DANCING IN THE STATE
Dancing in the Streets, a New York organization headed by Elise Bernhardt, last year embarked on an ambitious five-city project devoted to producing dance in public places. So far there’s been dance in Union Station in Washington, D.C., dance on the beach in Miami, and dance in an architectural landmark in Los Angeles. Last week the Dance Center of Columbia College cosponsored the lively “Dancing in the State” at Chicago’s State of Illinois Center. The final event is scheduled for a Philadelphia train station. So far, no dancing in an actual street.
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First came Mordine’s l990 Subject to Change, performed on the plaza against the backdrop of the Dubuffet sculpture rather than indoors. Strikingly, instead of wearing dance garb throughout as they have in the past, the seven dancers began in business dress and gradually stripped to dusky gold leotards. We’re all dancers underneath, Mordine seemed to say, all people with emotions we express in bodily ways despite our suit-uniforms and armor of accessories. She also retooled the dance to make use of the Dubuffet, which acted not only as the wings/dressing room but also, as dancers in various stages of undress peered from its nooks, as an enchanted forest, a place where magical transformations might occur.
I don’t know how Elizabeth Streb’s Airlines, made in l987, looked in its original environment, but in the State of Illinois Center it looked like a flat-out protest of the punishing demands made by institutions, whether corporate or state. The dance’s centerpiece is a somewhat irregular arrangement of metal bars, perhaps 12 feet square, like a jungle gym in only two dimensions. The backdrop for it here was the building’s soaring wall of glass above the main entrances, a wall divided into panes so that it resembles a fly’s eye: many eyes in one. The metal structure’s various rectangles are echoed in the composition of the wall of glass.
The text, some of it announced over a PA system and some shouted out by the dancers, is of the rabble-rousing variety. For example: “I want to see the governor / He owes me money / I’m thirsty / And he’s got my shoes.” It’s all a bit predictable and unclear at the same time; people around me (who did not have the text printed out for them) looked impressed but a little bewildered.
