NEW DANCES ’89
So where else can you go to see seven spanking-new dances by a total of 11 choreographers, some taking a first stab at making dances, and not be disappointed? Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble’s “New Dances ’89” has its high points and its low, but overall it’s a pretty nifty showcase for the preoccupations, styles, and points of view of several Chicago choreographers.
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Sarcophagus illustrates beyond any doubt the advantages of film. You can duplicate the dancer’s image to create perfectly synchronized unison movement. You can manipulate the dancer’s size, from much smaller to much larger than real life. You can create two images, one small and one large, and juxtapose or superimpose them. You can get much, much closer to the dancer than on any stage and see nuances of expression that are imperceptible in live performance. At times intimacy approaches voyeurism, as when Magden gives us a blowup of the dancer’s body prone and positions the camera between the dancer’s legs: Giudice’s groin towers in the foreground while his nose forms a little point off in the distance. But perhaps the greatest advantage is the camera’s ability to heighten the contrast between light and shadow, to offer a controlled single perspective that makes design easier, more available to the eye.
Tara Mitton’s Overexposure has all the sensuality and musicality that she typically demonstrates as a dancer. This piece for four men (Noel Cruz, Giudice, Carl Jeffries, and Todd Michael Kiech) and three women (Tina Morocco, Emily Stein, and Melissa Thodos) offers a complex, intriguing blend of “pure dance” and the occasional gesture from everyday life. A dancer laughs at something offstage, or looks in disbelief, or says with a flat hand chopping upward to the nose, “I’ve had it up to here.” Occasionally the original music by Winston Damon seems to speak, and at those times the dancers do too–bodies only, of course. At other times pure dance and the expressive gesture intersect, as when a dancer (Thodos), running in small steps that evoke frustration, bursts into a single explosive leap of pure anger.
In Global Warming, a quartet choreographed by Joanne Barrett and Laura Schwenk, Barrett danced brilliantly, as usual. But the dance is shapeless and prop happy: the dancers tip over a pail of liquid smoke, perform encircled by tires, and spray the air with aerosol cans. Pollution is undoubtedly the subject, but I confess to having been not only baffled but unmoved.
