In 1963, journalist Richard Peters of Juneau won $300 for suggesting “North to the Future” as the official state motto of Alaska. As his neighbors to the south were emerging from their fallout shelters, Peters said the motto “…is a reminder that beyond the horizon of urban clutter there is a Great Land beneath our flag that can provide a new tomorrow for this century's ‘huddled masses yearning to be free.’”
The spirit of Alaska is one of optimism and opportunity, a land of untapped beauty and abundance. As it turns out, Alaska provides plenty of fodder for new dances, too. Each of the five choreographers on Chicago Dance Crash (CDC)’s winter mixed-bill called “New Alaska” (through Dec. 20 at the Storefront Theater) began with three prompts: Alaska, 100 years in the future, and immediately following a worldwide catastrophe.
Kirsten Shelton’s “stranger than this” opens the show in a deep fog. Dancers dressed in unpretentious sweaters and jeggings look curiously, apprehensively, toward stage left as sounds of a filmstrip wash over them. A bright light (the end of the strip?) stuns them into action in luscious, slow motion phrases with a low center of gravity indicative of Shelton’s lineage from now-defunct Luna Negra Dance Theatre. The second track of music, Swans’ “Some Things We Do,” and Erik Barry’s moon-toned lighting gives context to an overall feeling of gloaming. “We see, we grow, we pray, we hurt…” says the track as the dancers move between dancing and gazing at something magnificent above them.
Due to the logistics of the storefront theater, the fog never really lifted, and Barry’s heavy-handed lighting cast an unfortunate gloom over every piece on the program. Stephanie Paul’s “The Refusal of Fate,” CDC dancer Kaitlin Webster’s “One Too,” and Artistic Director Jessica Deahr’s “Heard That” all had moments of levity and joy, muted beneath all that fog. Nonetheless, the choreographic efforts of each shone in the intimate space that fits this group better than others they’ve tried.
In an improvised series of solos, company members David Ingram, Chantelle Mrowka and Kaitlin Webster were joined by alum Brian Hare for “Freestyle on the Fallout.” With music and textual references, the dancers’ interpretations point to both the impending nuclear disaster of the 1960’s Cuban Missile Crisis, and the popular video game Fallout: a game that imagines what might have happened, if that had happened. Per usual, Crash brings an impressive skill set to the table, with Mrowka’s acrobatics and Ingram’s aggressive hip-hop solos complemented by softer contemporary offerings from Webster and Hare. As if sucked into a vortex from stage right to left, to snippets from Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence," Hare's solo nearly took my breath away.
Ahmad Simmons’ trio for Mrowka, Webster, and Monica Weller was, perhaps, the least overtly connected to the evening’s themes. “Vignette” dresses its dancers in flesh-toned separates, accompanied by traffic noises and sounds from our daily lives. “My vision of this New Alaska,” he writes in the program notes, “is much like now. Catastrophes morphing our humanity daily.” The women wriggle and slide in and out of cuddle huddles in their nearly naked costumes, reminding us of the relevance and weight of our every day experiences on our perceptions of the world, and the part others play in making those mini-catastrophes ok.
The common threads of each prompt tied the program together; like beads on a string of yarn, each dance had a distinct identity, yet together they were parts of a beautiful whole, incomplete without the others. “New Alaska” made me wonder if this particular combination of themes was an anomaly – a coincidental marriage that just happened to succeed – or if Chicago Dance Crash could pull prompts from a hat on an annual basis and come up with the same sort of magic.