator's eyes. That thought was on my mind as I watched one of four sold-out shows by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Columbia College's Dance Center - having passed away at 90 in late July, my focus was as much on the choreographer as on Chicago Event 1, which I saw Saturday afternoon before a large painting and silkscreen by Robert Rauschenberg.

Just thirteen dancers were the medium through which I experienced Cunningham's visions of movement, who transferred images from microscopic to epic. Striding into place in darkness, the lights rose on an asymmetrically-arranged ensemble that looked ready to begin George Balanchine's "Serenade" but, as dancers began moving an equal number would exit - we were shown the potential of scale but told unequivocally we would wait to experience its heft. The fluidity with which Cunningham's Events - montages of excerpts from throughout his career - fuse duets into quartets and new into old testifies not only to his unparalleled hand at composition but the cohesiveness of his ouevre. I'm not familiar enough to know when I was watching a sextet from 1960 or a group dance from 1993, but it didn't seem to matter; Cunningham's journey as an artist shows logic both linearly and fractally.

And musically: Columbia College Associate Chair and professor Richard Woodbury collaborated with MCDC's music director Takehisa Kosugi on a score for Chicago that was a sonic triptych of construction. Sounds in the first third suggested arrangement and preparation of tools, intensely-visual clankings and rustlings in advance of some grand project built from parts collected throughout a lifetime. As Chicago Event 1 continued, Woodbury and Kosugi moved the frame onto this contraption's sputter into life, the 75-minute piece closing on the static and whirring of its self-aware function (which included Woodbury accompanying the dancers live, his keyboard notes run through software blending it with the pre-composed component). Their work wasn't to everyone's taste but I thought it both beautiful and appropriate, and lengthy pauses of silence showed a willingness to include the absence of sound- beloved by Cunningham's partner John Cage - as a key element.

It's hard to believe the extent to which chance operations figured into Cunningham's dancemaking: his works contain moments of such poetry one almost has to conclude that surrender to life's randomness is the only entree to the divine. One section for four dancers without a shred of unison felt cohesive regardless; in the same way Jean-Paul Gaultier combines plaids, paisleys, polka dots and pinstripes in inexplicable harmony, so Cunningham took phrases of movement sharing no discernable common qualities and, with the intangible similarities bleeding through, showed why so many painters and visual artists felt a bond with his work.

Other moments displayed the unreal technical standard of the last generation to be coached by Mr. Cunningham: memorably, three loping runs by a duet hand-in-hand fell between their en l'air turns off one foot, one 180? and the other 540?. After three more runs they'd do it again, swapping the degree of their rotations. I fell in love with the sound of their landings: when his choreography calls for jumps, they go straight up and straight down- there's no disguising the truth of a body's weight. Chicago Event 1's only lengthy solo was danced by Andrea Weber, and it displayed another intruiging aspect of Cunningham's work. Architectural and abstract as it is, you can see (especially at a venue as intimate as the Dance Center) the fallible, fatigued body fighting within the pure structures of theory's constructions. I was mesmerized by Weber's trembling muscles - they became a thousand symbols of the gulf between modernism's idealism and human limitations. Of the rest of the spectacular ensemble, kudos go to Rashaun Mitchell and Jennifer Goggans, although all made an impression.

Chicago Event 1 ended in finale form. Proudly and joyfully, all thirteen dancers swept around the stage before their humble bow and well-deserved standing ovation. Cunningham's work is alive, perhaps more than ever, and his eyes will see as long as it is faithfully staged and performed.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

"Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna "Three Solos and a Duet""

 

By Zachary Whittenburg:

In discussing Mikhail Barsyhnikov, one must get a few superlatives out of the way: legendary, brilliant, sublime -- those kinds of words. In a bespoke solo like Alexei Ratmansky's "Valse Fantasie," for example, a soft stride across the floor to toy with an imaginary reflection required almost no exertion, but his tuned balance of precision and humanness in this opening pantomime instantly re-proved the volumes of experience and praise that followed him onstage.

This deft and enjoyable work gave us Mr. Baryshnikov in an ultralight alloy of the heavy metals he's danced throughout his career. Shades of his storied Albrecht and Basilio are blended with the sexy sass of the Tharp years and the command of sculpture he demonstrated in moderns like Paul Taylor's "Aureole." To Mikhail Glinka's oft-choreographed B-minor Valse-fantaisie, itself quintessential, a set of softly-twisted airborne shapes and witty musicality gave both Ratmansky and Baryshnikov something to do, which isn't to dismiss "Valse Fantasie" but to say that the history of dancemaking is built upon these little leaps and gestures and to combine them intelligently is really all there is. It was danced to perfection.

The other custom-built solo on the program, Benjamin Millepied's "Years Later," struck an equally-light note but was no less intriguing. Melodies for Saxophone Philip Glass originally wrote for a production of Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love provided ample opportunities for the dancer to whip through off-axis tours en l'air and unique combinations of jumps punctuated with Glass' jazzy honks. Baryshnikov is dancing in front of a projection of himself, first in the same material in contrapuntal arrangement, then in archival footage of himself as a preposterously-talented Latvian teen. Much of the counterpoint is played for laughs -- filmmaker Asa Mader loops the young Misha for an endless pirouette while the man onstage waits -- but "Years Later" is shot through with real melancholy. Baryshnikov moves toward and away from the projector, casting a shadow alternately larger and smaller than his younger self. One can (and should) dance for their entire life, but meeting the demands of classical ballet is a different story.

Mats Ek's choreography, though, is what gave this evening the meat to match its dancers' skill. The Swedish artist casts people as constantly cycling through violently-opposed states: shaking in bizarre fits of madness, blooming from within for moments of heavenly beauty, and pausing for repetitions that suggest both compulsive habit and core motivation. His wife, Ana Laguna, danced an excerpt from "Solo for Two" I've seen before but never done with such bravery; it haunts us the way a mostly-unseen other (Baryshnikov) haunts her. She mistakes a shoe for a telephone and looks for someone through binoculars that are only her hands, wraps her long grey ponytail around her neck and blows her nose on her skirt. Filed in between are gorgeous tosses of limbs and aching stillnesses. To breathe such life into images of sadness is to be redeemed from it -- Laguna's breathtaking performance was a lesson in humility.

Ek made "Place" for Laguna and Baryshnikov in 2007, which could be framed as the relationship Laguna reminisces in "Solo for Two." It opens finding them fused together with unison dancing and close proximity, but they're soon drifting into separate agendas, a pair of solos that take place on two different planets. Before Laguna's, she picks up the pale green rug, something between Neoprene Astroturf and whale skin, and covers Baryshnikov with it. His takes a fascinating detour into the stylized folk rituals of Nijinsky and has him hammering on a table like Liszt at a keyboard (both with his hands and his head). Flaskkvartetten's music, Erik Berglund's lighting and Peder Freiij's decor make the host space a rapidly-shifting set of conditions and Laguna and Baryshnikov's interactions with it only amplify the tenuousness. Joy is included in the entropy, though: the two run as though through a field and in place atop a hill of their own making, holding each others' waists and flirting knowing each others' turn-ons. Both of their pelvises continuously roll around in a primal springtime. "Place" is a complex work for two incredibly complex artists -- in addition to an unforgettable night of theater, the evening as a whole was a profound celebration of maturity in a youth-obsessed era.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

"Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company "Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray""

 

September 17 and 19 at 8 p.m. at Ravina Festival

By Laura Molzahn:

For two years, choreographer-writer-director Bill T. Jones lived with Abraham Lincoln in his head-plus Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and the King James Bible. The occasion? The Ravinia Festival commissioned a work celebrating the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth.

