Susan Marshall & Company
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sleeping Beauty opens with startling postmodern clanging and the sound of thunderous feet. These turn out to belong to the piece’s seven dancers, arrayed casually in shorts and judo robes. Sleeping Beauty herself (the superb Kristen Hollinsworth) is dressed in dance trunks and a T-shirt, defeating any romantic notion of the heroine, and her movements are equally off-kilter: quite a bit of her time is spent facedown, butt up, in a position like yoga’s downward-facing dog. The story too is a bit off: Beauty is awakened repeatedly and keeps going back to sleep. And when she moves from upright to lying down, she does it through an awkward twist of her body–sleeping may be her job, but it’s a distorted and distorting one. The prince (Mark DeChiazza) kisses Beauty several times–and here his kiss seems to induce the sleeping trance as often as it alleviates it. Once kissed, Beauty struggles to her feet and dances briefly with another woman or by herself until the puckering prince reappears to anesthetize her again. On several occasions she tries to push his face aside, but she always ends up collapsing under his gaze. It seems the fairy-tale rescue is actually a trap.
Even when Beauty is awake, most of her moves require writhing, twisting, or bending over backward. Marshall’s clarity about the discomforts of romantic love is a gift to those who write about her–consider the phrase “bending over backward.” But with physical gestures so closely tied to verbal concepts, the work comes to you secondhand–which may account for the dance’s remoteness from feeling. Clarity also risks obviousness: when the prince forces Beauty to spread her legs, the move is so blunt it’s less a metaphor than a sledgehammer swung at the audience’s head.
