Breaking Boundaries
Dance Chicago ’98 at the Athenaeum Theatre, October 15; repeats October 29
For example, Emergence Dance Theatre’s Vastation is wildly overproduced and undernourished while Fluid Measure Performance Company’s The Doorman is underproduced and underdramatized. Vastation has gorgeous design elements, beginning with the sounds of dripping water, birdcalls, and a distant flute. Backlit in a soft blue, it also features evocative projections and textured light. The costumes are more problematic: six young women are covered head to toe in white veils, which makes them look like brides or nuns. Sandra Schramel’s choreography doesn’t help place the scene: later the women strip off their veils and wear them as scarves, and various groups combine and disperse, but the women’s identities remain a mystery. They may be imprisoned brides in a heavy-metal fantasia, but I suspect even this is my invention. The dancers are also weak; the choreography calls for repeated barrel turns, which require a solid Graham-style contraction, but the dancers can’t pull them off.
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According to a program note, the inspiration for Still Water, by the Breakbone Dance Company, is a South American adage that “the dead never really go away, but remain in stagnant water searching for their soul’s resting place.” A duet between Atalee Judy, made up as a corpse, and Amy Alyn Pope, the dance seems an overly literal depiction of a woman wrestling with the ghost of her dead lover; wearing a man’s suit, Judy lifts Pope in traditionally male ways. This piece’s saving grace is that it’s well choreographed, each lover suspended momentarily on the body of the other.
The music, which seems to combine African and Portuguese influences, is often interesting, ranging from tuneful South African-style a cappella singing to flamenco to drumming. But the dance is unvaryingly brutal, aggressive, masculine stuff: shouting and adopting postures of attack, beating on metal, doing push-ups, walking on one’s hands, posing and staring. There’s a great deal of spoken text, but little of it is intelligible. A fragment in English is massively repetitious, as is a film introducing the dance.
