Moving "And the Spirit Moved Me"

For the second year, Kristina Isabelle brings work to the Mundelein Center on Loyola University Chicago’s gorgeous lakeside campus for a two-night engagement in the Pivot Arts Festival: a ten day, multi-arts, multi-venue festival taking place on the city’s far north side.

 

More than a year in the making, Isabelle’s hour long work titled And the Spirit Moved Me investigates the intersections between nature, the self, and spirituality. Sections of the piece tug more strongly at each of its themes; we are informed rather clearly what to think by projections of grass, fire, and abstractions of each dancer as they take turns in featured moments, but the dancing itself muddies the earthly and spiritual realms together in a most fascinating way. Each of Spirit’s themes is mined from Isabelle’s research on the work of legendary modern dancer/choreographer Sybil Shearer, who, for most of her life resided in the north suburbs of Chicago.

 

Shearer, who was once compared to Merce Cunningham and known for unprecedented agility and rebellious idiosyncrasies, died in 2005 at age 93. In addition to preserving her work, the Morrison-Shearer Foundation’s grant and residency programs have generated a number of initiatives inspired by Shearer's legacy and tremendous body of work. Most recent was Thodos Dance Chicago’s tribute, which reconstructed three of Shearer’s works verbatim. Isabelle takes a different approach, channeling Shearer’s frenetic movement quality and affinity for otherworldly themes, After a nod to Shearer in the dance’s earliest moments, however, audience members likely wouldn’t recognize her as the inspiration for this work.

 

Four dancers on stilts float above the stage, peeking in and out of concave projection screens, dressed in Vin Reed’s luscious extra-long pants. Stilt dancing is complemented by earth-bound dancers who sometimes dance with the stilt dancers, sometimes not. The costumes, projections, sound score hinting at nature sounds and text spoken in tongues, plus Isabelle’s signature stilt dancing all work together to evoke Spirit’s other-worldly feel; in fact, this is perhaps Isabelle’s most successful attempt at integrating stilts as a necessary and natural element rather than a cool party trick. 

 

The dancers’ possessed improvisations and spastic convulsions are uncomfortable at first, but gently and intelligently padded with more conventional dance phrases. Isabelle’s eclectic cast of performers is best featured in small groupings; whole group, unison sections are less satisfying than I’d hoped for. Particularly striking are solos from Isabelle, Andy Slavin and Alyssa Gregory, accompanied by Octane Rich Media’s stunning video of each’s visage in abstraction. Surprisingly, it is the solos and duets, as well as a quartet on stilts, that create Spirit’s climax. As And the Spirit Moved Me continues to evolve, I wonder at the prominence Sybil Shearer's role in this work will play in the its future, but it’s safe to say that, if nothing else, Shearer has inspired a movement vocabulary that, for Kristina Isabelle, is wholly new. The work is mesmerizing, thought-provoking, visually striking and physically challenging. What else can one really ask for in a dance?