Thursday's world premiere of "Fondly Do We Hope ... Fervently Do We Pray" (to be performed again Saturday at Ravinia) honored all those voices-and others. But I wasn't sure I could discern Jones's voice. The very generosity of his approach undermines it: he's thrown in every high-minded kitchen sink in the book and failed to shape and present his own vision. I don't mind postmodern; I loved Jones's "Chapel/Chapter" and, long ago, his "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land." But there's a tipping point into chaos, and Jones has reached it here.

Too often the visual and aural components compete. A circular scrim, beautiful in itself, opens and closes indiscriminately and serves as a screen for projected images. Several columns appear, disappear, and are moved about for mysterious reasons. A downstage promontory into the audience isolates certain performers from the main stage while video screens at either side of the stage sometimes capture the action, sometimes not. Voiceovers and an onstage narrator alternate or vie with the musician-singers, performing a variety of traditional and commissioned music, onstage or just off the stage. The dancers often seem buried under words: song lyrics, poetry, texts by Jones and others. Few silent, quiet, humorous, or rollicking moments energize the intellectual proceedings.

Two of the nine sections in particular blast us with information. "Biographies" offers bare-bones facts, not only about Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln but about various unnamed American citizens (though one suggests Jones), white and black, born at different times. Though a few quirks and beliefs are mentioned, these recitations come across as insultingly brief and pedantic, especially since the anonymous "characters" fade later. "Debates/The Boil That Bursts" features a shouting match by several speakers-vehement assertions of their rights and opinions, delivered quickly and staged so it's difficult to see who’s speaking. It's nearly impossible to tell what each is saying, much less digest it or compare it to the others' claims.

Jones also makes some counterintuitive emotional choices. The dancer playing Lincoln is short, slight, and blond, and his soft leaps and turns suggest ethereality. Only in one silent solo does his otherworldliness work: when he collapses over a column that's been toppled, he is unmistakably spiritually wounded. Jones's anchor for grief-over the war, the loss of Lincoln-is the famously unstable Mary Todd Lincoln. Her mental problems and laudanum addiction preceded Lincoln's death, but here she's a rock, especially in a late scene when she appears in full mourning. The relationship Jones depicts between a black man and woman, whose duet echoes one between Lincoln and his wife, is far more resonant and emotional than the First Marriage.

A few elements do unify the work, including train sounds that evoke, as Jones explains in a program note, the folk legend of a "spectral train" said to depart Washington every April. Much more pivotal-and moving-is Jones's repetition, three times, of Whitman's seemingly exhaustive inventory of bodily parts in "Poem of the Body." For the first repetition, recited by a childish voice at the top of the show, a tall black woman performs graceful movements that seem to celebrate dance and the body. But the inventory also suggests a slave on the block (human auctions figure elsewhere in Whitman's poem), and the second repetition makes that interpretation all too clear, even including the crack of a whip. But the third repetition is enriching: it adds violent, torturous actions (made familiar to us by Abu Ghraib) to the litany of body parts.

Among the resonant movement motifs is the motion of clasping the hands behind the back, which can convey the bound arms of a slave or the relaxed confidence of a great man strolling. That one action, performed in different ways, reinforces the idea that there's a fine line between forced servitude and the freedom to act and create. It's the single greatest leveling device in a piece that aims to celebrate democracy and the good, if divided, intentions of American citizens.

Speaking of democracy: the program oddly omits certain credits. It cites commissioned composers Jerome Begin, Christopher Lancaster, and George Lewis Jr. and all ten writers. But the musicians aren't credited, and no dancer is named, much less credited with his or her part. No set designer is mentioned (I suspect it was Jones's longtime collaborator, Bjorn G. Amelan). Included, though, is a dense two-page essay from dance scholar Suzanne Carbonneau telling us exactly what to think about the piece.

The Waking Room

"Khecari Dance Theatre "The Waking Room""

 

By Laura Molzahn:

The genius-and challenge-of Jonathan Meyer's new piece (running this weekend, then next Wednesday through Saturday at the Co-Prosperity Sphere) is how thoroughly it creates and inhabits its own world. It's not fun to be in "The Waking Room" because it forces the viewer, like the three characters, into a space that feels infantile, crazy, or both. It’s not fun, but it is a tight, efficient, uniquely enlightening journey into the elemental.

Ever wonder what it's like to be the twitchy guy on the corner talking to himself? Watch this and you'll have a pretty good idea. But let's be honest: all on our own, even without this piece of dance theater, we can enter the grip of mind-altered moments: drunkenness, rage, paranoia, unbearable anxiety. In "The Waking Room" we're not entering a new and unfamiliar house. We're returning to a nightmarish place that used to be, or maybe still is, home.

To create the movement, Meyer stripped away the control that we usually exercise over impulsive motions responding to a possibly threatening environment. The recorded and live score, composed and performed by Christopher Preissing, is an overwhelming, layered barrage of found and manipulated sounds, some fleetingly recognizable: children's voices, a tolling bell, train noises, a melody played on a toy piano. But sometimes it just sounds like a house falling down around you, complete with crashing pots and pans, forever.

Though the movement is choreographed and exquisitely performed by the dancers, it tends to look involuntary. Spasms produce whirling leaps: the dancer looks like he's been caught up in a tornado, except that his hands and head twitch with a life of their own instead of just whipping around the torso. Unlike the usual movement motifs, the ones here are undancerly, disturbing: simian walking, fidgeting, arching the back as if seized by searing pain. Nearly every moment makes stability and control precarious, gifts that can be lost. The occasional vocalizing (there is no text) consists of yips, yells, gasps, squawks.

The structure of the hour-long piece comes from subtle shifts in the relationships between the characters. Michel Rodriguez and Meyer are at first dominated by Philip Elson, who seems older and much more controlled and controlling. But by the end the two "boys" appear to sit in judgment on the older man, who devolves into a kind of pain the boys don't seem to know.

The shifts in dominance are expressed most powerfully when the characters interact. As painful as it can be to watch each individual's lonely tics and spasms, it's worse when they touch. In one early sequence, Elson approaches Rodriguez with stealthy touches that might be tender but that verge into coercion. Later Elson calms the manic Meyer by placing a hand on his head, then forces him to the floor. By the end, though, a tableau in which Elson "comforts"-and subordinates-the two boys suddenly reverses emotional direction. In the moving final scene, the older man simply sits alone and stares, just once closing his eyes and slowly shaking his head.

