JOSEPH HOLMES CHICAGO DANCE THEATRE
And now there’s Patrick Mullaney, in the new solo Randy Duncan created for him. Unarmed, the only new work on Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre’s program at the Civic Opera House last weekend, offers an almost perfect marriage of music, visual design, choreography, and the dancer’s abilities. Mullaney, who first trained as a gymnast, is everything you’d want in a dancer: strong, elastic, secure, and capable of astonishing definition and speed, he’s like some gorgeous mechanical creature. Yet until now he hasn’t generally been a good instrument for feeling–perhaps because he’s let us see only his technique. In many dances he adopts a comic persona; he tends to play the wicked schoolboy in such ensemble works as Duncan’s Bittersweet Av and Keith Lee’s Medley, grinning and winking shamelessly. But in Unarmed, Duncan has found a way to make Mullaney’s technique part and parcel of an affecting and serious dance, and without changing or in any way devaluing the dancer’s technical accomplishment.
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The more I see of Duncan’s work, the more capable I think he is of emotional, even spiritual power. You can see it in a dance like Copland Motets (1991), where the close partnering sometimes looks clotted rather than lofty yet the aim is consistently transcendent. Aaron Copland’s a cappella music (in a taped version by the Oriana Singers) is central to this work; in Duncan’s 1986 Turning Tides, Sam Harris’s music carries the dance. Duncan often relies on vocal music’s complex, uneven phrasing and the impact of the lyrics to supply the mood and some of the message and development of his dances. That may be a limitation of sorts, and yet there’s something appropriate and even inspired in the symbiotic relationship Duncan develops between music and movement. It may be that he frequently chooses vocal music out of a wish to communicate something important rather than merely entertain. A piece like Women’s Work (1990), which uses an instrumental score by Tom Kast, doesn’t seem to go anywhere: the creative impulse behind it seems weak, though I suspect the music is more symptom than source of the problem.
