The Seldoms
Dance is a better medium for conveying impressions than ideas. At its best, it carries those impressions right past the cerebral cortex and into the primitive brain, or past the brain entirely and into the viscera. Combining with whatever’s already present, these impressions can produce a shock of recognition: oh, that’s what this music (emotion, experience) looks like!
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Duet #1 (1999), by Jin-Wen Yu, a guest artist in the Seldoms’ concert, was the most successful of the lot. To Bobby McFerrin’s music, Michelle Blakely and Mei-kuang Chen enacted a series of playful interactions organized around the motif of conversation: in one repeated gesture, the dancers cup their hands at mouth or ear. But they also exchange information with their bodies, playing like puppies in a litter: nudging each other aside, tumbling over each other, and in one memorable move, butting a head against the other’s sacrum until that dancer is pushed into a back flip. As the two take turns at leading, what first appears a contest of wills gradually reveals itself to be cooperation, at which point the piece’s concept–this is what interdependence looks like!–comes winging through. The dancers were superb, making the demanding choreography look relaxed and easygoing.
Peskov’s pieces were bracketed on the DanceLoop Chicago program by two works from fellow artistic director Paula Frasz. Here the content overwhelms the choreography. Voices of Light, her 2000 piece about Joan of Arc, is set to Richard Einhorn’s music, composed to accompany the rerelease of a silent movie–which may account for the dance’s melodramatic feel: in one sequence the corps surrounds Joan (Economakos) and points at her accusingly while stentorian howls rise on the sound track. I hadn’t read the program before the piece began, so it was nearly over before I realized who this woman in the knave of hearts tunic was supposed to be. If Frasz wanted to re-create the legend, she ran up against the limits of dance as a storytelling form; if she wanted to convey big ideas like Sacrifice and Nobility, she succeeded only in communicating bombast. It didn’t help that the corps of nine was unable to stay in sync or that Economakos was obviously struggling to manage the movements most suggestive of Joan’s otherworldliness, like walking through midair (on the others’ hands). But even a step-perfect performance would have revealed an obvious truth: dance can’t tell stories the way film or theater can.
Choreographers are like sports stars and other entertainers: you need a better batting average than .200 to bring any but the most ardent fans to the ballpark.
