Anja: The Unexpected was unexpected. Just not in the way it suggested. Joel Hall, a local dance favorite who’s celebrating his eponymous company’s 40th anniversary in 2015, made a rare cameo during last Friday’s performance of Anja, Hall’s latest world premiere in association with the Chicago Theatre Company, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
Hall’s opening solo had been touted as one of the show’s main attractions. And it was for the most part. He moved fluidly and with exceptional strength. He wore a long garment and a makeshift Egyptian headdress — a priest who shows reverence to a crucifix-like golden talisman. This was no small subtlety. Hall has described Anja as the exploration of ancient Egyptian philosophies, a fascination he pursued to understand its existence in contemporary African American culture, all of it contemporized through jazz music. The lens of ancient Egyptian culture, as Hall told the Tribune, typically focuses on very Euro-centric perspectives. He wanted to take it in a different direction.
Anja, meaning “graceful” in Egyptian, sees Hall recruit a few local jazz favorites in attempting to get his point across: percussionist Charles "Rick" Heath, saxophonist Ray Silkman and Jesse Charbonier. Jazz is Hall’s muse, its sexy sounds propelling the cast on a journey that features billowy scores like Ethel Waters’ 1933 classic “Stormy Weather.” That the music was so skillfully performed during the show gave Anja redeeming qualities for the majority of its 90-minutes. The choreography, however, which sees the cast shift between spirited Afro Cuban, contemporary ballet and sultry modern technique (in ten mostly indistinguishable scenes, save for the alternating scores of music) is as curious as a Sphinx.
Drawing connections between what Hall aims to achieve and the inspiration for which Anja steeps its roots is difficult. Hall features his male dancers in black pants, tuxedo shirts wrapped with cummerbunds. For the ladies, it’s often sleek black dresses. They dance under rich colors of light, amidst racy sax riffs and the punchiness of jazz drums, highlighting the talents of Heath and Silkman, especially. The cast—14 dancers with company apprentices—often feel like swappable figures, hardly any distinguishing characteristic to suggest that they’re anything but an ornamental corps of bodies. They cast seductive spells, as if meeting for the first time; they dance in pairings, implying fleeting romance; periodically, the dancers salute the musicians with a bow of the head, or the grazing of a shoulder, none of which is to draw much connection between Egypt’s past and the present.
And for nine of ten scenes, it’s much of the same. Ancient Egypt is nowhere to be found, except for backlit projections of desert stars and the Eye of Horus. If we’re to take “graceful” in the most literal sense, then Anja is a partial success. It would be unfair to say the dancers were not graceful. In fact, there were moments that proved quite touching, as when Silkman, playing his heart out, shuffles and kicks his legs alongside the dancers in a coordinated effort.
But even with its moments of grace, Anja comes off as a surface-level investigation that begs for more. The unexpected could have used a little more clarity.