Mad Shak Dance Company
Goodfellow’s Easel, premiered earlier this year at the Next Dance Festival, and the 1992 A Conference of My Ghosts are both quartets and both exemplars of the Shanahan movement style. But where the earlier dance has an obscure subtext about grief and loss, revealed mostly in voice-over lyrics (“My baby lies cold,” “Words seem so cold”), Goodfellow’s Easel follows a purely musical progression. At first Kevin O’Donnell coaxes from his trap set cut-off bursts of percussion–feints at meaning–then finally a long, drawn-out line like a strong wind with sudden gusts and lulls. Though their movements don’t change substantially, the dancers seem buoyed by this wind, urged into longer and more satisfying motions. (This dance worked better, however, at the Dance Center of Columbia College last January than in Link’s smaller space, where it didn’t achieve the same momentum.)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Shanahan’s step backward from the work she produced under the influence of the Hedwig Dance Lab suggests that if she can’t have someone else look at her dances, she should refine her own approaches and sensibilities. She needs to slow down, to think: In the Absence of A and Hive show that more thought means more coherence and more feeling. Hive in particular, with its quasi-humorous tone and underlying emotion, is the kind of complex work that can be seen several times and still reward attention. Part of that interest comes from the passionate dancing by the five performers–Dardi McGinley Gallivan, with her combined strength and lyricism, is particularly astonishing.
