CHICAGO DANCE MEDIUM
Doolas responds most fully to Brel’s song “La valse a mille temps” (“Carousel”) and its image of life as a giddy ride. Doolas’s vision is large–life as carousel, as cyclical meaninglessness–but her response to her vision is disappointingly small. Though she tries to express peaks of feeling, she fails to carefully build up the detail that could have communicated those feelings.
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Louis Miller, a company member, has begun choreographing, and in a style much different from Doolas’s. Miller likes odd, quirky movements, like fluttering hands that slap against a dancer’s cheeks, or a bent leg lifted very high in parallel position over angular arms. The movements seem specific to each dancer’s body: they may be a dancer’s signature oddity, which no other dancer can reproduce. In Koh Sahn Road, Miller strings these quirky movements together on a vaguely oriental theme, using both traditional Thai music and a song from the art rock band Dead Can Dance. Miller has not yet developed a sense of overall structure, so the dance meanders. But it seems a genial trip, with Miller as an abstracted tour guide, tugging at his lower lip and listening to some inner music before he begins to speak.
