JULIE SALK AND THE ZEPHYR DANCE ENSEMBLE
The concert was literally incredible: it was hard to believe that such complex and evocative images could be produced with such minimal means. De Kalb’s Emergence Dance Theatre is just upstairs from the Duck Soup Co-op. From the outside the building looked a bit dumpy, but inside was one of the most beautiful and intelligently designed dance spaces I’ve yet encountered. Merely a large studio with black curtains hung to mask the wings and an enormous white cyclorama hung upstage, the room’s proportions somehow created the illusion of a great expanse, which was perfect for the first piece, Westward Woman.
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All five dances on the program were choreographed by Salk, some for herself and others for the five-member Zephyr troupe. Westward Woman, a solo, presented fragments from Lillian Schissels’s Woman’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (read with engaging sincerity by Marie Lanier-Gandy). These readings alternated with Salk’s simple, typically American dance, full of gestures characteristic of the frontier life: throwing a lariat, doing a square dance, hitching up boots, lifting milk pails. These gestures, performed with the nonchalance of a daily chore, appeared and disappeared arrhythmically, weaving an intricate texture. Three homespun skirts, which lay on the floor at the beginning of the piece, enhanced this textured feel. To mark transitions between movements, Salk would pick up a skirt, languidly put it on, and sway quietly with her back to the audience, evoking a calm and yet lonely mood, as if she were standing before a great plain musing about her uncertain future.
Doux Amere succeeded in creating disturbing images of addiction and self-destruction. Set to Billie Holiday’s recording of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” Doux Amere explored physically images of excess. The piece began with Salk sitting in a chair stage right, dressed in a black camisole, her head bent down in concentration. When she finally looked up at the audience, she began to shake uncontrollably. Dancing seemed at first to alleviate her condition. But ultimately it offered no solace, for whatever movement she performed, she seemed compelled to repeat it and exaggerate it until it became a grotesque caricature. It was as if the dancer had been caught in some sort of emotional spiral or whirlpool, which was physically manifested. In one almost unwatchable section, she sat in the chair, and then slid to the floor and crawled away from it. Immediately she flew back into the chair, and then crawled away again, only to be thrown back into the chair with twice the force. This continued until the crawling and the returning to the chair were almost indistinguishable.
