JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE COMPANY
The Holmes company seems to be “black” in a different and more elusive way. For starters, JHCDC is generally not afraid of emotion: the highs are higher, the lows are lower. Take Love Not Me, for instance, a recent (1989) piece of Duncan choreography: A woman (Winifred Haun) writhes on a chunky, angular, medieval-looking chair in a shaft of light so pure and blindingly white it seems to have come straight from hell. The harsh lighting and the choreography–which is all asymmetry and diagonals, shoulders askew, arms awry, one leg or the other reaching to make an emphatic but obscure point–reveal a wild woman in a wild state of grief. When the dancer holds her rigidly pointed leg straight up in the air with both hands, it’s as if she were holding a cocked rifle, about to aim and shoot. The piano music, by Allan Segall, is percussive, spare, modern, but entirely dramatic: in this hyperemotional state, every moment seems to bring a new agony.
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Though I’m becoming convinced that a romantic duet may be one of the most difficult things to pull off in dance–they beg for cliches, and even if the cliches aren’t there, the audience will read them in–Medley contains a duet with some more than usually inauthentic moments. (At one point I thought the dancers’ smirks meant they were going to break into hysterical laughter at their own antics.) Medley’s blandness makes its genuine innovations stand out: the vulgarity of Patrick Mullaney’s pelvic thrusts directly at the audience, a big smile on his face; the surprise of Kevin Ware’s whirling in midair from front to back to front prone positions on the floor.
