Mature River North in 25th Anniversary

River North Dance Chicago matched its 25 shining years to the grandeur of the Auditorium Theatre’s 125 last Saturday night in a stunning anniversary celebration of both the company and The Auditorium with River North’s contribution to the Auditorium’s “Made In Chicago” series. 

The five pieces on the program showcased a mature and artistically rich company that boasts broad stylistic range in its repertoire and spot-on technique, versatility, and artistic depth in its dancers.

Opening the program was artistic director Frank Chaves’ sculptural dance poem, “In The End” (2014), a celebration of masculinity in strikingly original movement.  That Chaves choreographed this piece from a wheel chair is beyond imagining. That he was able to achieve such a spectacular effect with “In The End” is continuing evidence of his distinctive choreographic vision and unique movement language that speaks directly to the soul. 

The piece begins with the company’s six men in a human rope of linked arms across the proscenium, balancing and leveraging each other one at a time, their bodies, clad only in the barest of briefs, almost glowing in Joshua Paul Weckesser’s  primordial lighting against a pitch black field of infinite space. The effect is visually arresting for the sheer beauty of their bodies in motion and the exquisite design of the shapes they make in a slow evolution of back arches, kicks, lifts, and passés that weave and wrap themselves around each other. They become a human jungle gym of rotations, renversés, aerial summersaults, and back dives. 

The strength and interdependence of their movement make a gripping emotional impact as well, sustaining dramatic tension throughout the work’s group segments and three contrasting duets, each of which depicts a different quality of relationship--completely trusting, playful, and recoiling--and yet the theme is transmitted almost entirely through abstract design. The one exception, where storytelling becomes more overt, is the group segment where the men literally dress each other in business suits and ties, while their movement symbolically “dresses” them in the brusque, angular strokes of a dog-eat-dog world.  Chaves’ eclectic blend of music is evocative and supportive without sentimentality, taking us on a universal exploration of the balance and relationship of human partnership and individual strength. 

Company dancer Hanna Brictson’s choreographic debut, “BEAST,” features the company’s six women in a bold and militant take on female empowerment. The choreographer’s own smart costume design of piercing royal blue sarong skirts and halter tops gave just the right balance of femininity and gutsiness that her jazzy movement deserved. Making frequent reference to popular dance vernacular, she combined body undulations and a generalized lushness of energetic flow throughout the stage space. Hayley Miller shone in a solo distinguished by wrist isolations and passion.   Set to the driving techno-beat of Evguine Galperine, Kanding Ray, Iva Bittova, and Locust, the work had a more pop-dance feel, with strong use of unison group movement. These Dionysian women danced all-out with banshee-like drive as if exorcising pent-up rage. 

Smoke and a dark stage provided the landscape for Adam Baruch’s world premiere, “the frost that binds,” set to an original, other-worldly score by Roarke Menzies.  Hands circumscribed the space around each other in a series of ingenious couplings, where partners came together and separated, breaking apart like atoms splitting.  Congealing, separation and reconfiguration of the group, like coalescing molecules of ice crystals, suggested a parallel to human community. 

“Can I explain this to you?” begins Spanish choreographer Ivan Pérez’s “Flesh” (2011), an enigmatic eulogy set to the poem “The Knife” by Keith Douglas. In the end, there is no answer to the plaintive question, but the search for one, in two emotionally riveting duets and two group segments, gave aching physical realization to the poem of love and loss, voiced with penetrating simplicity and unaffected directness. A huge knife anchors one side of the stage and commands focus, but does not necessarily add to choreographic substance, other than visually reiterating the title of the poem. The final image of a woman's face, projected as an afterthought behind the dancers, made for uneeded literalness, an intrusion on the otherwise abstract canvas of the choreography and the poem's imagery.

Chaves’ frothy finale, “Habaneras, the Music of Cuba” (revival, 2005) fills the stage with Jordan Ross’s colorful Latin-influenced costumes in a balletic, character dance homage to the great Cuban composers. In a rousing conclusion to the evening, the company was at its celebratory best, exuding pure joy and infectious energy that brought the audience to its feet with whoops and cheers.