TWO WOMEN’S TALES
Jan Bartoszek and Amy Osgood make fine dances–musical, well crafted, and thoughtfully produced. Both choreographers choose interesting scores and create shifting, complex relationships between the images, phrases, and structures of the movement and those of the music. Both acknowledge that choreography is a craft–acknowledge the nuts and bolts of making movement phrases, revising and repeating them, splintering and reshaping them–but do not exhibit that craftsmanship as an end in itself. Both present their dances with a sense of proportion: the movement, performance style, lighting, costuming, and score (whatever the particular combination of music, silence, sound, and spoken or taped text) all contribute to the work. No single aspect of performance overwhelms the others, nor does any aspect suffer neglect.
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Dicintio and Raglin enter wearing white lab coats. They aren’t soothing caretakers; they’re unacknowledged participants directing the dream. The pajamaed Rossen seems only dimly aware of them, her gaze unfocused as they push, lift, and catch her.
Another dream emerges, more enigmatic than the first. Small, gestural movements–fingertips drumming repeatedly on a palm, spread fingers cupping and lifting a breast–are juxtaposed with earlier movement motifs. The choreography strands first one dancer, then another: the lone dancer stands still and watchful at the edge of an eddy of movement, then she is swept away. Each dancer is participant and observer, dreamer and dream figure at once.
By the end of “Rogue,” Venus has grown self-conscious, no longer capable of believing her own platitudes about spring, beauty, a vision, no longer accepting what “Sandy” says. The trio’s movement echoes Venus’s changed consciousness: contractions initiated by the Botticelli hands; a hand stroking the opposite arm with the calculated deliberateness of a stripper; a frenzied, hunched tiptoeing. Movement and text both suggest ways of dealing with cultural expectations of women. Stereotypes can be internalized: Osgood shrinks, saying doubtfully, “Sandy says I am.” They can be accepted and exploited: Dankworth confronts the audience, standing with her hip cocked: “How d’ya think I got this job?” Or they can be overwhelming: LaSota folds into herself screaming “Vision! Vision!”
The Dance Center is a beautiful setting for dances like Bartoszek’s and Osgood’s–the lighting and sound systems are more sophisticated and versatile than anything available elsewhere–but seeing their dances there reminds us of what Chicago has lost. The thriving community of independent choreographers who worked here in the early 80s–a community that included Bartoszek and Osgood–has dissipated like mist on the lake. Some choreographers have moved to other cities, some to other careers. We should recognize that Chicago has nonetheless a handful of choreographers making dances at least as interesting as their more noted national counterparts’.
