Jan Erkert & Dancers and James Kelly Choreography Project
Watching two of the opening programs in the six-week Dance Chicago ’95 fest, I felt like crowing about how Chicago choreographers balance so well on the fine line between entertainment and instruction. But then that formulation began to crumble. What’s entertaining and what’s instructive? Is entertainment fun and instruction boring by definition? Or do we actually prefer instruction when it comes to dance, because meaning is easier to grasp than pleasure? And isn’t discovering meaning a pleasure in itself?
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On one of the four programs last weekend Jan Erkert & Dancers showed they can do it all, perhaps partly because Erkert’s impulse is to return to first principles. In the 1994 Without Sense, a duet in which the dancers are alternately blindfolded, she doesn’t just go for laughs or thrills–though she gets those too–she opens up fundamental issues of trust and communication, even the hows and whys of moving in space. Having the “sighted” dancer describe or prescribe what the “blind” dancer does makes us wonder how any of us moves: By our own volition? As we’re directed by others? Do we “tell” ourselves what to do verbally? Or take orders from some speechless, instinctive creature inside us? In A Silent Place, a work in progress, Erkert evokes the laboratory of dreams: with Sara Livingston’s video of Mexican sites as a backdrop, projected on a piece of fabric like a huge bedsheet, Erkert improvises a solo that somehow suggests the soul wrestling with the images and occurrences of everyday life–which, the way the soul sees them, aren’t at all everyday.
The James Kelly Choreography Project, which shared the bill with Erkert & Dancers, didn’t attain the same level of performance. Part of the problem is that, where Erkert has had a pretty stable core of dancers for a number of years, Kelly has had to pick up dancers for each new performance, which means they might change every few months. And judging by the program credits, he’s the kind of choreographer who comes up with the movement material himself, which means imposing his style and ideas on the dancers.
Like I.S.T.B.E. #9, Schulze’s showcase premiere To My Whomever is obscurely meaningful and mysteriously tender. It also resembles his earlier Third Step In, Dip: both rely on the conventions of ballroom dance for their humor. To My Whomever, danced by Schulze and Felicia Ballos in old-fashioned formal clothes to old-fashioned ballads like “You Leave Me Breathless,” creates a distance between the man and woman that’s somehow never violated, even when one of them sits on the other’s rump. This isn’t a sad distance–it’s a respectful distance between two reserved people unafraid of undignified acts, or perhaps unaware that they’re undignified.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/William Frederking.
