ALL YOU CAN EAT AND OTHER HUMAN WEAKNESSES
“All You Can Eat and Other Human Weaknesses,” the Chicago premiere of Xsight! Performance Group, is quite simply the most electric debut concert I’ve ever seen. A one-time-only, whacked-out performance event created by Brian Jeffery, Timothy O’Slynne, and Mary Ward, “All You Can Eat” comprises dances and comic sketches within the framework of a 60s spy-show parody. Yes, the concept is as hokey as it sounds, but it enables the trio to produce a performance that is consistently unpretentious, entertaining, and accessible, and often intelligent, thought-provoking, and resonant.
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A ballet of dreams, Fallen Angels is–like many of Ward’s works–just a trifle mad. Each pajamaed performer dances the central character in a different dream drama; in the coda, the images from the three dreams, suggesting Catholicism, fundamentalism, and sex, mingle and merge. O’Slynne flaps and wheels before two tempting, larger-than-life immortals. Jeffery writhes, leaps, and struggles, constrained equally by his bedclothes and his fears. Ward pounces on Jeffery and O’Slynne, yanking and dragging them until they do the same to her. Self-mocking, serious, and gleeful by turns, Fallen Angels is both straightforward and sophisticated. A great part of the pleasure of seeing the dance again in a smaller theater was that its wealth of detail–the nuances of gesture and expression, the subtle. play of light on billowing fabric–“read” better.
Jeffery and O’Slynne dance Small Craft Warnings simply. And this kind of simplicity is inevitably moving. Their performance calls attention to the dance itself, to the act of dancing, but never to themselves as dancers; their dancing is depersonalized yet not impersonal. Clarke’s choreography offers no easy hiding places behind cheap stereotypes, just the occasion for honest, unmannered dancing. What a rare pleasure it is to see two strong male dancers in choreography that doesn’t trivialize sexuality, glorify the gymnasium, or worship war.
Reduced to its essential elements, Boy in a Baggie consists only of two male voices speaking on tape, a shaft of white light, and O’Slynne, wearing an oversize clear plastic bag, walking slowly backward and lowering his arms. Scant material indeed, but it says plenty about the death around us.
