STANDING IN THE WINGS
at the Circle Theatre
This concert began and ended with a quartet dressed in white. Todd Michael Kiech’s untitled work in progress uses three men (Angel Abcede, Louie Miller, and Kiech) and a boyish-looking woman (Cheryl Bye) in white T-shirts, white pants, and white sneakers. As the lights come up, Kiech steps away from the group to start a sequence of loose, circular falling movements. A turn on the toe of his sneaker turns into a quick pirouette in plie. The continual momentum-filled movement is always under control and always fluid.
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Leigh Richey’s Don’t Talk to Me, which ended this program, in many ways is the heterosexual parallel to Kiech’s work: a quartet dressed in white sketches a story with continual overlapping movements. Richey’s story involves two male-female couples (Joerg Chabowski, May Ho, Matthew Keef, and Sabine Parzer) who are fighting; she sketches the moment when the fights become emotionally and physically violent. Richey tells her story with painful accuracy.
The choreography of Jeanette Welp, a member of the “multidisciplinary performance group” the Sock Monkeys, seems to be postmodern dance’s answer to the Marx Brothers. Welp begins her solo, Guava Five, by throwing shoes from behind the audience onto the dance floor. She then comes onstage, picks one shoe she likes, and throws the others off the floor. She puts on the shoe, a black sneaker, and dances in it, hopping, leaping, and swinging until the sock on her other foot makes her slip into the splits. Welp then plucks the other black sneaker from the side of the stage, where she has cleverly planted it. After dancing, mercifully in two shoes, for a few minutes, Welp starts singing to herself like a little girl dancing in her living room. Finally, she kicks one shoe off and walks offstage. After her bow, she picks up the spare shoes and garners another round of applause as she walks off with her armloads of footgear.
Neither solo developed the movement; they were catalogs of movements that the dancers had perfected. Each dance was lovely to watch but the experience was a bit like eating candy: too sweet and bad for you. Curiously, both dances reminded me of Ruth St. Denis’s dances from the beginning of the century. St. Denis relied on costume and exotic movement to communicate her ideas. The tradition of black dance in which Cato clearly places herself started with Katherine Dunham’s re-creations of African rituals, which like St. Denis’s dances relied on exotic costumes and sets. Modern dance did not start until some of St. Denis’s pupils, such as Martha Graham, found other ways to communicate ideas. Perhaps a black Martha Graham will someday redefine black dance and find other ways to say what it wants to say, but as long as black dance relies on St. Denis’s brand of exotic externals, it will be condemned to prettiness.
New choreographers do still emerge sometimes in the traditional way: like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, they just decide to put on a show. At the Circle Theatre in Forest Park, a few blocks from the terminus of the Lake Street el line, Chambre Dance Company presented ballet in a chamber setting. Interspersed among the 16 short dances on the program were a few genuinely funny bits, some interesting ideas, some moments of good choreography, and a lot of romantic dross. (Chambre Dance’s premiere was linked with “Standing in the Wings” by the presence of Douglas McMinimy, who performed three pieces in the first half of the show, then rushed to the DanceSpace.)
