Construction workers doing double time building the Skyline Stage on Navy Pier don’t even bother with a double take when a woman wearing a ratty white wig and pouf of a miniskirt over her faded jeans strides through the site. She walks past roofers completing the concession stands, electricians wiring on the catwalk, and climbs on the stage. There she opens the door of a makeshift cabinet on wheels. She climbs inside, squats, and wiggles her hips. With her knees tucked under her skirt, she looks like a dancing midget.
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This is what happens when a performance art troupe tries to stage a site-specific work and the site specified hasn’t yet been built. The International Theatre Festival had been expecting the Skyline Stage to be ready by May 1. That was the day Dogtroep, the festival’s opening act, arrived from Holland with a cargo container full of bicycles, costumes, and hand-held power tools to begin building the set for Camel Gossip III.
Dogtroep has performed on a snow-covered hillside during the Winter Olympics in Albertville, in front of the opera house in Frankfurt, and in the scorching heat of Seville. Each production is different. In France performers and buildings emerged from under the snow. In Germany the company members worked with huge flames; in Spain they played with water. This is the first time the group will actually perform in a theater. And it’s also the first time it has created a show in an environment that’s constantly changing. “I felt awful at first,” Zandvliet says about the mayhem on the pier. But Dogtroep has adapted.
“I don’t think a union carpenter could have built this!” the Dogtroep guy said. And he’s right. “If you took one pole away,” says Han Bakker, Dogtroep’s executive director, “the whole thing would come tumbling down.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Lloyd DeGrane.
