CHICAGO DANCE MEDIUM
For one thing, the Chicago Dance Medium appears to be trying to reduce dance principles to some pretty elementary levels–not technically but emotionally and intellectually. But do we teach children poetry by reading them greeting-card verses? Do we teach music by playing the latest Burger King jingle?
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The Chicago Dance Medium’s artistic director, Rosemary Doolas, choreographed three of this evening’s works; all of them display her basically sunny outlook and nice feeling for music. On the Water’s Edge (1987) looks pretty much like what you’d expect: several women (Katrina Barron, Julie Brodie, Laura Gould, Dawn Herron, and Debra Nanni) frolic on a beach, kicking the waves and tossing a ball. But the Vivaldi score has a rollicking sophistication that tends to offset the sometimes unimaginative choreography, and the dancers’ rhythm of tension and release occasionally works in an interesting counterpoint with the music.
Freefall/High Pointe (1986) starts out with a good, straightforward movement idea–that falling, whether real or the simulated, slow-motion variety, needs a center. The dancers (Patricia Ball, Herron, Lydia Taranco, Nanni, and Tom Siddoway) first perform Graham-style hard contractions while seated on the floor, like a stylization of women giving birth: heads back, arms up and flexed, legs turned out and flexed, hands and feet flexed, abdomens contracted like fists. Eventually they get up from the floor, and by swelling and rolling around their centers in apparent slow motion give the effect of parachutists in free-fall. What we see of the dancers’ absolute control contrasts nicely with the illusion of loss of control in falling.
This piece is loaded with chilling images, both visual and verbal images of sterility, of passivity, of emptiness, of incapacity. When the bride dully empties her pockets, for example, rice cascades to the floor like sawdust flowing from a dummy. It’s not the traditional rice toss. There’s a lot going on in The Bride Who Is a Stranger–perhaps too much–and I wondered where this bleak vision was headed. Still, its startling profusion of ideas, ideas that run wild and some times amok, grabbed my attention and imagination in a way the rest the evening had not.
