ROUTE 142
Route 142 is a road show on a particularly small and human scale: if Les Miserables is a tank, Route 142 is a lightweight bicycle. Last year Eisen got a grant with no strings attached and decided to create a work that he could take on a midwestern tour. Chicago’s concert was to be the last of 20 cities in a tour completed in two months. To move that fast, you have to travel light. Eisen’s props are a stool, a kitchen timer, and a boom box. There’s no special lighting, and the dancers double as stagehands. Set the timer, or put a tape in the box, set the dancers in motion–and you have a dance.
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Route 142 has four sections: a solo for Eisen danced to the timer, a quartet to taped music by Chicago composer Michael Zerang, a talk Eisen has with the audience, and a duet for Eisen and Sheldon Smith to improvised vocalizing by the three performers not dancing. The title also suggests, however, that the entire tour is the “performance”–a performance that has been extended over two months and into several midwestern states. So Eisen’s talk, which focuses on the tour, is crucial–it’s a way for the audience to “see” that fact.
Eisen’s choreography is athletic, but not in the sense usually used in describing dance: high leaps are not the point. No athlete thinks about whether he looks pretty while he’s tackling someone or sliding into third, he just gets the job done. So do Eisen’s dancers, though their motive is cooperation. In the quartet especially, Laura Gould, Juli Hallihan, Kent Lindemer, and Sheldon Smith are a team, a team whose rapport is obvious. A hand on another’s back and a gentle push are companionable. A vault into the air that pivots around a standing dancer, the vaulter using the other’s shoulders for support, is strong and simple, not sentimental.
