MOUTH
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Choreographer Robin Lakes has a knack for exploring the simple but essential things in life. In Mouth, her new full-length piece, she muses on that strange opening in our face, thoroughly examining the acts of kissing, biting, suckling, talking, and eating. Their nuances are taken into account, and their ramifications toted up. “All my sins pass through my mouth in one direction or another,” she states at one point–proof that there’s more to the mouth than lips, teeth, and tongue. But though Lakes’s ideas are good and worthy, they don’t come off as well as they might. The emotional depth that usually characterizes her choreography is sadly lacking here, and her ideas never really reach the audience.
On a purely intellectual level, Mouth is fascinating. But its potential charm has gotten buried under a mountain of inappropriate music and mediocre acting. Lakes’s choreography generally shines with poignant details. Her dancers here play real people doing real-people things–saying grace, scratching their heads, munching popcorn. When filled with emotion, such mundane movements can be captivating. But unfortunately, few of the dancers assembled for this piece know how to fill them. Their interpretation of Lakes’s choreography is often shallow and artificial: in most of the scenes, it seems they didn’t fully understand or know how to communicate the point she was trying to make.
