MORDINE & COMPANY
The need for expression–or a less personal need, the need for dance education–may have been what made Mordine step up to a microphone before each dance at each performance last weekend at the Dance Center to talk to the audience about her work. Whatever her reasons, it was an act of courage and generosity. Dancers don’t like words. Mordine also sidestepped her own tradition by creating a program made up entirely of her own dances–three recent works, each of which revolved, in a different manner, around mortality. So the evening was singularly unified.
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Several duets and solos form the heart of this work. They surface mysteriously to move the dance along, then sink back again into the matrix of ensemble dancing. It’s an organic structure, and the movement looks organic. Daniel Weltner, in a brief solo, quivers and slides to the floor, like an animal that’s been shot, and is carried off by the others. A duet for two women, Paula Frasz and Catherine Wettlaufer, is vaguely hostile: the younger woman pushes the older along, for example, one hand flat against the back of her head, both tiptoeing in a precarious moving balance. Later two male-female duets pare the tango to its essentials: a mating dance purifed.
Stylization also strongly colors Mordine’s premiere, Subject to Change–and may be part of the reason it’s not an easy dance to watch. The music is from the Kodo Drummers of Japan, but Richard Woodbury has manipulated it to produce peculiarly modern effects–turned the volume up and back down, for example, so that the drumming sounds like a train rushing at you and then receding. In the opening section the drums’ metronomic rhythm makes time palpable–a crucial sense for us to have in a dance about change.
Birthdays are evanescent; so are the people who have them. Last December, live accompaniment by the Oriana Singers for Five Ecstatic Dances enhanced our sense of the moment of celebration and its quick passage. Unfortunately, live accompaniment passed quickly, too. Real live musicians are almost prohibitively expensive for Chicago dance groups, but the hisses and clicks of the recorded music in this performance went beyond the merely annoying. This dance, as humane and mature as any I’ve seen, calls out for living voices, the breath that comes and goes as unexpectedly and inevitably as the living human shapes of the dance.
