Forward Motion
The Dance Chicago festival, now in its third year, is a smorgasbord of dance intended to broaden dance audiences by presenting packages of stylistically diverse pieces slickly marketed. Festival promoters Fred Solari and John Schmitz of SCT Productions want to offer something for everyone, and with that goal in mind have assembled a roster of 300 artists on ten programs with such intriguing titles as “Breaking Boundaries” and “Jazz It Up.” The program I saw, “Forward Motion,” promised Chicago’s most “trend-setting modern dance companies” in a program of “lyrical movement, biting social commentary and brave artistic insights.”
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I wonder how this generous definition of “best” serves the constituencies involved (except, of course, the producers). Festivals like this one risk losing the support of artists, whose faith in such programmatic politics can be easily shaken. Equally counterproductive is fooling dance audiences into thinking that a one-stop shopping smorgasbord is a bargain: in this case, audiences are not served when they’re being catered to. Dance Chicago is taking strides toward programmatic and presentational excellence. But to an unfortunate degree artistic excellence has been sacrificed to the “necessary” evils of programmatic inclusion. “Forward Motion” is a melange of stylistic and aesthetic approaches successful in many ways, but its successes are qualified.
Loop Troop–the umbrella entity that supports the work of Carrie Hanson and Rebecca Rossen among others–has two works on this program. The first is Ruby’s Geometry, a solo choreographed and performed by Hanson, who received a Ruth Page award this year for performance. A character study, this dance is commendably not simply a showcase for Hanson’s ample bag of dance tricks. With the help of Margaret Nelson’s high-contrast lighting, Hanson creates an atmosphere of tense, splintered drama, juxtaposing angular arm and hand movements with the sensual rocking of her pelvis. The piece opens with Hanson seated on a skateboard hidden beneath her full skirt and sliding from side to side. The skateboard–whose usefulness is quickly over–sets up the side-to-side spatial constraint Hanson adopts throughout. Clad in a raucously ingenious red ensemble complete with femme fatale wig, Martha Graham-like skirt, and corset, Hanson’s Ruby reminded me of the main character in the macabre short story, “A Rose for Emily.” I admired the subtle blending of clues at the abstract heart of the work: the color red, the dancer’s subsexual neurotic motions, the restriction to horizontal movement, and the intriguing title. Still lacking is a way of elevating her unique, engaging movement ideas to the level of meaning suggested by the production elements.
As the piece opens, Jeffery “frees” Julia Rhoads from the confines of two steel box frames, which remain instruments of restriction throughout, an insistent contrast to the dancers’ angry vulnerability. Holly Quinn performs a tantrumlike duet with Peter Carpenter, but most striking, and ultimately most satisfying in its simplicity, is the ending, when Jeffery, Carpenter, Kim, and Rhoads walk slowly downstage almost nude, with thick black belts strapped just below their ribs pulled increasingly tight. The music fades, and the dancers’ rhythmic breathing in unison is the only sound to break the charged atmosphere created by the work’s hard sexuality. This closing image makes the rest of The Illicit Keyhole fall into place, as we see the dancers stripped of everything but what makes them human.