Each dancer has a very different physicality from the others. Elson generally stares in a threatening or predatory way, or he looks bored and languishing, held upright by his cane. He’s the character most likely to give in to gravity, to slither and list. Meyer often closes his eyes or flicks them sideways; his violent motions seem to originate from within. By contrast Rodriguez seems both freer and more alert to the world outside himself. At one point he sits rigid, turning his head birdlike, maybe tracking bugs with his gaze-when he suddenly stands, it's from the force of his looking, not his volition.

Strong design helps create the world of "The Waking Room." Iris Bainum-Houle's fussy, frothy costumes (based on the decadent Incroyables of postrevolutionary France) contrast sharply with the blank-slate gallery setting and Christopher Furman's sleek kinetic sculptures of bird wings and human heads. Though unlike, both designs are distancing, creating an otherworldly place-an effect enhanced by Julie Ballard's harsh, highly directed and dramatic lighting.

Dance for Life Chicago

"Dance For Life"

 

By Laura Molzahn:

Dance for Life has always been a hybrid beast-part high-energy bash, part earnest AIDS fund-raiser, part showcase for Chicago dancers and choreographers, who donate their time. At Saturday's sold-out 18th annual show, host Dean Richards brought the fun, prancing out in full disco regalia, including a shoulder-length wig and red sequined jumpsuit. Mark Ishaug, president of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, brought the passion in a speech branching out from supporting HIV/AIDS care to lobbying for general health care reform.

And the dancing? A little too much party, I'd say, and not quite enough professionalism.

Especially at the beginning of the evening. The curtains parted to reveal the Liberace-esque opening tableau of "It's Harrison," the new piece directed by Harrison McEldowney: two beautiful young men posed dramatically, draped in red circus silks flowing from the ceiling. (They reminded me of a postcard I got once, showing a handsome blond draped strategically in Grecian style and labeled "fashion victim.") Later oodles of dancers-I caught bharata natyam, flamenco, tap, ballet, ballroom, and Irish step-joined the two skilled aerial performers and jumbled together their chosen art forms, all set to the unlikely accompaniment of Neil Diamond's "Soolaimon."

At least host Richards got laughs. No one laughed at this Bollywood/Vegas extravaganza, which didn't seem to have much perspective on itself. Michael Jackson impersonator Enrico Hampton, who came on next and fell short of leggy grace, didn't help the opening mix.

Unfortunately, they set the stage for Same Planet Different World, a small company new to DFL who performed Shapiro & Smith's moving, subtle 1989 sextet, "To Have and to Hold." Time was when AIDS activists didn't shy away from death and grieving, but the new tack seems to be uplift. The company performed only an excerpt from the piece, and it chopped off the dance's devastating ending. Preceded by a section of leavetaking that suggests death, it slows the action: dancers lie beneath the three benches onstage, lightly touching and disturbing the "sleepers" on top. Without the ending, "To Have and to Hold" is an enjoyable but rather pointless exercise in soft, tumbling, wavelike choreography that obscures individual identity to create a constant flux of human relationship and interaction.

The Joffrey Ballet's contribution was a masked solo, "Aria," well danced by Matthew Adamczyk. The white mask is soon doffed, but Val Caniparoli's controlled, pretty choreography doesn't bring the "real" person behind it to life. Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago performed Jon Lehrer's upbeat, athletic "A Ritual Dynamic," which for regular dancegoers has been somewhat overexposed in the last year. This fourth performance was not the best I've seen-the work is most satisfying when the dancers hit precisely on the beats of the heavily percussive score. Fortunately the hopping from side to side, which resembles a whole fleet of downhill racers speeding toward us, was perfect.

After intermission, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's resonant "Jardi Tancat" ("Enclosed Garden") brought back the quiet, intense feeling of "To Have and to Hold." Created in 1983 by Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato and set to recorded folk music sung by Maria del Mar Bonet, "Jardi Tancat" surges with repressed passion. Bare wooden sticks set the limits of a barren plot, consign the six dancers to a corner of the stage, and define the worldview of those whose existence is bound by sky and earth. But not completely. The movement is sometimes literally back-breaking: shoulders hunch and the dancers bend at the waist, planting and harvesting. Then, just before the end, three duets turn loss and confinement into love, freedom, and joy. Unexpected low-flying turns and lifts follow the lines of the fluid, deep, yet somehow lighthearted singing.

Company member Monique Haley choreographed the entry by River North Chicago Dance Company-and this relative newcomer shows promise. Her "Uhuru," set to lively percussive music by Akoyo Afrobeat, is so hurried it makes you want to laugh; it registers as upbeat but without the least straining or pretension. Rat-a-tat sassy moves-twitchy hips, uh-huh chest motions, macho strutting with arms flying-come across as sexy but don't take themselves too seriously, while a male solo near the end is seriously sensual. And ends in the blink of an eye. Darn.

Randy Duncan's new "Let It Be" closed the program with a space-filling piece for 18 dancers from ten companies. I'm sorry to say that the pallid choreography couldn't stand up to the music, a gospel rendition of John Lennon's "Let It Be" that had, if anything, a tad too much emotion, wringing its metaphorical hands over certain lines. But it was undeniably powerful. Duncan's choreography, too often reminiscent of Alvin Ailey, simply flowed around its edges.

Chicago Dancing Festival

"Chicago Dancing Festival"

 

By Zac Whittenburg:

It may only be in its third year, but the Chicago Dancing Festival has quickly risen to significance on the summer dance calendar. Wendy Whelan, the New York City Ballet principal recently f?ted in Vail with a gala celebrating her career, performed Thursday evening at the Harris in "After the Rain," a work by Christopher Wheeldon created in honor of her gifts. Over four free evenings, three of which I attended, the festival brought an impressive spread to the table and a survey of American dance as provocative as it was engaging.

Tuesday, a "New Voices" program presenting recent works by choreographers currently making national rounds was a seductive kickoff. Calling Robert Battle a new kid on the block may at this point be a stretch but his "Train" (2008), created for River North Chicago Dance Company, is nonetheless a work that feels fresh, lean and exciting, especially in the hands of dancers like Hanna Brictson, Clayton Cross and Monique Haley. Trey McIntyre can hit or miss but "Just," a willfully unusual quartet performed by Oregon Ballet Theatre, is better than much of his repertoire at communicating both his encyclopedic background and musician's ear. With nods to Balanchine black-and-whites and plotless MacMillan, this work finds McIntyre following clues scattered throughout a century of modern ballet into rich anterooms of his own creation; the accompanying suite of short pieces by Henry Cowell obviously sparked his imagination. "Ah! Crudel," a duet by Aszure Barton performed by her sister Cherice and James Gregg, had a simplicity and conviction the evening would have been monotonous without -- to a Handel aria sung by Ren?e Fleming, Barton and Gregg dipped toes into each other's personal space across and atop a plain black table. Witty and light but suggestive of psychological domination and sweet revenge, the scene's potential was teased out to maximum effect, blessedly minus a pat conclusion. Less successful was Jessica Lang's trivial "To Familiar Spaces in Dream," although Richmond Ballet's four men, strong and mutually aware, kept this overlong ballet and its gimmicks as alive as they could ever be.

