Chance Dance Fest
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Becoming centered requires years of practice. Martha Graham’s signature movement, a contraction, is an exercise for finding one’s center–for pulling the body’s power into one point so that it can be sent in another direction. One of Graham’s dancers, Dan Wagoner, described it as passing through a black hole–letting your body be pulled into a point of fantastic mass and compression, then passing through that point into an exploding universe full of movement and light. Only modern dance has this idea of a center; in ballet, a dancer rides on the straight lines of her spine and extended limbs. The single point of a center gives a modern dancer great freedom of movement compared to a ballet dancer, a freedom so extreme that it’s difficult for modern-dance choreographers to find and teach their particular way of moving.
Bob Eisen has been searching for his particular way of moving for the last several years. Formidable intelligence and iconoclasm have always been strengths in Eisen’s choreography, but recently his movement has become striking, defined by simple shapes made of taut lines held in place muscularly. For this year’s Chance Dance Fest, Eisen has created a quartet called 1 Thru 6 X 2 With Chance Variations, and the first shape he takes is bent at the waist in an acute angle, with arms and one leg stretching toward one side. Made up of sharp, flat planes joined at precise angles, this shape is almost like a folded piece of cardboard–a still form of once-organic matter. It’s a shape that has no center, no place where movement originates or settles. The emphasis on line and the absence of decoration recalls Merce Cunningham.
The deeper problem is that Mahler’s movement doesn’t have much authority because her body doesn’t seem to be the carefully worked creation that most dancers’ bodies are. Many dancers can make a simple movement seem not only worthy of attention but meaningful, such as Chicagoan Donna Mandel’s mere braiding of her hair onstage. Without this physical authority, Mahler’s dances just fall apart.
