A LITTLE PERSONALITY
Sentience’s A Little Personality offers a lighthearted, personable, positively painless introduction to dance. If you sought a performance filled with finely finished and meticulously crafted work, you probably would have been disappointed by the barely structured dances and marginally successful improvisations on the program. But if you wanted to learn how people “read” or “get” a dance, or if you simply wanted to learn more about how people move, you would have found the program satisfying, edifying, and entertaining.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
More a lecture-demonstration than a performance, A Little Personality presents the basic analytical tools of Rudolf Laban, the century’s leading dance theoretician and metaphysician, in an immediately accessible, physical form. Sentience’s director Joan Majewska talks about an idea–one of Laban’s four motion factors of weight, space, time, and flow–and then the performers demonstrate that idea. It’s infinitely easier for us to see the difference between bound movement and free movement, for example, by watching the dancers in front of us than by reading pages of drawings and descriptions; the presentation makes visceral sense.
They stand side by side, facing the audience: two blonds–one nervous, one reassuring–their chins slightly tucked, shoulders up, fingers entwined just below the waist, legs together. Majewska gives her partner small suggestions: “Step toward me. Back up. Turn this way.” A little bit of magic occurs: we can no longer tell if one is leading and the other following; inhibitions drop as the range of movement gradually increases.
