REVIEWS

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.