"Modern Masters," Thursday at the Harris, brought the week its core moments. Whelan and Sebastien Marcovici danced "Rain" with unwavering focus; Whelan's legendarily-refined technique and inhuman facility was effectively concentrated upon the ballet's symbolic minimalism, however short of her talent Wheeldon's creativity falls. Another duet, from William Forsythe's "Slingerland" (2000), found its interpreters (Aspen Santa Fe Ballet's Katherine Eberle and Sam Chittenden) giving it in every way the performance it deserved. A portion of Gavin Bryars' first quartet for strings reaches an apex at which a single chord is drawn out to a raw scream and the dancers, writhing until this point in restless heat, slow for the pregnant tension of a simple promenade. Eberle (in a golden potato chip tutu) and Chittenden were both physically and psychically connected, their movements near-perfect in both execution and intent. Lar Lubovitch's relentlessly-casual men's trio "Little Rhapsodies," impeccably done by Jonathan E. Alsberry, Attila Joey Csiki and Jay Franke felt, for all its finesse of form, like a trifle. Lubovitch, co-founder with Franke of the festival itself, is a master craftsman, utilizing an array of compositional tools without leaning on any too heavily, but his vocabulary tends to look more repetitive than it actually is and the attitude is never far enough from blas? (a second work of his was slated for Saturday's program but was scrapped due to dancer injury). Local representatives Luna Negra Dance Theater and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago are entering their fall seasons in great shape; less so the Joffrey Ballet, who in Robbins' "In The Night" Thursday offered little above an appearance (Edwaard Liang's "Age of Innocence," faring better on Tuesday, seems to have been given priority).

Most will judge the festival by "Celebration of American Dance" at the Pritzker Pavilion, for although the Harris was packed both nights, those audiences combined don't approach the mass of fans that filled the amphitheater above Saturday evening. The night's purest and best dancing came from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell in Ailey's "Cry" and Cory Stearns of American Ballet Theatre who, in the pas de deux from Le Corsaire, was as understated and elegant as his partner Isabella Boylston (a last-minute replacement) was choppy and standard. Boylston and the women of Houston Ballet (dancing another Forsythe piece, 1996's "The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude") share a common affliction: Noncommital port de bras sorely lacking structure and poetry. Forsythe dancer Noah Gelber has said the piece is about "reinstating every bit of expertise and differentiation in classical ballet that has been lost over the years -- all the niceties and eccentricities." Nothing in "Vertiginous" was beyond this quintet's skill level, but conceptually they missed the point.

Excitement and anticipation surrounded the Chicago Dancing Festival this year, and for good reason: Attendance shows interest, and this city is filled with people curious about and receptive to pure dance who now have an annual opportunity to take the industry's temperature and discover great work. That it's made free and accessible to all sweetens the deal immeasurably, and the program's inclusion of local venues' calendars is a kind, community-minded touch. Stage-filling collaborators from Chicago Human Rhythm Project and D.C.-based Step Afrika! gave a rousing, syncopated opening to the evening and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company performed Ulysses Dove's "Vespers" with sincerity and abandon. Show closers Les Ballets Grandiva, an all-male ballet troupe from New York, were an odd choice of finale -- I'm not sure their slapstick riff on Balanchine's "Stars and Stripes" is as effective for those unfamiliar with the 1958 ballet, but watching a man dressed as a drum majorette survive a few dozen fouett?s in front of the equivalent of a small town does induce a certain kind of patriotism.

Spring Awakening

"Spring Awakening"

 

By Sid Smith:

Some friends who saw "Spring Awakening" in New York consider Bill T. Jones' choreography for the Broadway hit, which opened Tuesday at Chicago's Oriental Theatre, the weakest element of the show.

I'd argue the reverse. Jones' crafty, subdued, intelligently minimalist and anti-Broadway contribution achieves its goal and does its job better than the score by Duncan Sheik or the book by Steven Sater, who also wrote the lyrics. "Spring Awakening" is a rock musical adaptation of a 19th-Century succes de scandal by Frank Wedekind, ahead of its time in explicitly tackling teen sexuality and outmoded societal repression. Wedekind's play bluntly foreshadows the sexual revolution of the 20th Century. The musical marries that lustful rebellion with the different but related one embedded in rock and roll. Presley wasn't just a musical pioneer. He was adored--and condemned--as Elvis the Pelvis.

Sheik and Sater deserve great credit for the idea here and the slickness of the execution. This is Broadway as intelligent and challenging, a different universe from the likes of "Legally Blonde: The Musical," "Wicked" or "Hairspray." Following a handful of students in a small town in Germany in the 1890s, the musical graphically explores hetero sex, gay sex, sexual abuse and even S & M, the latter courtesy of a wholesome girl who craves to be whipped. Sheik's score isn't bad--it just tends, number after number, to be somewhat repetitive, similar melodies based in the same rock balladeer mode. Jones' job was to come up with movement that somehow fit into all this, and movement turns out to be the perfect word. This is a downtown, gestural approach, not a Great White Way, razzmatazz one. He imposes limits and employs the spare results for poetic signals. A key motif involves the youngsters repeatedly rubbing their own bodies, from shoulders to chests to groins. It's a sensual self-caress that's both startling, rhythmic accompaniment and imagistic evocation of hormonal rage.

The motif reaches apogee in a raucous number in Act II fearlessly titled "Totally Fucked." By this point, the most energetic choral dancing of the show, the hand-over-body exercise takes on a speed and hysteria of victims of hives seeking relief. But it's all done with hands, the footwork largely irrelevant.

Some of the minimalism may well be a virtue born of necessity. The excellent cast members appear to be singer-actors who dance rather than dancers first. Still, Jones concocts a crafty spell via tiny moves employed for major effect, starting with a bit in the show's opening, where a lone woman among the row of singers begins to stomp her foot in that signature driving gesture of the rock singer at the mike, joined eventually by another woman or two. This is rock superfluity transubstantiated and coalesced into symbol, foot-stomping not just as revelry, but as an expression of repression, anger and libidinal fury.

Later, when the young men are clustered in chairs in a way that evokes a classroom--there's not really any scenery on the show's mostly bare stage--the foot stomping returns to create a sense of ensemble harmony, the barest nod to the notion of a chorus.

In a key love scene, wherein a casual conversation turns into hand-holding, Jones injects the simplest of dance forms and moves. In one brief phrase, the girl falls away and her partner quickly grabs her back, a ballroom idyll so brief you miss it if you blink. And yet the image lingers, the mood established, choreography condensed to telegraphic signals.

