Forward Motion
Medieval artists found transcendence in Jesus’ suffering. Bach tried to build a circular staircase to heaven with counterpoint. Ignoring God and human society, Keats and Tennyson aimed to find direct spiritual access to nature. Christian mystics spoke of seeing the face of God in moments of religious ecstasy, though the brilliance of God’s face forced them to turn away once they’d glimpsed it. Transcendent moments tend to slip away, and true religious ecstasy often feels like torment rather than comfort.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In Melissa Thodos’s Piece of Peace, two men and six women dance in a yellowish light strongly suggestive of sunlight. When all eight excellent dancers are onstage, the sense of fluid mass is thrilling. Usually there are two duets or trios onstage simultaneously, each group moving in unison but differently from the other group. This gives a sense of richness, of having an abundance to look at, but it’s also confusing: Thodos doesn’t provide the visual clues for an audience to determine which group is foreground and which background. The impression is of a lot of not very distinguishable stuff. Similarly, Thodos chooses interesting minimalist music by Steve Reich for the second section but doesn’t follow the music when it changes dramatically. Glorious to look at, the dance has a strong kinetic effect but doesn’t develop or climax.
The relatively new Moose Project, directed by Paul Abrahamson, offers contemporary ballet in There’s Always One, set to Corelli’s contrapuntal music, using the strategy of ensemble dancing and adding a strong classical element. But since many of the other companies blend ballet so seamlessly with other forms, Abrahamson’s solely balletic approach seems dull, and the dance is forgettable.
Two other dances use humor to puncture our obsession with transcendence. Jason Ohlberg’s Venus for Same Planet Different World begins ominously: five dancers dressed entirely in black, with black gauze masks completely covering their faces, look like insects. Suddenly a body with blond hair and wearing a white and red dress rolls across the stage under their feet: it’s Venus herself, here a skinny man in a platinum wig and white strapless evening gown that keeps falling off his bare chest. Venus eventually seduces all the black-clad dancers, who vanish one by one beneath her voluminous skirt. We may yearn for the stars, but we spend a lot of time scheming how to end up between Venus’ legs.
