THE ART OF THE SOLO OR GOING STARK RAVING MAD IN A ROOM BY YOURSELF
Erkert is one of Chicago’s best choreographers, nominated three times for the city’s Ruth Page award for choreography and winning once. She began a remarkable cycle of dances in 1991, in an all-woman concert whose unifying theme was mothers and daughters. Erkert’s 1992 concert dove into gender issues, with dances about her father, about regular guys (including Erkert’s husband), about growing up female, as well as a reworking of her Sensual Spaces that added a father figure to Erkert’s own mother figure. By 1993 Erkert was deeply involved politically, organizing community workshops for women, many of whom performed in the 1993 concert. But her political dances were wooden, more slogan than art. And the community of women the dances attracted was not supportive but rigid–women who had fixed ideas of gender roles and knew who to blame. In 1992’s Glass Ceilings Erkert was still wittily refusing to accept gender stereotypes; but in 1993’s Two Lives of Women she divided the dancers into tomboys and hesitant girls.
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Aside from Erkert’s, the most successful solo was Anthony Gongora’s Listening Without Ears. He sets the stage with an eye-height candle and a scroll painted with a mosaic of colorful scenes. Circling the candlelit room, he talks about a choice between remaining in darkness or coming into the light. Then the lights rise, and Gongora dances variations on two themes to four French Baroque chamber music pieces, using both the quick, precise, virtuoso movement only he can do and slower movement with almost a narcotic quality. The dance ends with Gongora facing the candle and very slowly letting his right hand grasp his throat.
