Rebecca Lazier
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The evening began with a duet excerpted from A Stone’s Throw, part of her New York company’s repertory. The piece, danced by Lazier and company member Jennifer Lafferty, is startlingly erotic, though the women don’t often touch; instead each concentrates on her own body. One gesture recurs: arms crossed in front, one wrist captured by the other hand. This image of entrapment permeates the piece, so that when the dancers mirror each other in a series of contortions the effect is tense rather than comic. Similarly, when Lazier lifts Lafferty by thrusting a fisted arm between her legs, the gesture is not clumsy but dangerous. Otherwise unobtrusive New Age music by Jody Elff has an insistent rhythm that counterpoints the dance but doesn’t seem to drive it. Lazier later noted that she generally choreographs in silence, because “dance has to be a music of its own.”
A solo, Sepia, displays all of Lazier’s strengths as dancer and choreographer: her clean articulation, trust in momentum, and ability to communicate ideas without signposting them. Performed to intermittently explosive music (uncredited but apparently the work of percussionist Shane Shanahan, a longtime Lazier collaborator), the piece illustrates the dancer’s effort to center herself in a chaotic world. Her opening movement, to the funereal sound of bells, is interrupted by a change in the music–and suddenly she’s cowering as though from a bomb. But soon she rises, reincarnated, through a deep demi-plie that underscores the effort it costs. This pattern of damage and recovery informs the entire piece: phrases showing her off balance–as when she seems dragged forward by her tied hands–alternate with yoga-inflected moves. There’s a brief loss of focus late in the dance, with too many musical explosions producing too much fussy business, but Lazier recovers with a strong final gesture. Here wrist grasping reveals alienation from self: after shaking her trapped hand until it seems a separate being, she tosses it carelessly over her head like trash.
For years people have dropped by Chicago Dramatists on a Saturday afternoon and paid $3 to hear a new play. There are no production values to speak of, and the work might be terrible; but it might be great, in which case you’re the first to know. These “Summer Dance Chicago” concerts are like that: drop by the Dance Center when you’re in the South Loop, pay a few bucks, and see what’s happening.