Maybe there is too little choreography. Fans of Jones' other work may well feel cheated.

But his work here won him a Tony Award while avoiding the superficial flash that plagues so much Broadway output today. By standing back and serving the piece, resisting the imposition of a jarring style that commands its own attention, he harkens back to an old Broadway tradition that began with "Oklahoma!" and hit pay dirt in "West Side Story," in which the separate arts of the American musical come together and unify for a whole as unique as its parts.

Excavation of Remains

"Breakbone Dance Co. "Excavation of Remains""

 

By Zachary Whittenburg:

Being in the presence of death -- even just thinking about it -- induces in people behavior radically different than theirs is in any other circumstance. Profound mystery and the ultimate end lead many to become erratic or inappropriate, not to mention uncomfortable. Something of this common reaction seems to have come over Atalee Judy's newest work Excavation of Remains: In the face of death, its announced subject matter, it hurries and flinches, laughs nervously and shifts in its seat. A powerful, unique work might be excavated from within this material, but in present form it illuminates neither its performers nor the (mostly) real-life characters they portray.

Seven subjects who have passed on are resurrected by Breakbone's equal number of dancers; a motley crew, they range from relatives (Nikki DiGioia-Stachon plays her Italian nona) to pop-cultural icons (Suzy Grant as "Mama" Cass Elliott) to the semi-obscure deceased of local interest (Atalee Judy's runner felled by heat in the 2007 Chicago marathon is a character based on Chad Schieber). Each narrative appears rougly twice, but more to hammer home points made the first time out than to finish or deepen their initiations. Curiouser, the moments of death themselves when reenacted, the points upon which Excavation of Remains' entire raison d're rests, pass in an instant and whichever dancer acts out the demise is only momentarily still. Then, it's pop back on your feet and we're off and (literally) running into the next vignette, not unlike the way children "die" when playing Cops and Robbers: Death is no fun! Let's get back to our game.

In the end, it's the absence of surprise that aborts what this work could have been, for what will death be for any of us but the biggest surprise of our lives? The dancers enter the space in t-shirts emblazoned with cold descriptors of fatality ripped from their autopsy reports: "Cancer," "Cardiac Arrest," "Suicide." Supine with toe tags hanging from their feet, their first gesture is a gasp in unison into their awareness of the afterlife. In short order there's pat chatter about how each met their end that their shirts have already made unnecessary. And it's a shame, because this is a talented group of dancers that doesn't get nearly enough opportunities to show it. A prologue and epilogue -- both pure-dance ensemble constructions -- are compelling, engaging examples of fresh composition in the vein of Bill T. Jones and Marie Chouinard.

Billed as "darkly comedic," jokes do abound in this piece. A recurring character is Judy in a smashing tuxedo subtly bedazzled with a skeleton as game-show-host challenging Suzanne Dado to choose her emotions as if bidding on a Showcase Showdown. But too often they're simply not funny and, in the case of Mama Cass' arch nemesis -- a giant, incredible ham sandwich costume -- the punchline's historical inaccuracy isn't forgiven by clear-enough signals that the error is intentional.

I may have said quite recently that I didn't mind an evening of dance not touching upon its purported subject. I don't mean to contradict that statement but I do believe something about choosing to make art about death changes the situation somewhat. And Excavation of Remainsis no interminable failure: Besides the aforementioned solid-if-seldom dancing, there's an impressive rethinking of the usually-hidden but lovely theater at Hamlin Park, nice integration of video (by Carl Wiedemann), and what I hope will spread like the flu -- a completely waste-free audience experience. Wooden tickets will be repurposed for subsequent shows and the program info is available online and in the lobby as opposed to on paper. One can't shake the feeling, though, that this work is but a fraction of what it could and should have been.

Jazz Dance World Festival

"Jazz Dance World Festival"

 

By Zachary Whittenburg:

Jazz Dance World Congress opened the performance series of its sixteenth occurrence with a new documentary by Pedro Brenner that pays tribute to the program's founder, Gus Giordano. Reverence for the choreographer understandably permeates the festival's atmosphere -- the company he founded hosts the series and is the only one to appear on all four bills -- but the singular and oft-imitated style he coined has already given way to a plurality of forms that belies the title of the occasion. Last night, seven companies from around the world raised the question of where exactly "jazz dance" is and how long it might identifiably be around. Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago are unparalleled as gala openers: Of weaponized sincerity and generous energy, the 20-member group of drummers and dancers presented a staged version of tomak aGuinean dance of freedom, that drew the house into a collective state of readiness to experience movement (comprised largely of young hopefuls, the audience's anticipation of this concert was palpable). They're no more a jazz dance company than Toyota is, but Muntu's fluid unison of spirit in Drum Talk/Tomak/em>was nonetheless the perfect amuse l'oeil. Of the remainder of the program, one may look at Harrison McEldowney's Blues for Ann, performed by DanceWorks Chicago, and Cesar Salinas interpreting Giordano's 1978 solo Wingsas shouldering most of the responsibility of the Congress' attendees' expectations. Bluesis exemplary of McEldowney's thorough comprehension of dance history's traditions and tropes, the flirty interactions of its sextet's subgroupings and gutsy solos clever and casual dressing of well-honed constructions. In one section, Rebecca Niziol dances on and around a trio of deadpan boys, using them like pommel horses and props and ultimately bored with the lot. Awhile later, Marc Macaranas is the soloist of its inverse, using his arms like snakes to attempt charming the ladies in "Got My Mojo Working." Salinas, with his Jell-O clavicles, gives Wings (to Joan Baez' simple, affecting take on "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot") more heft than is in its steps alone. A solo-as-sermon taking many a cue from Alvin Ailey, it deals from a stacked deck and repeats one too many phrases to not-enough effect. Two duets by visiting companies were responsible for the show's best work.Theater of Public Secrets 2008by Philadephia's Koresh Dance Company is an intriguing excerpt of choreography in three parts by Ronen Koresh. To a score of eerie whistles and jackhammers on ceramic by Karl Mullen and Nick Kendall, Theaterrecalls the au courant, naturalistic vocabularies of Ohad Naharin and Toru Shimazaki in its own voice. A solo by Jae Hoon Lim subtitled "Remembering" finds him glued to a bench except for bursts of weightless ballonand broken renverswhile Melissa Rector appears and disappears. She dances under his gaze for "She," and the two unite in a touching, simple duet called "Love" wherein he carries her in broken-doll shapes, one of each of their hands held up as though taking an oath. With an open ending that boldfaces the many oblique references to Romeo and Juliet, Koresh's adult work was a delightful discovery. Mexico's Cuerpo Eteo Danza Contemporea thankfully broughtLlora . . . para que se te Lave el Almato a second act otherwise devoid of substance. Brisa Escobedo was one of the piece's two dancers as well as its choreographer and costume designer (tiny underwear and a simple floral crown, but still). To Mika's ballad "Over My Shoulders," it's a remarkably unique duet that takes its entire duration to separate Escobedo from her partner (Rolando Ramirez), who begin as a single, multi-limbed shape and disappear into black with Ramirez standing and Escobedo fetal behind him forgotten, discarded or worse. At the risk of sounding inhospitable, the festival's other guests, Mashashi Action Machine (from Japan) and POZ Dance Theatre (of Korea) were vapid and uninspired. The former were at least endearingly bizarre: At one point, six dancers form a tree while one flits about birdlike in a diaphanous blue-and-orange cape with two hunters looking on, but there are sixteen counts of nothing for every display of circus acrobatics and no discernible aesthetic throughline. The latter, which begins with a barely-lit tableauaccompanied by an interminable shriek, quickly devolves into the sexlessly-rippling torsos, crudely-popped extensions and melodramatically-unfolding port de bras-- to paint-by-numbers Piazzolla, no less -- that unfortunately are the popular notion of what "jazz dance" is.

