CHICAGO MOVING COMPANY
The four works in the Chicago Moving Company’s current concert at the Dance Center are all driven by their music. Each dance has the character its music gives it, but its character is also determined by the way the choreographer connects the movement to the music: at one end of the spectrum that connection might be loose, dreamy, impressionistic, and at the other a beat-for-beat mapping of the dance onto its aural analogue. Nana Shineflug, CMC’s founder and artistic director, often uses music as a backdrop, a method that works exceptionally well in Windows (1985), which has just the same stillness and apparent randomness as its music, Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question.
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Windows, inspired by Edward Hopper’s paintings, is quiet at its heart–like that artist’s work, it seems arrested in a moment of contemplation. It opens with three women (Shaun Gilmore, Eileen Sheehan, and Krista Willberg) walking on one by one in silky nightclothes; one seats herself in a roomy armchair, the second on an unmade bed, and the third stands and smokes. Once they’re all onstage, only the cigarette smoke moves, drifting as thoughts do in the middle of the night. Then Shineflug enters, in a long Martha Graham-style slip, and with her large hands splayed starts looking for something, stepping and reaching. Clearly she’s the mind in contemplation, skimming the surface of some calm lake, trapped between two impenetrable worlds, the physical and the spiritual. Occasionally she moves into sync with the music’s phrases, pumping her flat hands up and down before her or circling her leg in a high rond de jambe and back into arabesque, ending with a lilting backward tilt of the head. She backs out of the lit portion of the stage and walks into it again several times, her mouth tugged down into a carved half-moon, her eyes staring.
A five-year-old’s suggestive but nonsensical metaphor included in the program is apparently meant to “illuminate” Falls of Rough. Clearly the dance has a circus motif, providing one or another of its six performers (Derrik Harris, Lori Helfand, Kay Wendt LaSota, Toby Lee, Sheehan, and Willberg) the occasional opportunity to don a ringmaster’s swallow-tailed coat or a clown’s big red nose or fiery bouffant wig. LaSota “rides” two ponies at once, one foot on the back of each hunched-over dancer, straddling the air with the help of two long, long canes. There are Punch and Judy antics and the flubbering lips of horses blowing, but the dreamlike whimsy Gilmore pursues eludes her. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the whimsy goes nowhere. The dance’s pieces, including its piecemeal music, are effective in spots, but they just don’t add up.
Different Trains ends rather too neatly, with a literal image of a stage that blithely equates choreographer and composer, suggesting that her art as well grows out of memory and imagination. Of course Shineflug was a child in the 40s too, and I’m sure the repeated phrase “They’re all gone now” resonates for her as it did for the composer and indeed as it must for anyone of a certain age. Yet for the most part the theatrical side of Different Trains works, its mime and occasionally literal images complementing the conductor’s calls and train sounds of Reich’s music, which are woven together into an aural fabric more tense and alive and therefore more compelling than the sounds of any actual railroad station could ever be.
