Chicago Choreographers Go Dutch
This summer, under the auspices of Dance Chicago, multiple Chicago choreographers created or revived works on members of Amsterdam’s Dutch National Ballet. In August, after two weeks of rehearsals, the dancers—joined by members of the Joffrey Ballet, River North Chicago Dance Company and local independent artists—performed these diverse pieces as the Dutch National Ballet Project at the Athenaeum Theatre.
The program naturally had a showcase feel, but the dancers exhibited consistent strength and professionalism. Though these works may or may not land in Dutch National Ballet’s future repertoire, the real benefit seems to have been in the exchange of movement styles.
Classical in carriage, the Dutch artists got to mix it up with Chicago’s capable modern and jazz dancers to reveal the challenges and connections inherent within the varied forms—notably in Randy Duncan’s praise/modern ensemble reverie, Kay’s Lilt. A soothing yet dynamic interpretation of souls on their way to heaven, Kay’s Lilt demands total-body expression. Altin Naska’s new Into the Agape, a still-unformed, abstract drama set to a live, original score by Douglas Johnson, evokes a disjointed sense of dread by entwining the slicing pointe work of DNB’s Natalia Hoffmann and Tamara Michalczyk with the intricate body twists of Paul Christiano and lithe elegance of Aaron Rogers, both Chicago dancers.
Into the Agape has not fleshed out its thematic significance; however, Naska’s revival of Enchanted proved concise and profound. DNB’s grounded Altin Alexandros Kaftira and weightless Hoffmann tackle oddly positioned lifts and inward-folding turns. He is a man with a vision of the perfect woman but, in the end, she just escapes his over-thinking grasp.
Frank Chaves reimagined his duet, The Mourning, for DNB’s Sebastian Nichita and Maiko Tsutsumi. The pair crawls and melts into Bielka Nemirovski’s heart-searing vocals as if seeking refuge inside the notes. Christiano, an acrobatic dancer, reprised his phantasmagoric Balada para un loco with its Pilobolus-like body sculptures, for River North Chicago Dance Company. Christiano did not perform in the piece, thus showing his ability to transfer his unique gymnastic quality onto other dancers.
A similar transfer takes place in Lauri Stallings’s The Language Project for an eclectic mix of Chicago and DNB dancers. The former Hubbard Street Dance Chicago ensemble member often has moved organically using every sinew, a skill she stresses in her dancers. Stallings choreographs the way William Faulkner wrote: fragmented, stream-of-consciousness non-resolution. For this reason, her work is both intriguing and frustrating to experience. The dancers, on a stripped stage, appear to hang on for dear life. Yet she demonstrates how sure-footed they must be to illustrate her ongoing theme of psychological precariousness.
Lucia Mauro is a dance critic and arts writer, whose work appears in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine and on Chicago Public Radio.
