BALLET CHICAGO
Martins’s Calcium Light Night, danced by Petra Adelfang and Manard Stewart, is as peculiar, angular, and pleasing as its Ives score. The brightly lit, stripped stage, with its great hanging fluorescent square, emphasizes the ordinariness of the dancers’ simple, uninflected walking between sections. But the dance–and Adelfang’s and Stewart’s dancing–is anything but ordinary.
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Gerard Charles’s Feral Forms also looks tentative, but seeing the dance a second time convinces me that its lack of conviction is a deliberate choreographic effect and not a problem of performance. Feral Forms nudges Karen Baynham, Christine Dorian, and Laura Taylor from pose to pose–it’s artful, artificial, anything but wild. Jazz and breakdancing quotations appear in the choreography danced by Malbrough and Mark Ward; but it too is sanitized. It seems that none of the movement wants to be danced full-out. The score is a taped collage of background music and text from the movie Kiss of the Spider Woman; but it’s nearly impossible to integrate the misogynistic dance images with the image of women that transforms William Hurt’s character in the movie. Feral Forms is a puzzle, and quickly palls.
