RIVER NORTH DANCE COMPANY
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Sherry Zunker Dow, artistic director of the River North Dance Company, formed in 1989, understands these impulses well. She has a background in jazz dance and has done mostly commercial work (television, movies, music videos) and musical theater, and it shows. Her appealingly extroverted dancers are clearly there to entertain, not to indulge themselves or the choreographer. It’s no coincidence that the company was the subject of a recent TV documentary (made by HMS Video) and that its performances at the Harold Washington Library Center sold out. Zunker Dow opened these concerts with a shortened, remixed version of that video. This is a woman who knows about liking to watch.
Zunker Dow consciously apes music videos in her Reality of a Dreamer, set to the Eurythmics song “Sweet Dreams,” enhanced by Doug Johnson’s live amplified bass fiddle. The piece is lit (by Todd Clark) to look smoky and grainy, and the often slow, sinuous choreography has the same allure and drama of slow-motion video. At one point the dancers even lip-synch the song.
Tony Savino’s Swing Partners (A World War II Jitterbug Suite) would be pretty ordinary if it weren’t for its same-sex partnering. In a remarkable barracks scene two men ogle a pinup calendar, dance with it, then with each other, then pull down the pants of a third. With the entrance of a fourth man they form two couples and swing their partners all over the stage, occasionally exchanging them. The clear effort to establish a heterosexual identity for the two men, their lingering, embracing dance together, then the near-rape of another man sit together very oddly. But the chemistry and energy of the men’s final jitterbugging with each other is undeniable, and it carries over into the last scene, in which men and women, women and women, men and men whirl together and apart so quickly and exuberantly the viewer no longer cares whose legs are flying into the air or how they got there.
