JOEL HALL DANCERS
So dance that fits a mold, or dancers who obey the letter but not the spirit of the choreography, can seem airless and stuffy–without that breath and ease that belong to the no-man’s-land, dangerous but free, where creativity is possible. When I see a dancer’s leg reaching hopelessly for the sky, it’s deadly to perceive it as bone wrapped with muscle or as an identifiable step from a particular dance vocabulary. I need to see the dancer succeed despite the hopelessness–the impossibility–of the attempt.
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The Joel Hall Dancers, a committed, hard-working, 15-year-old Chicago jazz-dance troupe, appeared last weekend at the newly refurbished Blackstone Theatre. It’s a lovely place to see dance, intimate and beautifully restored. It was also hot as hell the night I was there. And though I wondered whether the dancers were suffering as much as I was, I don’t believe the stuffy atmosphere of the performance was entirely the fault of the theater. It may be that jazz dance, with its codified vocabulary and familiar look, needs more oomph than other dance forms to look fresh. But even the group’s closer, Talley Beatty’s Month of Sundays (1979), a revival-meeting stomp created for the Hall dancers, produced a merely dutiful air of excitement.
A program note advised me that Hall’s latest work, Now You See It, Now You Don’t (1988), is “dedicated to the plight of the homeless.” A quote in the program from Ralph Ellison further tied the dance to the plight of the invisible of every sort. I was sorry to see that the music would consist of four songs (by Daniel Ponce, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and Chico Freeman) because I’d gotten a little tired of the predictable medley-of-popular-tunes formula in Nightwalker and That’s a Fac’, Jack!
We’re shown both the effort and the lilt in the simplest movement. And after all, it’s just that combination of will and serendipity that keeps us coming back for more.