Cavalia

"Cavalia"

 

By Sid Smith:

The sweeping spectacle called "Cavalia," a Cirque du Soleil-like extravaganza starring nearly three dozen noble, magnificent horses in a tent in the West Loop, is a chance to examine dance when part of a larger entertainment effort.It's instance of the art's employment, in other words, when facilitator rather than main event. Dance enthusiasts see this all the time and rarely pay heed, even though these endeavors often attract vast audiences unlikely to see choreography in its more rarified concert setting. Whether it's the Rockettes, a Las Vegas spectacle, "Dancing With the Stars" or a new vaudevillian circus, dancing is still dancing, even in this flashier, more populist mode. And commercial dance, it should be remembered, offers crucial income for industry professionals. Such Chicago worthies as Sherry Zunker and Harrison McEldowney are among those who've subsidized their serious fare by working on cruise ships."Cavalia" is in a class by itself in this regard by raising an unusual, some might say bizarre question: Can horses dance? The answer, goofy though it sounds, turns out to be, "Yes, more or less." They can be taught to ker-plop their hooves in time to the music, even repeatedly for relatively long riffs--one stallion at Tuesday's opening worked up a back-and-forth rhythm, alternating one pair of hooves with the other, as if caught up in a brief fever of jazz improvisation. Horses, too, we learn, can be guided to form all sorts of ensemble configurations and then dissolve gracefully out of them, just as humans do. And they almost universally do so with that majesty that makes them among the most hypnotic animals on the planet.Like the show itself, which canters along in fits and starts, wearied by slow segments interspersed with genuinely breathtaking ones, the choreographic effects are spotty. Any devotee of the art house is likely to sneer at the conceptual simplicity of much of the routines. In a section known as "Roman Riding," for instance, four riders atop four horses team up with a trio of acrobats. But there's little effort to link the two into any kind of coherent, unifying structure. They just do their thing, side by side, on stage, their technical talent lone reason to be there."Cavalia" is less like Cirque in that regard and more like "Riverdance," conjoined by dreamy nature imagery and a comforting, New Age gloss. Ersatz poetry, linked by sleek presentational puffery.That said, some sections of movement are knockouts, including times when the aerial artists and acrobats show off their stuff while the horses take a break. (Frederic Pignon and Magali Delgado are listed as equestrian choreographers, while Alain Gauthier is artistic coordinator and choreographer.) Among the more astonishing athletes is Mohamed Ahchoune, a six-pack he-man and utter maestro of the Chinese pole, suspending himself by shear muscle power in a horizontal position and then seeming to climb upward, as if the air were hiding an invisible staircase.But the horses are the real curiosities, and, in one section, a quartet of them suavely engage in a circle moving counterclockwise, while another foursome initiate a circle in the opposite direction--the two circles so close together that the image is one of stately ensemble intimacy. Elsewhere, the horses slowly gather together closely, and each places his head atop the animal in front of him, creating a sweet family grouping, not unlike something you might see in a bit of sugary ballet. (All the horses are stallions or geldings.)A synchronicity dancers might envy is on view in the regal, medieval-cloaked duet called "The Mirror," wherein two women, dressed identically, atop two ashen steeds, move in close proximity to each other and all over the playing area, all the while identically mimicking each other's moves. Mirror images indeed, and tough for humans. But with animals involved? Pretty impressive.But, for me, the most enchanting bit came near the very beginning. A woman dances on stage alone, playfully teasing and splashing around in a pool of water embedded in the set. Eventually, a single horse joins her, and in an entrancing moment of almost romantic seduction, he hesitates as she beckons, and then oh-so-slowly, as if aware of the melodic music, inches toward her to sip water from her hand--classic myth and the garish sweetness of painter Maxfield Parrish come together.

Ephiphany Dance Experiment

"Epiphany Dance Experiment"

 

By Sid Smith:

Dance and performance art can be similar. They can be different. And they can both blur in a single concert the boundaries separating the two disciplines.That fruitful but confusing cross-pollination has bedeviled artists for decades, and it served as the subject Sunday of the Epiphany Dance Experiment's mixed program featuring performers on both sides of the divide. A discussion afterward made clear that artists from the two genres find the distinctions complicated and enmeshed in larger issues involving the complexities of the creative endeavor--issues easy to ponder, tricky to resolve.Each installment in Epiphany's series, conducted in the large space inside the Epiphany Episcopal Church, is organized around a particular aesthetic issue, followed by discussions that enable both artists and audiences to interact and debate. The unusual physical attributes of the church make it an ideal setting for performance art. Home to a cavernous room, adorned with brightly stained glass and towering, timbered arches, the church is undergoing renovation, providing a singular mixture of sanctuary beauty and warehouse decay. The pews are movable, providing one of the larger playing areas in Chicago dance.Of the four works on view Sunday, Britt Posmer's "there is a way in which the body sleeps" made the best use of the space. The stage became one of the characters, in fact, as a small chorus of women, enacting sound artist Lisa Abbatomarco's sonorous wails and harmonies, wandered about like spiritual guides. Meanwhile, collaborator Joshua Kent roamed the playing area, too, at times armed with a pair of small wheels suspended on a string, a device he swung back and forth like an instrument of church incense.Posmer, who boasts a background in classical dance, remained in the middle, mostly sitting on the floor, her movement therefore deliberately limited to a kind of ongoing symphony of port de bras. Eventually, Kent's string unwound from a large spool and created a spider's web, trapping Posmer, part of the imagery invoking the ballet classic "The Sleeping Beauty." Posmer thus served as a prisoner of modern psychic displacement.Like much of the Epiphany program, the various parts didn't especially coalesce into a coherent whole. But some parts are arresting, including one segment wherein the four singers manage a spell of percussion made up mostly of the sounds of sharp intakes of breath.Space is a tool for the performance artist, more an obstacle to be overcome by the dancer. Rachel Thorne Germond made that point in the discussion by suggesting dancers learn to perform whatever the situation, church or bar, and she and the other dancers on this bill demonstrated the point. Their work seemed not so much to embrace the space as survive it.Both her "Not About Elvis Dance" and JulieAnn Graham's duet, "(s)he," featured ample walking around, as if to fill time and the necessities of the larger playing area. Both are contained and focused in ways better served by a more confined stage. In "Elvis," a work in progress, Germond shows off her inimitable, ever-so-feminine echoes of Elvis Presley's iconic pelvic thrusts and swagger. She wriggles, she writhes, but, beginning the piece in high heels that she quickly sheds, she does so with grace and a seductive delicacy. Some of it she enacts to a recorded backstage interview with Presley. Though rambling and currently too long, Germond's piece has the makings of a sharp, engaging solo.Graham's work depends too heavily on a single joke: her partner, Todd Kiech, wears a flimsy dress similar to her own costume. Role play is a topic. Part of the time he displays prissy, vamp-like femininity; she sometimes attacks him as a ferocious aggressor. Othewise, "(s)he" is a minimalist catalog of tiny gestures, dotted by acrobatic falls to the floor.Performance artist Marissa Perel chose to revert to a more traditional theatrical set-up by moving the pews from their spread out semi-circle back to a more traditional arrangement. In her piece, "Weak," she and two colleagues, Colin Self and Snorre Sjonost Henriksen, sit in the audience at first and intone chants. Eventually, Perel moves to the rear of the altar area, while Self and Henriksen roam the audience, coming on to various members, all to a mournful song by Chris Isaak.The proscenium set-up, and the church echo, made the lyrics sometimes hard to decipher. But, for the most part, they seemed more than cute but less than poetic. One set of lines near the end, for instance, goes, "To wear you like Humboldt Park/To be worn by you like Pilsen."

