Next Generation Project
The first half of the evening featured three dark dance-theater works, haunting narratives suggested by costumes, movement, and a spare, graceful transformation of the stage. These pieces felt very urban, reflecting the starkness and shifting connections of city life in issues of isolation, illness, and violence. The vibrations of the nearby el, rocking at random through each piece, added a gritty dimension: these works didn’t feel sealed off from city life but exposed and vulnerable to it.
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Box, a narrative dance in the tradition of Merce Cunningham, choreographed by Atalee Judy for Breakbone Dance Company, shows a man emerging from self-imposed isolation with the help of four female spirits. Bon Harris sits limply, restlessly slumped next to his television and his tropical fish, moving aimlessly in repeated desultory gestures. Four angels struggle to get him to move, sliding “invisibly” into his room, dancing and gesturing to raise his energy, sometimes mirroring his movements. Lifting and supporting each other, the angels move in and out of a shelflike box at the back of the stage, like dolls stored away and released. Finally they lead him out of his room by holding his fish in a bowl before him, carrying him across the stage on their rolling bodies, lifting his feet with their hands so he doesn’t touch the ground, and finally placing him in the shelf structure. From there he walks slowly, calmly, through the audience and out of the theater. This touching, slow-moving journey, a commentary on healing and liberation, never explains itself but revels in its simplicity.
After such risky, confrontational, and beautiful pieces, the second half of the evening was disappointing, static despite its solidity and intelligence. Scenes From the Gray Area: The Art and Times of Richo, a film by Cynthia Reid and Rich Wilson, is a clever short about a fictional performance artist that satirizes the performance scene. The film amuses by quoting the noirish excess of documentaries about performance art, such as smart film angles, and by making in-jokes about the Chicago dance-performance community. Reid and Wilson are good at snide irony, and the locals who appear as Richo’s critics, acolytes, and collaborators skewer the pomposities of stardom quite sweetly, if a little redundantly. But the sarcastic hipper-than-thou goofiness wears thin, and when the audience members who’d come to see themselves on film left before the next performance began, it seemed the piece had stoked egos, not deflated rude-boy arrogance.
