JENNIFER MONSON AND YVONNE MEIER
In their combination of dance and performance art Jennifer Monson and Yvonne Meier seem to keep returning to their childhood. What they do looks like terrific fun: splashing in buckets of water, doing cartwheels and wheelbarrows, pouring honey all over themselves.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But I grew bored with their work quickly, just as I grew bored with show-offs when I was a kid. Perhaps it’s just me. I was a bookish little boy who had more fun reading about history than doing gross-out stuff like seeing how many bottles of Pepsi I could drink without barfing. But perhaps it’s just them.
The solo Meier performed herself was more fun and less humiliating. The slow belly dancing that begins it is again upstaged by performance-art elements. Most memorable is Meier stepping rapidly back and forth into buckets filled with water, like a football player practicing his footwork by stepping in tires. Meier then throws off her overshirt, soaked by the splashing water, and throws herself into wild head gyrations, like a headstrong girl in a tantrum. As the gyrations slowed and ended, I briefly saw a girl with hurt feelings, too full of life for her parents to handle. Then the disobedient girl pours white powder out of the statue of a cat, making a big mess that the gallery proprietors have to mop up.
