Dance in Chicago: New Work for a New Millennium

Dance Chicago '99: New Expressions in Dance, Athenaeum Theatre, November 29, 2000; NEXT Dance Festival, Athenaeum Theatre, January 27-29, 2000; The Sky Is Falling, Storefront Theater, June 23-24, 2000; Seeded Ground: An Evening of Improvised Dances, Links Hall, July 21-23, 2000.

For more than seventy years, New York has been the undisputed capital of American experimental dance. It is, after all, the city where Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm, and Helen Tamiris pioneered the development of American modern dance in the 1930s. Concurrently, left-wing organizations such as the Workers' Dance League and the New Dance Group used revolutionary dance as a tool for socialist propaganda, providing a forum for a new generation of choreographers including Anna Sokolow, Sophie Maslow, and José Limon. The 1950s in New York produced innovators Alwin Nikolais and Merce Cunningham, who renounced dramatic dance in favor of more abstract work, focusing on bodies in their environment and the relationship between movement and space. Then came Judson Church--the vanguard venue for postmodern dance in 1960s Greenwich Village--and the coming of age of experimentalists Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Steve Paxton, to name a few. You can't argue with that kind of history; New York is New York.

Chicago, in contrast, has a different type of cultural reputation. Well known for jazz and classical dance, Chicago is home to Hubbard Street, Gus Giordano, the Ruth Page Foundation, and the transplanted Joffrey Ballet. What is less known is that Chicago also has a burgeoning contemporary-dance community, just on a smaller scale. With influences ranging from classic dance forms to performance art to improvisation, Chicago movers are creating experiments of their own--many of which rival or parallel what is going on in the East. Directors and members of the Chicago Moving Company, XSIGHT! Performance Group, Breakbone DanceCo., and the Links Hall studio are producing noteworthy new material. And in response to the increasing audience for this kind of dance, new venues are emerging from or alongside the older ones. Chicago has its own versions of Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, and the Joyce Soho, and even its own branch of The Field. It was forty years ago that the groundbreaking Chicago improv troupe called itself The Second City as a witty comparison to the colossal theatre community of New York. Today this name might be an equally appropriate reference to another cutting-edge art form, contemporary dance.

The Chicago Moving Company was founded by veteran choreographer and solo artist Nana Shineflug, who has received numerous grants and awards over the course of her career. She now shares the directorship of the company with Cindy Brandle, the recipient of a choreographic fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. Brandle's work was presented as part of Dance Chicago '99 and the NEXT Dance Festival. In Rust Proof, an energetic quartet full of sturdy partnering and fluttering arm gestures, four women spin to the floor like miniature tornadoes. More inventive is The Midnight Diaries, a multilayered duet based on the process of journal writing. Brandle and dancer Elizabeth Lentz write in their notebooks, tear out the pages frantically, and scatter them across the stage. Behind them, projections of journal entries change as the months go by. One entry describes how the author spent an hour staring at her own hands, marveling at the power they hold over other people. The choreography makes deliberate use of the hands; as the piece moves from quiet wonder into athleticism, we witness that hands can do everything from caress to gesture to strike. Although contemporary choreographers have used spoken text so often that it has almost become a cliché, Brandle's idea of using the written word is unusual and equally thought-provoking.

Another member of the Chicago Moving Company, Peter Sciscioli, premiered a new piece in the NEXT Festival. Cc: gives us the sexual dynamics of...