Chicago’s Next Dance Festival
Cindy Brandle wants to address transformation in Awakening. Midway through the dance–a premiere for the fifth annual Next Dance Festival, which continues with two additional programs through February 6–we hear her text over the loudspeakers: “It was a struggle. It always is. I slept, only for the awakening….When will the arms that hold me melt?…I am stillness, bathed in trust; even within sleep, I am finding awakening.” Clearly sounding themes of immobility and the hope for freedom, Brandle’s dance diagrams spiritual transformation. The first section, performed in half light, has a warm, gooey, indistinct feeling. It focuses on one dancer (Brandle) and her relations with four other women, which are sometimes succoring and sometimes hostile. The second section is short and angry, lit in red: a soloist (M.K. Victorson) takes center stage for a fierce sequence of off-balance turns. The third section reiterates the first, except that the dancing is quicker and more exuberant and occurs in full light.
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The idea in Awakening is pretty clear: you might be asleep, but through activity and energy you can wake. When you do, you’ll discover the same old world but it will be bathed in light. Brandle’s moral reminds me of the Zen koan “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain.” It’s also one of the fundamental messages of modern art: wake up and live. Yet it’s too schematic to be of much use. What if the metaphor isn’t sleep but imprisonment–instead of waking up, you need to break your chains or kill an invisible monster? What if the enemy isn’t just your own indolence?
What appears to be transformation is sometimes just change, a movement whose purpose is almost impossible to know: two dances by Jennifer Grisham only seemed at first to manifest transformation. Her first piece on the program, 30A-38, is intentionally strange. Two women and a man wear wigs, one pink, one purple, and one platinum. The man is bare-chested, and the women wear flesh-colored leotards and tights. On the surface it looks like a bad-girl dance–my guess is that the title refers to the dancers’ chest sizes. 30A-38 lacks coherence, but its percussive movement is interesting and the dancers are skilled.
