Dance Chicago '95 - various dance groups and choreographers, Athenaeum Theatre, Chicago, Illinois

Dance Magazine, March, 1996 by Laura Molzahn

ATHENAEUM THEATRE, CHICAGO OCTOBER 26-DECEMBER 3, 1995 REVIEWED BY LAURA MOLZAHN

When the eyes of the dance world focus on Chicago, they probably see the coming battle for audiences and funding between Jeffrey Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. But Dance Chicago '95, a first-time festival, reveals another, less visible, reality: that Chicago has a strong scene dominated not by ballet or jazz but by modern and postmodern dance, nurtured by two lowprofile Chicago institutions, the Dance Center of Columbia College and the tiny Links Hall.

No heavy hitters took part in the event. But of the thirty-six groups and independent choreographers represented, twenty-six were modern, four ethnic, four jazz, one tap, and one ballet.

Some of the modern choreographers, such as Bob Eisen and Jan Erkert, have been working for twenty years or more, yet their dances remain fresh while they increase in sophistication. Eisen, who always eschews theatricality, launched a downright attack on it in Circuits, setting his laconic, offhand movement all over the theater--in the orchestra pit and in the aisles, on a balcony, and on the stripped-bare stage. He and his three dancers, seeming deeply confused about where they were supposed to be, shouted at one another, switched directions, and waved their arms until an uninformed usher was actually about to toss them out of the theater. Erkert continued her experiments with video and text in a work in progress based on her travels in Mexico; in an excerpt from Whole Fragments her dancers showed bow deeply they carry her wropped, springing motions in their bones. Erkert's assistant artistic director, Mark Schulze, presented similarly athletic and moving choreography.

Many of the younger artists used text extensively and inventively. Like Eisen, they weren't doing anything much different from what audiences saw at Judson Church thirty years ago, but their pieces were thoughtful and provocative. The all-female Baubo Performance Project married texts and film with suggestive butohlike images--dancers whose shirts were literally stuffed, a stage in deep drifts of crumpled newspaper--to create a work about the search for independence in WonderLust. Rebecca Rossen used two men untrained as dancers but fascinating as movers in Tenderly Struck, Rapidly Held, whose abrupt, often funny choreography was set to an explosive string of words.

Mad Shak Dance Company's Hive reminded me of the early word-and-movement puzzles Twyla Tharp devised for her dancers: Mad Shak made its way through Molly Shanahan's complicated, offen backward text using the folk song 'Skip to My Lou." Fluid Measure Performance Co., almost a generation older than these artists, in Whyoming wove movement together with an intricate confessional text 2 about a vacationing middle-aged woman who reaches an obscure crisis.

When it comes to jazz dance it appears that Hubbard Street has a rival in River North Dance Company, headed by MTV choreographer Sherry Zunker Dow and former Hubbard Street dancer Frank Chaves. With lots of short pieces as funky as Wired, as clever as Thief, and as elegantly romantic as Fixe, and dancers as wild and smooth as aged whiskey, River North is well on its way to being Chicago's next big export. The troupe used a whole stable of interesting local choreographers, such as Ginger Farley (Eye of a Needle, Head of a Pin), but Chaves was the most prolific and promising, with a versatile, when humorous approach and a good feel for music.

Performances by RPM Productions, the festival's sole ballet company, revealed the crisis state of Chicago's ballet world, now splintered into several groups. RPM is new and headed by Gordon Peirce Schmidt, formerly Ballet Chicago's resident choreographer. He was ammicably let go because of a lack of funds; certainly there's nothing wrong with his dramatic and musically resonant choreography.

His 1993 Gift of the Magi, based on the O. Henry story of the same name, looked better than ever with ABT dancers Sandra Brown and Guillaume Graffin as quests in the leading roles. But with the exception of a few other performers, no one else was very proficient. Schmidt's new work, Festival of Carols, seemed designed to spare his inexperienced performers: it didn't have much dancing in it. There just aren't enough trained, seasoned ballet dancers in Chicago to go around, and the fact that our burgeoning' ballet world is underfunded only exacerbates the problem.