THE MOUNTAIN
The work by Lauri Macklin that I’ve seen–and it’s been regrettably little–has been vibrant, passionate, powerful, and most of all precise. Yet within that precision, Chicago choreographer Macklin discovers a playfulness that makes her self-consciously constrained vocabulary human.
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Macklin’s agenda in The Mountain seems to be to reveal the insidious dehumanization demanded by the corporate world. What makes this dehumanization so terrifying is that it is done in the name of “the family.” We hear a voice-over early in the piece telling us in a soothing tone that “corporations embrace a feeling of family,” but that “your success depends upon your being totally accepted by the family.” Sections from the book Dress for Success, read in voice-over, perfectly encapsulate such pseudo-fascist ideas, explaining that you must give up all personal preferences in order to fit into the corporate system. The dancers, clad in identical charcoal gray suits with cool yellow ties, generally perform exactly the same routines as everyone else onstage, routines that seem automatic, as if the dancers had been trained rather than rehearsed.
In general, Macklin’s images remain curiously one-dimensional, lacking the kind of opposition that has been the hallmark of her choreography. For instance, the corporate people remain disappointingly static. I didn’t discover anything about them beyond their wholesale belief in the corporate system, a belief that the piece clearly holds in contempt. The corporate people are simply equated with their roles. I longed to find the things that put them at odds with their corporate roles. I wanted them to seduce me into understanding their faith in corporate America.
