EMERGING VISIONS: THE CHOREOGRAPHERS’ MENTOR PROJECT
Strangely, it sometimes takes an outside eye to refine, even to evoke an artist’s true vision. “Emerging Visions: The Choreographers’ Mentor Project,” a new undertaking by the Dance Center, has done just that: apprenticed four of Chicago’s most interesting choreographers–Ann Boyd, Bob Eisen, Mary Johnston- Coursey, and Kathleen Maltese–to two of Chicago’s most intelligent and mature choreographers, Jan Erkert and Shirley Mordine. Each of the four produced a new work (Boyd in collaboration with Julia Neary, an actress) for this concert, and the distinctive, rich, polished results suggest just how valuable an outside eye can be. In some cases the gap between adviser and advisee must have been small: Eisen and Maltese have worked in Chicago for more than a dozen years. Certainly it’s to the credit of the mentors that all four artists looked more like themselves than ever, only better.
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In this piece Maltese tries to give us back the valuable and irreplaceable word “girl,” long proscribed by the politically correct. Maltese delivers most of the text herself (the other performers are Christine Bornarth and Donna Mandel) in her soft, breathy, rather high-pitched, definitely girlish voice. Wryly humorous, she gives Sedimentary Girl some almost silly movement: smoothly cycling legs to the words “synchronized swimming,” a punning motion to the word “sidekick.” Variations on girlish companionship permeate the choreography–the way girls lie together in a tangle while they talk, the teasing way they have of copying each other.
Johnston-Coursey is a bountiful dancer–and sometimes in the past, perhaps as a result of that energy, her choreography has seemed to have too much happening too fast. In Songs the meter has been slowed, the movement pared, so we see the pulsing impetus behind the energy, the accumulation and flow from one moment to the next. There are frequent contrasts between inertness and life: a dancer leaps–instantly, it seems–from a drooping pose to a tense, almost military stance, arms raised, palms out; or some dancers lie on the floor while others whirl around their curled bodies. Often the rhythms of the dancing repeat the complex, half-hidden rhythms of the songs. Other, more overt rhythms disappear soon after we recognize them: several dancers roll from side to side on their backs, beating their legs and hands against the floor in a kind of marching beat to the song “Guard in a Grey Iron Prison.” But the motion and rhythm don’t last and don’t reappear. Johnston-Coursey starts a stamping run in a circle that’s taken up by the other dancers; as soon as the rhythm is plain to us, the choreographer goes on to something else.
At the beginning five dancers (Eisen, Anthony Gongora, Christy Munch, Dan Prindle, and Mark Schulze) walk onstage under full light and take their positions: Eisen at center stage, the others in an upstage corner. All but Eisen wear pants and loose, sleeveless tops; Eisen himself is bare-chested and wears what appear to be pajama bottoms. Our immediate sense that he’s more vulnerable than the others is reinforced when he begins to rapidly lie down and get up, lie down and get up–a sequence that seems to go on forever but is varied by an occasional walking pattern or gesture while standing; he massages his own head in a wide circle, for instance.
