Anablep & Other Oddities
Ameba
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The three women set the tone for “Anablep & Other Oddities” with Odalisque/What’s Next, to music by Chicagoan Dave Pavkovic. (Krolak herself is a veteran of the Actors Gymnasium and a former member of Chicago’s now defunct Baubo Performance Project.) Krolak and Nicole Harris, each wearing a single bright orange work glove with a second glove firmly attached to her breast, perform astonishingly graceful, dancerly lunges and reaches considering that they’re also wearing a single stilt that makes one leg twice as long as the other. That choreographer Krolak intends to satirize the world of fashion and women’s ornamental role is made clear by the coda: a voice-over observing that “women look so good when they’re off balance.”
After this opening piece–or “amuse bouche,” as it’s styled on the menu/program–dancer Amelia O’Dowd roller-skates onstage like a carhop, stopping in front of members of the audience to take their “orders” from the selection
The finale, or “dessert,” was the premiere of Krolak and O’Dowd’s Ramfeezled, a word said to mean “to exhaust oneself in needless busyness.” Wearing a T-shirt with a memorable inscription–“I look great…on your floor”–O’Dowd continually adjusts her facial expression and body language in obedience to voice-over instructions from some imaginary (I hope!) book of advice about how women should attract men: look but don’t look, be approachable but not easy, lick your lips but keep smiling, toss your hair but keep your head still, ad insanitum.
