SUSANNE LINKE
At the core of Linke’s great art is a great humility, the kind that leads an artist to perfectionism: because it’s so easy for things to go wrong, no detail can be left to chance. Linke not only choreographed and performed the four solos on her program last weekend at the Harold Washington Library Theatre (presented by the Dance Center of Columbia College and the Morrison-Shearer Foundation), she also designed the costumes and collaborated on the lighting (with Johan Delaere). In each piece she aims at a single but complex effect, and every well-chosen detail contributes–not only costume and lighting but music and, most important, the character of the dancing.
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One of those ends is to remake herself in each dance–and transformation is also the subject of her first solo, Wandlung (“Change”), an homage to Mary Wigman. It opens with Linke flat on her back, bathed in a glowing golden light, her chin lifted and strong. She’s not relaxed, not a human being in a natural pose; she seems carved, a ceremonial figure better suited to the lid of a sarcophagus than to a bed. Slowly one knee lifts, and an arm. Moments later, torso arched, she fully achieves the effect of levitation by rotating 180 degrees, still lying on her back and with no apparent effort or even movement.
Im Bade Wannen is affecting in the most obscure and unlikely ways. It opens with Linke sitting on a commode; she rises, drops her skirt, carries a towel a bit upstage to an old-fashioned bathtub on legs. Blinding white light and scraped hair emphasize her skull and the luminosity of her skin–eerily she resembles the tub itself, looking hard and scoured and much older than in the first dance. She begins to circle the tub, brushing the rim with her towel; she looks serious, almost distracted–her motions and mien suggest a mad housewife. Meanwhile the music is festive, almost circuslike; she moves unpredictably into and out of rhythm with it, seeming to work her way, almost row her way, through these light, musing compositions.
Her one prop is a huge square of pale blue cloth elaborately folded accordion-style and rolled; her task is to unroll and unfold it, though as often as not she undoes her own work. At one early point she repeats an obsessive back-and-forth phrase, unrolling the cloth a little bit more each time. It’s like knitting–in order to go forward she has to go back, picking up old stitches–and similarly soothing and maddening. It’s hard to see the blue cloth, which sometimes resembles a road, sometimes a billowing sea, as anything but a metaphor for life itself; but the halting rehearsal tape and Linke’s often prosaic movement, which moves in and out of sync with the music, save the dance from sentimentality, as does her final act of self-effacement.