An Evening of Dance Drama

"An Evening of Dance Drama"

 

By Zachary Whittenburg:

There are a number of angles from which to approach a review of last weekend's performances of choreography by Paul Sanasardo and Dmitri Peskov. For me it was an uncomfortable experience but, to be fair, the works shown were intentionally so. Although a generation apart -- Sanasardo is, at eighty, more than twice Peskov's age -- and from divergent backgrounds, their sharing of an evening is a logical alignment of simpatico artists (they're both in residence at the Joel Hall Dance Center). The two are given to high drama and grand gesture, share a sculptural approach to choreography, and find inspiration in plaintive strings and staccato piano melodies that tick off the seconds of troubled existences. Three briefAlfred Schnittkepieces were chosen by fellow Russian Peskov for his world premiereSuite in the Old Style; a couple (Masha Balovlenkov and Paul Christiano) dance an opening pas de deuxwhich is then extrapolated by a double duet and aclosing detour into schizophrenic pantomime for Christiano likeLeonid Jakobson's Vestris, only stationary.Suite telegraphs its ache through every shuddering touch, longing reach, and glance stolen from under relentlessly-furrowed brows, toggling between a realm of near-mime and pure dance. The sextet often finds the women doing heavy lifting -- no one in this dance is spared maddeningly-difficult sequences of jumps and partnering as Peskov does his best to keep up with the operatic intensity of Schnittke. Ultimately, though, we don't understand what's happening, only how difficult (physically and emotionally) it all is. Peskov also revived three older works, including hisNijinsky(2006). Christiano, a wholly unique performer who's surfaced in many companies over the years, is in a sweet spot here. Peskov's martial-arts background provides generous display of Christiano's fantastic acrobatic control -- he pops into and out of handstands with unfailing confidence, often halting incredible momentum and changing direction before reluctantly returning upright. When upside down he can use his legs with the expressivity of port de bras. Aimed at describing the sad end of Nijinsky the legend, the solo is set to theadagio from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23. It's hard to say what this piece of music has specifically to do with the mentally unstable superstar of the Ballets Russes -- dancewise it's more indelibly associated with the recent past as part of the score to Ji?™Kyli's Petite Mort. Its ubiquity, though, handily sets a mood of mournful remorse and this interpretation of it, while derivative and predictable, is also generally respectful. Two duets followed, Good Night (2002) and Stray Dog: A Dance Suite in Three Parts(2008). Good Nightleans on another oft-choreographed piece for piano and strings, Arvo Pt's Spiegel im Spiegel,without adding much to the pile. Dog, on the other hand, may be one of the most unusual dances I've seen in some time. Named for a pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg artists' hangout, Peskov works his way in fits and starts through a poem in Russian ripe with images of romantic dysfunction ("Yet the ring shall fall/And the sea shall rage/For my little bird/We are not meant to live together"). He rains red rose petals down on himself while looking up into the Paradise that for his character is most frustratingly not here on Earth; partner Christina Eltvedt enters, is tossed around, and laid upon them. One can see in Peskov dancing Peskov the deeply personal movement style that doesn't translate to other bodies. Frighteningly committed to each wave of convulsions and masochistic phrases -- he at one point repeatedly jumps and lands on his shins -- his is the only full interpretation. Prenominate moments of discomfort abound in Dog, including one wherein it appears as though Peskov is going to disrobe his young partner, pulling her dress up over her head and halting only at the last moment. Although lean and muscled, Peskov is fond of jangly, loose movement that paints him a marionette at God's whim with a dead look in his eyes and a pernicious sneer on his lips. This Stray is possibly feral, and as he lays demonstrative touches on Eltvedt with a menacing "Put the ice between your teeth/And the pain will let go of you" -- twice as frightening in Russian -- Henryk Gecki's revving bass lines and arpeggiosflesh out the scene in all its twistedness. A sudden denouementis stranger still: The two separate with properbalancaround the stage as if greeting guests at a party, all trace of their disturbed relationship vanished from view. On this charade the lights fade to black. Paul Sanasardo's contribution to the bill was its second world premiere, the five-part suiteSleepless Night in the City. Its sections are titled for the hours between midnight and dawn and subtitled "The Hour of the Predator" and the like. The small but able ensemble of dancers returned for Sleepless; performing multiple roles each, they kept their energy up and commitment unwavering throughout a taxing concert. Sanasardo has a dance-theater approach similar to Christopher Bruce's: Formations and positions cut and dried are pressed up next to body language and a composed casualness. Peskov dances in this work as well, a roguish "Prowler" who rides in on a bicycle and cruises in lazy figure eights looking for trouble. Other characters include a "Homeless Woman" (Masha Balovlenkov) and "Drifters," two couples dressed for a night out on the town. Balovlenkov's bag lady is sympathetically drawn, if only in two dimensions, and the powerful strains of Webernand contemporaries (along with keeper of the flame John Luther Adams) give her social invisibility some poignancy. Capturing the mood of neon lights reflecting off rain-soaked streets as princes and paupers play their roles is nothing new, but Sleeplessis a genuine work and pleasing enough.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009: Chicago

"The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009 "

 

By Zachary Whittenburg:

