It was a cold and snowy evening last Saturday. The warm and cozy Broadway Playhouse in the Gold Coast (a change of venue from the still out-of-commission Harris Theater) served a fitting backdrop for the 2014 Choreographers of Color Award. Each year, three diverse choreographers are selected by the Joffrey Academy of Dance to present new work on its proficient group of Trainees. It seems a mutually beneficial arrangement for the choreographers and dancers involved. The Trainees have the opportunity to work with notable emerging choreographers in a fully produced concert (essentially, a really, really (really) well done dance recital). And, who wouldn't want a large company of impeccably trained pre-professional dancers at his or her disposal?
Such was the case for three up-and-comers on this year’s bill at Winning Works - showcasing new work from each award recipient: Justin Allen, Stefanie Batten Bland, and Norbert de la Cruz. Also on the bill, a restaging of Joffrey Academy Artistic Director Alexei Kremnev’s ballet Le Roi S’Amuse. Matt Miller’s lovely lighting set an atmosphere of edgy contemporary ballet, as did Gabriel Brandon-Hanson’s classic romantic tutus embellished with bodices resembling asymmetrical black hoodies. As a result, Le Roi didn’t always sync with the minstrel-y Delibes accompaniment. However, Kremnev’s eclectic mix of traditional ballet with contemporary kept up, for the most part, with the dichotomy in play between Delibes’ music and the other more modern elements.
Batten Bland emerged onstage and offered a poetic introduction to her Chiral, in which she questioned whether she could make a dance as if constructing a jigsaw puzzle, but without the picture on the box for reference. The feeling of interlocking pieces was carried in the costumes: nude trunks and genderless mini-dresses with neutral fabric braids strung lengthwise. A sometimes tinkering, unrelenting xylophone score by Nils Frahm complimented Batten Bland's contemporary choreography;the dancers mimicked the pulsating score in their movements, with few moments provided to come up for air.
Justin Allen’s Interconnect is in the same relentless vein as Chiral, but with the addition of “hair-ography.” Hair down is a stylistic choice, but can take an intricate, well-rehearsed dance and make it look sloppy. Hair goes one way, legs go the other, one dancer's hair goes up, another goes down. Technically strong, tightly rehearsed choreography became lost in a mountain of distracting long hair that created, in the case of Interconnect, a feeling of adolescence. Hair-ography aside, the salient moments of Interconnect are the ones that show more restraint. A unison phrase of women standing in a V-shape slowly creeps downstage and dissolves into lines of dancers moving impeccably together - that was a powerful and memorable moment.
Norbert de la Cruz’s Kuya was the closer for the evening. An homage to his Filipino heritage and a story about home, de la Cruz explained to the audience that this was a story of hope, and also of sadness. He encouraged us to find the uplifting moments in his tale - pretty easy to do initially as a large cast of pale blue dresses and slacks floats through the space. As the piece continues, a bold costume choice emerges from the wings, directing the audience to feel that this is no warm and fuzzy story about home and family; it’s hard to find anything uplifting about a guy in pale blue pajamas with a creepy red sheath over his face, particularly when the character is seldom highlighted. The connotation is that evil walks among us, is one of us, dances right beside us… this message, intentional or not, lingered over Kuya above all else, making it difficult to follow de la Cruz's instructions. Throughout the piece, de la Cruz places this creepy guy smack in the middle of unison passages, or nestled in a beautiful group huddle undulating off of and back onto a bench on stage. In the end, good prevails over evil as the mask is ripped from the dancer’s face, but the viewer is left wondering whether there's more to the story that hasn't been told.