NATIONAL FACULTY CHOREOGRAPHY SERIES III
The American College Dance Festival is an annual week-long occurrence for college students and faculty; its board meeting was held in Chicago this year, and this concert was associated with that event. Woody McGriff, the series coordinator, explained to the audience that 38 dances were submitted; three adjudicators, including Reader critic Cerinda Survant, winnowed them down to just nine.
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Curtis’s movement is more lean and bare than Chiao-Ping’s; it does not express emotion so much as embody it. In one moment, Curtis stands in a vertical bar of light, as in the aisle of a train. An eerie siren combines with a repetitive, percussive melody to give a sense of a moving train’s click-clack. Curtis moves from one foot to the other, her arm up, as if riding a train standing up. It’s not a witty image capturing in movement a common experience–instead Curtis’s image is disturbing. Her train has an unstoppable momentum, like a life out of control. Shortly after this, Curtis moves into a horizontal bar of light, making a movement like throwing dice in a game of craps. At the end of the dance, the vertical and horizontal bars of light intersect in a cross, with Curtis at the center, crucified in the glare of an overhead light. The aim of Curtis’s imagery is to bring into focus the murkiness of the dark night of the soul; it finally resolves into religiosity.
A thoroughly convincing walk through the terrain of relationships, Stormy Brandenberger’s Memories tells the story of a first romance. The girl (Danielle Terese Knoll) chases the guy (Timothy Gimpel), putting her chair down to catch his eye. When he still doesn’t notice her, Knoll puts her chair down directly in front of Gimpel and tackles him. He gets away and, moving his chair, sits down again. Again she tries to tackle him, but this time she tackles thin air; she doesn’t seem to notice the difference. Knoll seems as much in love with romance as with a man. Such wry details fill Brandenberger’s dance, as well as an exact memory of the many stages of a romance. Brandenberger sidesteps cliches gracefully, as when Gimpel steps out of the dance to tell a story about playing with a balloon: he lets it go and catches it again, until he accidentally lets the string slip through his fingers. Brandenberger captures the callousness of young men, who play by pushing a girl away and then pulling her back, as well as the puzzlement of older men looking at their younger selves.
Wit and passion started to work together in Charles Abraham and Carol Childs’s Common Law. Set to a blues song by John Mayall’s band, Common Law presents a man (L.D. Burris) and his common-law wife (Childs). Image after image recalls the poverty of dusty southern towns described in blues songs. The dance has the sexual intensity of Delta blues songs too: Burris and Childs kiss; they roll across the floor in an embrace; and Burris lies on top of Childs in a straightforward mime of sex. When he’s hurt, she pulls him up–but she wipes her hands first. He carries her on his shoulder as she kicks, trying to escape. In the last image, Burris curls into a fetal position as if wounded, while Childs stands over him, like a tough woman glad to see her rough husband in pain. Abraham and Childs have created a dance with a story we all know, and they tell their story with wit and feeling. In the context of this program, Common Law is an old dance, created in 1982; the dance itself seems a little dusty and old-fashioned, like a history professor lecturing with passion about a society that no longer exists. Meanwhile note-taking students secretly wonder why the professor cares so much.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/John Weinstein.
