Dance R/Evolution
If you expect an evening focused on dance classics to be more traditional than one focused on new dances, Dance Chicago has a surprise for you. “Dance R/Evolution,” featuring “remounted works from Chicago choreographers that shaped the dance scene…during the past century,” feels fresh and new while “New Dances” seems to have brought the traditionalists out in force. It’s no surprise that the cover photo on the “New Dances” program is of a dance performed in “R/Evolution”: that’s where the innovative work is on display.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
After the pieces by St. Denis and Humphrey there’s a gap of nearly 50 years before the next Chicago “classic,” suggesting the difficulty of surveying and capturing an ephemeral art form in a city that hasn’t always valued it. But “Dance R/Evolution” does illustrate a more important, and more positive, point: the Chicago dance renaissance is at least 15 years old, and maybe 25. If 25 years was enough time to move Steppenwolf from that storied basement in Highland Park, maybe it’s also enough time for the city to notice its wealth of fine dance makers, dancers, and dance companies. This program includes a wide selection of them, with 8 pieces of 12 successful.
In Wonderful One, Sherry Moray’s ballet to pop music, Joffrey dancer Joanna Wozniak is skilled but fails to command the stage the way the Momenta dancers do in the Humphrey classics. That’s no fault of hers: ballerinas just don’t belong on their own the way modern dancers do. Christine Rich’s Parenthesis serves up modern dance in the form of a classically melodramatic and erotic pas de deux. Sarita Smith Childs and Paul Christiano give it all they’ve got, and watching the piece is like seeing The Way We Were–it’s formulaic but perfectly done.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marc Hauser.
