BILLBOARDS
“Sometimes It Snows in April” by Laura Dean is a peculiarly cool and silken introduction to the steamy ballet. In the first section, set to an atypically spare and lyrical song, the dance’s vocabulary is austerely classical, and its central images are simple geometric forms in space: straight lines, diagonals. The movement is unembellished–no multiple pirouettes, no jumps with multiple beats–just long, smooth sequences of turns, balances, leaps, and steps that devour space. The 18 dancers seem innumerable, the lines never-ending. The section closes with spinning, dipping lifts, a movement that prefigures the spatial concerns of the next.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The second section, set to “Trust,” sends the dancers spinning like planets revolving on their individual axes and rotating around an unseen sun. Circles, lines, and diagonals alternate; the movement grows increasingly complex–more conventional partnering and less repetition–while maintaining its geometric clarity. When the music changes again, to “Baby, I’m a Star,” the stage erupts in unison jumps and shimmies, evoking a 70s disco. (Remember the Hustle? I could swear I saw not just an allusion, but a direct quotation.) The steps and jumps pound the musical beat as relentlessly as an 80s aerobics class. The costumes too invoke nostalgia; the shiny gray shirts, trousers, and spaghetti-strap dresses sprinkled with silver jewels simultaneously recall John Travolta shirts, the white costumes of Laura Dean Musicians and Dancers, and Dean’s other Joffrey dances.
Even in parody, sleaze is sleaze: it’s not interesting for very long. “Thunder/Purple Rain” seems even longer than it is because Moulton co-opts music video’s music and movement vocabulary, but he has no theatrical equivalent for the multitudinous camera angles, fast cuts, and artful editing that enable music video to capture and hold the viewer’s attention. I expect parody to pillory and comment.
In Peter Pucci’s “Willing and Able” the viewer sees working dancing relationships, both gay and straight, but the dancing takes precedence over any hints of narrative. “Willing and Able” (set to “For You,” “The Question of U,” “It,” “Willing and Able,” and an excerpt from “Gett Off”) is dancing about dancing, but it’s culturally specific: the dance inserts something of our own time and place into the venerable body of the classical tradition. And dancing like this–virtuosic, spontaneous, unrestrained–is what makes me love ballet in spite of all its repressive imagery. Pointe shoes are sexy and fashionable, not instruments of disfigurement and torture.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Herbert Migdoll.
