IT’S ABOUT TIME
When a new dance company starts, one of its most difficult tasks is building a repertory. Talented dancers are only the ingredients; the master chef is that rare choreographer who finds the company’s personality and makes dances that fit it. The Hubbard Street Dance Company, for example, is actively building its repertory–commissioning works by Daniel Ezralow and reviving works by Twyla Tharp. New companies, without Hubbard Street’s financial resources, cannot afford to commission dances by experienced choreographers. Instead they must work with developing choreographers, and choreographer and company learn together how to make good dances.
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Zephyr’s four dancers–Karen Brettschneider, Kranicke, Margaret Reynolds, and Caroline Walsh–are all well trained. Three of them studied at Barat College in Lake Forest; Barat’s known for training dancers well but not exposing them to new choreographic ideas, perhaps because it’s isolated from Chicago’s dance community.
The Zephyr dancers are so well trained that Janson and Klotzer both fell into the mistake of making dances that are too technical. Klotzer’s The Fruit of the Vine and Janson’s Anemone are marred by lovely but uninspired movement taken directly from technique classes. Though beautifully executed, the movement is not shaded to fit the dance; as a result it feels vague and generic. Neither dance is well structured; each seems just a wandering long sequence. Klotzer is particularly poor at transitions between movements, which are not made rhythmically clear: unfortunately they make the Zephyr dancers look more inexperienced than they are. Janson’s Anemone is more carefully done, but sustains its tone of deep-sea dreaminess for too long; the dance cries out for a change of texture, for development in a new direction.
Janson’s The Machine Within the Machine Within the Machine Within is more inventive and daring; she also introduces a story that keeps the audience’s interest: three dancers in business dress force a fourth to conform. Though the story is simple, Janson structures the dance well to carry the theme. The three dancers keep returning to a stance like that of soldiers at parade rest, hands behind their backs and feet spread wide apart. Each has a solo, out of which emerges a hand gesture: punching, looking at her hands as if they had blood on them, holding one hand to keep from hitting with it. When the three start to humiliate the lone dancer, their actions seem reasonable and motivated.
