SHELDON B. SMITH
Faced with the impossible, in this solo Sheldon B. Smith gives us a portrait of a politically correct dancer trying to do the impossible. Smith starts by jogging around the Link’s Hall stage and waving at the audience, like Jordan during warm-ups, as a punk song hammers its unintelligible message. Just when Smith looks like he’s ready to launch into the meat of the dance, he signals to the stage manager to cut the music and asks for different music, for “a lighter, 60s sort of thing.” As an overproduced version of “If I Had a Hammer” plays, Smith’s character gets political; he hammers at an imaginary nail, first with a hand hammer, then a sledgehammer, until losing all control he flings himself on the ground, hammering at it with his fists. Smith’s hapless dancer tries Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (a heroic pose) and Lennon’s “Imagine” (machine guns firing and bodies falling). In silence, Smith points to his open mouth, gestures and mimes speaking. A hand gesture of prayer turns into a gesture of being washed in water, as if being baptized. Two people argue, perhaps a boss and a wage slave.
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The greatest danger of Smith’s anarchic wit is to himself, that he might not focus on one target enough to become a true revolutionary. His premiere Rawl Plug is a breakthrough, a real moment of revolution. In the last few years a kind of Chicago dance style has evolved, composed of equal parts Tim Buckley’s swinging movements and stamping steps and Bob Eisen’s idiosyncratic vocabulary of shoulder rolls and inturned steps. Smith employs this intentionally naive style, which looks extraordinary in the hands of skilled dancers, at double speed with four strong women (Alt, Jenna Hunt, Judy, and Julie Worden), to a driving score by Bruce Gilbert. Using a traditional theme-and-variation form, Smith creates a dance of pure movement with few theatrical elements. Hunt starts the dance with a lightning-fast rendition of the basic movement phrase; when she’s joined by the other three dancers they repeat the phrase, then start partnering each other–Alt steps over a kneeling Judy, who lifts Alt onto her shoulder and turns her. The dance ends with the precision of a videotape splice: repeating the basic phrase, Judy jumps on one leg while the other leg is extended in second position; while she’s in the air the music stops abruptly and the stage blacks out.
