NEW DANCES ’88
Hatchlings resemble their parents, and most of the works premiered in the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble’s choreographic incubator New Dances, now in its sixth year, share the ensemble’s virtues and vices: its careful attention to production values, its strong sense of theater, its attractive and athletic dancing, its certain nostalgic cheeriness, and its unfortunate tendency toward the melodramatic and the banal.
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The man and woman reappear on the video. She sits cross-legged on a beach, cradling his arching, pulsing torso across her lap; she soothes him. Fishella enters from the upstage corner and cuts across the stage in a great diagonal–arms reaching diagonally forward and back, his legs moving in opposition. He draws his weight back onto a bent leg, one arm contracting to the shoulder as if to draw a bow. He stamps a small circle, torso slightly rounded and head lowered, one arm curved overhead, the other curled behind his back.
Beth Bradley’s Withinsight is highly theatrical, but lacks coherence. The dance begins with the four performers swathed in immense black capes, stalking back and forth across the stage almost at random; they walk parallel paths, never crossing, encountering, or relating. Eventually, parts of bodies appear–a hand covers a face; arms reach, fingers spread, while the dancer turns in plie. In the second section, a black-clad Mary Ward sits on a black chair upon a black table coolly contemplating a wineglass, while Frank Fishella gesticulates behind her, then strides diagonally across the stage exhibiting unspecified distress. They switch roles: he takes the wineglass and sits on another black chair, while she sinks to the floor, rolls, wraps her arm around her head, slides her hand down her thigh or slaps at it–all movements suggesting frustration and frigidity.
The dance begins with seven droopy dancers placed randomly about the stage. Suddenly they’re everywhere, hauling each other out of their chairs, flinging each other into different seats–risky throws, dramatic partnering, precise athleticism. They pair and re-pair. One dancer caroms, interrupts, interposes. Three women “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” Brief moments of ensemble movement and square dancing emerge. A backward pirouette and spiral jump appear and return. A phrase materializes momentarily on six of the dancers, then the three duets disappear without a trace.
