Columbus Chicago Dance Connection
at the Skyline Stage, Navy Pier, August 19
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It was also appropriate, because the dances tended to be personal. Craig-Quijada even made a solo for her husband, Physical History. Philip Brooks’s bio reads, “He is not a dancer or choreographer. But he married one. Thus, his appearance here tonight.” Craig-Quijada seems to have been motivated to heal, not exploit: Brooks begins by whispering, then announces out loud that this is “the secret physical history of my family.” The often-humorous text, which he wrote, reveals a dysfunctional family obsessed with appearances but not very good at maintaining health: a father with hair transplants, a mother with a nose job and subsequent addiction to nasal spray, an anorexic sister. Brooks’s matter-of-fact delivery and rather offhand movement enhance the humor at the same time they underscore the sadness at the heart of the story: after Brooks describes embracing his sister–lifting her off the floor without realizing it because she’s so light–he briefly cups his hands and puffs a bit of air at us. Craig-Quijada’s simple movement is suited to a nondancer and to the text: an implied family insistence on perfection takes the form of walking a tightrope or trying to balance lying on the knife-edge of one’s side.
Craig-Quijada’s way of moving is connected but loose, and she plays that looseness for laughs in Scant Playground. Danced by Ohio State undergraduates Telly Fowler, Emily Pope, and Susan Sanborn, it feels a bit like an exercise for students: it has a single movement idea and, again, not much structure. But it’s very funny, subverting the usual dancerly ideal of muscled yet efficient movement: here the dancers are either falling all over each other or trying to move in inefficient, ungainly ways, hopping with arms crossed before them or squirming facedown across the floor on chest and toes. Fowler is an especially good comedian–he gets laughs just standing and letting his head fall back like an orange off a table–but all three perform well in this dance for narcoleptics.
The dances that worked best here were the bigger, jazzier ones. Unfortunately I missed Muntu Dance Theatre’s performance and half of Ballet Theatre of Chicago’s due to a misunderstanding about the show’s starting time; but of the pieces I saw, the best received were Hubbard Street’s hip-hoppy The Murk Groove, River North’s sultry Thief, and Randy Duncan’s finale, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me. Works that suffered because they’re smaller or less accessible were Kevin Iega Jeff’s Church of Nations (performed by Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre), a big work in a modern idiom about an issue–war–not immediately concerning this audience, and James Kelly’s sextet Love, Elvis, whose parodic 50s gestures were too small on this stage to be funny.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Eileen Glenn.
