Coming Forth by Day

What Nana decides to do, Nana does. That much is plain in her resolute musculature and the fact that she’s still dancing, though she’s past 60 and requires surgery on one knee. It’s plain in her intense, monolithic presence when performing: her conviction runs like a current through her arms, torso, and sturdily planted feet. She’s described herself as more a dancer than a choreographer, and dancers need willpower, a whole lot of it–they must understand that the soul makes the body. Or, as it’s put in the voice-over texts of the Chicago Moving Company’s new evening-length piece, the body is the record of the soul. Hence the god Osiris, who’s killed and cut up into 14 pieces, can be restored by the power of love and breath.

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But not even Nana Shineflug–artistic director of CMC, which celebrated its 25th anniversary with performances at the Dance Center of Columbia College–can encompass issues of life and death, transformation and transcendence, body and soul, in a 45-minute piece, as she tries to do in Coming Forth by Day. Despite its beauty, watching the piece is like seeing a condensed history of the universe on fast-forward.

But the sections don’t come together in the way Shineflug presumably wants them to. I was particularly troubled by the short shrift given evil: a section called “Becoming a Crocodile” runs past us the ideas that life is change, that destruction is necessary for creation, that the devouring jaws of the crocodile are the entrance to new life. Meanwhile several dancers enact the crocodile’s aching grimace and sinuous, mechanical movements (Holly Quinn makes an especially impressive reptile). Shineflug’s brief reference to evil and destruction is perhaps the result of her worldview, which, like Milton’s in Paradise Lost, is essentially comic: the end is known, God will provide, all is for the best. This may be true, but it doesn’t make for great drama. Unless you’re Milton writing a poem of several thousand lines–and some would disagree on that.