DANCE AFRICA/CHICAGO 1993
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But dance on a concert stage has to be structured to make theatrical sense, a concern separate from but sometimes related to such magic. And for some reason at DanceAfrica/Chicago 1993, sponsored again by the Dance Center of Columbia College, I kept thinking about whether things made sense theatrically or not. For one thing, novelty is a theatrical virtue, and the lineup here was completely new: none of the four companies had appeared in the two previous DanceAfricas. It was also obvious that efforts had been made to shorten the show, partly by trimming some of the onstage ceremony: brevity’s another virtue, maybe especially in light of last year’s event, which lasted a good three hours and genuinely tried the audience’s stamina.
S.P.I.R.I.T.S., a Chicago group, has a built-in theatricality: it relies on costumes and props, masks and heavy makeup, for much of its effect. Never Ending begins eerily with throaty blasts on a horn, animal sounds, bells, and a figure whirling in the half dark. One by one mysterious beings enter: a tiny person, his face and body shining with heavy white bars of makeup, who does back flips all the way across the stage; a man in glittery top hat with face half dark, half white; several people on stilts; a bird or crocodile shaggy with hair or feathers; a whirling broom; an acrobat; a guy on even taller stilts; and finally an enigmatic central figure, a hairy mound with a tiny goat mask on one side of its head and a heavy-lidded human mask on the other. Each figure was striking in itself, but as a whole Never Ending didn’t go anywhere. If there was a narrative I couldn’t tell what it was (and the section titles in the program didn’t help), and the piece didn’t really build: essentially we saw a list of characters, one spectacular figure after another coming onstage and doing tricks, then standing aside.
But the audience never went wild for her the way they did for a heavyset woman whose triumphs over gravity were purely magnificent, whose rhythms fed on the drummers’ and gave them back. In the end the most thorough planning, the best theatrical sense, can’t anticipate or produce that kind of energy, that ecstatic form of communication; at best it merely frames it, allows for it. And so we waited, settling for entertainment–which this DanceAfrica certainly provided–and hoping for transcendence, which came only in flashes.