Opening the first of four nights of Chicago's inaugural A.W.A.R.D. Show! grant competition, Columbia College Dance Department Chair Bonnie Brooks succinctly termed it a "grand experiment in dance democracy." Taking a necessary moment to explain the program's history (it's a Boeing-funded transplant of a successful New York venture in its third year) and acronymous title (Audiences With Artists Responding to Dance), Brooks welcomed the full house with an invitation to vote our consciences not just upon what we saw, but what we felt could be achieved with a $10,000 cash injection.Rachel Bunting has been making work quite a few years now as The Humans, a brain trust of collaborators from which she draws on a per-project basis. Her duet with Precious Jennings, who I am (who I am not) found many hallmarks of her style settling into place. Comprised of a few scenes gradually involving a vaguely-ceremonial portal hung with chimes, Jennings and Bunting let the layers of their twindom (Bunting has an identical, Collin, who designs her costumes) seep out through a satisfyingly broad delta of narrow channels. The broad strokes of two dancers fitting their bodies into complementing shapes mid-air were offset by a delicate motif of thumb-and-forefinger air threading that originally looked like holding string but was later revealed to be the representation of owls' eyes. In another twist, the "doorway" later becomes a mirror. Its transitions were deftly handled by the pair, who were in top form and, appropriate to the piece, seemingly of one mind. From India by way of Seattle, Archana Kumar is to be commended for pushing a fusion of traditional Indian styles -- Bharatanatyam and Kathak -- and modern dance and improvisation past superficial flirtation into total synthesis. Her solo, Unveil the Beginning, was part of a year-and-a-half-long process that involved not only this stylistic merge but also an assessment through movement of life cycles and rebirth. Many of its images were potent: Kumar strikingly uses her costume (a sheer white dress and green veil, both hanging to the floor) in one of the first to create the suggestion of a giant vagina. Although abstracted through multiple dance languages, Kumar's solo was admirably lucid in its intent. Generic, beat-driven world music, recorded waterfalls and suddenly-dominant, crude video unfortunately undercut the impact of vocabulary obviously born of extensive consideration and research.Among not just these but all twelve of The A.W.A.R.D. Show!'s competitors, there's arguably too much variety to judge one against the other. Still, intriguingly out of place was a dance that would in most circumstances represent the norm, Track 4 by collaborative choreography team Francisco Avi and Stephanie Martinez. A quartet of boilerplate composition and influence-heavy material, it's a pleasing enough work that showcased the youthful honesty and polished technique of its dancers. Reworked from its original outing as a commission from DanceWorks Chicago, Track 4 seems to have lost some of the passion and intensity given it by its dut cast, however, and up against the multifaceted rigor of Kumar's, Bunting's and Julia Rhoads' pieces it came across as uninspired and standard. What Rhoads' Lucky Plush Productions entered into the show was titled Memory Mash but is tied to a larger work-in-progress, Punk Yankees, which will premiere on the same stage this fall. Beginning with a bit of text and loose unison, it dives quick and deep into a choreographic DJ set (aided by a Girl Talk-esque score of pop and dance-history samples by Stefen Robinson) that swipes at references from mainstream (Swan Lake, Thriller) to insider (Tere O'Connor) to downright obscure. Fragmented dialogue among the six dancers, though, wraps it in enough context to let the agenda of Memory Mash bridge the gap even to audience members not geeked-out enough to get jokes about JosLim. Indeed, it didn't keep Lucky Plush from walking away with the series' first win, which guarantees them at least $1,000 come Saturday.Being able to see just one of these performances is a real heartbreaker -- The A.W.A.R.D. Show! is a major development for the Chicago dance community and many of the eight dances that remain to be shown I haven't seen before. If you're planning to show support for your favorite this weekend you're likely already holding tickets, but if not you should move fast. For those outside Chicago or otherwise engaged, the Dance Center's website is announcing each evening's winner at 10:00am the following morning and the grand prize late Saturday night.

Jaema Joy Berry

"Jaema Joy Berry's You Can't Dance Out the Side of Your Mouth"

 

By Sid Smith:

There's a beguiling credo in choreographer Jaema Joy Berry's program bio well worth quoting:"Jaema Joy Berry started dancing at the age of 5 in Traverse City, Mich., when she used to come home from kindergarten and cry because she couldn't run like the other kids," her Links Hall bio reads. "Fearing for her future life as a hopelessly uncoordinated individual, her parents put her in a ballet class, and here she is!"And we're the better for it. Berry is precisely the sort of promising young talent the city would be wise to entice. Not that her short program of works at Links Hall over the weekend--impishly titled: "You Can't Dance Out the Side of Your Mouth"--was flawless.The one-hour collection of seven brief pieces was uneven and sometimes limited to a good idea crying out for more honing and development.But Berry senses that successful dance can maintain serious standards but not shy from entertainment, either. She's particularly intriguing when she works with a sizeable group. Her opening gambit, "Sample," flooded the small Links Hall space with 13 dancers, an odd number, but one that allowed for a complete takeover of the tiny playing area. The oh-so-close viewer felt almost magically transported into the midst of a large corps, an almost primal renewal of the excitement and mystery of ensemble thrills. Berry makes the most of that in "Sample" by accentuating that intoxicating rush, by celebrating this most basic allure of dance artistry: a crowd moving not in random chaos but with expert design.In this and some other works on the program, she reveals a smart eye for construction and unfolding patterns. To melodic, flowing music by the Vitamin String Quartet, "Sample" is an attractive display of dancers linking up in twos, then threes, then more, with motifs gathering steam, moving through the corps as if a rolling ocean wave, and then dissipating into the ether. It's simple, straightforward harmony and syncopation, but entrancing.She thinks outside the box, too, but gently, sweetly, seductively. One work is a comic duet springing from the simplest of gimmicks. Each dancer wears one tap shoe and keeps the other foot bare. Draped with buffoonish, Trockadero-like skirts of over-the-top tulle, the piece is a waltz of limping ballerinas, each convinced of her own grandiosity in a tug-of-war of wills.This let's-try-something spirit is on view in "Tea for Two," an exhausting solo of joy to Art Tatum's ticklish take on that old standard, and in "In Perspective," another clever bit of aesthetic tinkering pitting three modern dancers in opposition to a fourth, who pounds out part of the accompaniment with her tap shoes.Berry's movement is clean, often flowing, basic modern dance, with pleasing classical riffs. But she peppers it with interesting arm arrangements, evolving motifs of right-angle positioning that evoke the semaphore movement of a traffic controller, and yet give her works a soupcon here and there of individual signature.Some of this falls into the promising-but-needs-work category. One like able idea is a series of works during the pauses between the official pieces. The dancers come out and enact little bits in twosomes and other small combos, most of it to the accompaniment of recorded conversations right out of daily family life. But the idea proved successful only in bits and pieces. Sometimes the recorded dialogue was funny, sometimes it wasn't, and the dance/pantomime suffered from the same meandering, hit-or-miss inconsistency. It?s great shtick--it just needs to be perfected.But here she is! And let's hope she keeps slugging away. This is a dance maker whose intelligence and warm love for her art shine through in every endeavor.