Baubo Performance Project, Christine Munch, Rebecca Rossen, and August Tye
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The program that inaugurated the Dance Chicago ’95/Second Stage performances (in the Athenaeum’s newly remodeled smaller space) was split between dance theater and pure dance. Baubo Performance Project, a collaborative group of six women, presented a dance-theater piece about leaving home and, perhaps, finding a new home. WanderLust: A Migration in Three Parts begins with a line of women walking slowly onstage dressed in men’s black pants, white shirts stuffed to bursting with newspapers, and newspaper headdresses like very high, stiff collars, obscuring their faces. After processing to the rear of the stage, they begin frantically ripping the newspapers away from their heads and out of their shirts; finally three of the six have stripped off their shirts too, and the stage is strewn with torn paper.
The costumes suggest women pretending to be men, stuffed shirts whose true identities are literally buried. Tearing away the newspaper, revealing their soft breasts and small waists, Baubo essentially says: We’re not aberrant men, the way the culture so often defines women (think of Freud). Our nature is fundamentally different, and beautiful. At the same time, nudity onstage is a charged thing, often sensational. Removing their shirts suggests kids taking a dare, especially since a later section of text asks “have you ever?” questions in voice-over: “Have you ever eaten at Due’s pizza?” “Have you ever married a monster?” I imagined another: “Have you ever been nude onstage?” WanderLust suggests a taste for adventure, but the piece also reflects a lot of anxiety about venturing away from home and from convention. After they’ve been comfortably shirtless for a while, the women suddenly rush around picking up newspapers as if mom were on her way over for an unexpected visit; then they stop dead, clutching the newspapers to their chests, to face us in a self-protective, crouched phalanx.
Rebecca Rossen and her dancers seemed to embrace the small space and proximity of the audience, however. Keith Carollo, Matthew Cobb, and Rossen herself faced us unblinkingly–especially Carollo, whose steady gaze actually pulled me in. Perhaps they weren’t self-conscious partly because Rossen’s dances have nothing to do with technique as we know it: in fact Carollo and Cobb have little or no formal dance training.
