Review by Laura Molzahn
Read the full article on the Chicago Tribune
Imagine assembling an ocean liner in your basement, then carting it out onto a body of water, hoping it will float. That must be something like the experience Thodos Dance Chicago has mounting its annual “New Dances” showcase, which reached its 16th year Saturday-Sunday at the Athenaeum. The numbers are impressive: nine fully staged premieres by nine choreographers – eight of them by company members, some less than experienced – plus four lighting designers, five costumers and 27 dancers (choreographers pick their own design and performance teams.)
“New Dances” is a big boat that generally lists and shudders. It’s seldom fully audience-friendly: Many pieces and the program overall, are just too long. But it doesn’t sink, a tribute to the company’s thorough preparation to overall find dancing and to the choreographic experience (or good sense) revealed in some pieces’ amped-up focus and impact, unity and sense of electric connection among the dancers.
And then there’s beginner’s luck. Or skill. One of the program’s standouts was Hattie Haggards’s faux-naif “Show a Little Taste,” a piece for 10 whose humor was firmly grounded in clockwork motions, vacant or overly broad expressions, an array of dated or whimsical tunes. The theme was cooking – specifically, baking a cake. Owen Scarlett was the imperious chef, while his sous chefs scurried about in a game of musical chairs. The asymmetrical stage design and brilliant use of flour suggested a real knack for stagecraft.
The accomplished sextet “Sunrise” – a commissioned work by a non-Thodos member, former Hubbard Street dancer Shannon Alvis – creates an intense community in flux, aided by Nathan Tomlinson’s expressive lighting and Ezio Bosso’s stirring music (owing a significant debt to Arvo Part). Comfortable with open spaces and with stillness, Alvis allows dancers to be individuals, and no one more than CJ Burroughs, whose labile, tentative solos epitomized human vulnerability at moments of transition.
Abby Ellison’s striking “Everywhere But Here” gained strength from its insistent through line, its choreographic ingenuity, and from David Goodman-Edberg’s magical cones of light, interrupting pedestrian life: People striding purposefully would suddenly falter, would stutter or stagger, in these zones. Highly gestural but with no clear meaning, “Everywhere” gathered emotional force at its finale, as a woman labored vainly to engage a reluctant man.
Characters of a sort also emerged in Jessica Miller Tomlinson’s mysterious, evocative “R.O.C.B.” Set to a particularly piercing recording of Heinrich Biber’s violin “Passagalia,” this was not an easy or pleasant dance – press materials suggested it originated in part from the concept of “hanger,” or hunger + anger. But it was a pleasure to watch thanks to its musicality, muscular use of torque and odd choreographic fillips.
The penultimate work in a 140-minute program, “R.O.C.B.” suffered from its placement. So did the final piece, Tenley Dorrill’s upbeat “Mambo Clap Wozam Slap,” set to an ingenious mix of funk roots music, from alternative hip-hop to Afrobeat and Ethiopian jazz. Yet this showbiz take on the venerable club-dancing genre failed to take off. I wasn’t sure whether the cause was the dancing – a little too elegant, a little less than funky – or my fatigue.
Completing the program were Briana Robinson’s appealingly simple quartet “Uncovering,” showing a talent for both variety and clarity; Alex Gordon’s impassioned but opaque “Residue”; John Cartwright’s brave but doomed “Present Voices,” with its halting recitations aloud; and Brennen Renteria’s puzzling “On the Greener Side,” focused on a cap dangling overhead like a minnow on a hook.