Dix Versions
at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, April 12-28
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Compagnie Kafig’s Dix Versions delivers not one perspective but ten. For 90 nonstop minutes these nine dancer-athletes engage in a riot of competitive break dancing, gymnastics, and contortions. They offer no apologies for departing from “serious dance”–just full-out dancing to a pounding techno beat straight from the 80s. Yet the message is unmistakable: whether isolating different parts of the body so each dancer seems divorced from himself or spinning around on their heads until the audience is dizzy, Compagnie Kafig paint a picture of a world out of control, their own work the graffito on the picture: Fuck art, let’s dance!
Compagnie Kafig grabs the audience with an opening tableau of what appears to be two people grappling in a wrestling hold, their legs twisted together and someone’s arm extended. The shape unravels to reveal–one person. Cartoons projected on video turn out to be out-of-sync and out-of-focus film of the dancers, whose live-action selves bounce and twist and recover from impossible falls like Tex Avery cels in motion. In a cartoon world, everything is hopeless but nothing is serious. And in Compagnie Kafig’s world, the point is not that leaps and splits and cartwheels and back bends are out of balance–the dancers’ confidence is the balance. In this they have assistance from choreography (uncredited, but presumably by artistic director Mourad Merzouki as well as the dancers) so connected to the music’s rhythm that it seems inevitable. Audience members whose usual experience of dance prompts the question “Why are they doing that?” would realize that here the answer is “Why aren’t you?”
Similarly, the world premiere of artistic director Jim Vincent’s Counterpart anatomizes male weakness: Jamy Meek, a powerful dancer, spends far too much time confined in small spaces or by the other dancers. Vincent addresses the confusion that often accompanies contemporary dance (and contemporary life), yet it feels more like an op-ed piece on disorientation than an experience of it. From the opening moment, showing the ensemble in silhouette, the dancing seems to take place at one remove from the audience–through the use of a scrim, as when one woman dances naked behind sheer curtains, or simply through the dancers’ preoccupied looks, as if engaged in some unexplained ritual. Vincent obviously had distancing effects in mind–the work is divided into “counters” and “parts,” mirror and reality, the shadow and the act. But again, leaving the audience unsatisfied is a chancy way to explore dissatisfaction. It’s a very smart work, and I’d want to see it several more times to parse its meaning. But the first impression it leaves is “Tastes great–less filling.”
