Dance Review by Hector Pascual Alvarez
Read full review on Chicago Stage Standard
The stunning Auditorium Theater, designed by architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and dubbed at the time “the eighth wonder of the world”, is celebrating its 125th anniversary. To commemorate, Thodos Dance launched its 23rd “Chicago Inspired” season this Saturday, as part of the Auditorium’s “Made in Chicago” dance series.
The White City, Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, opens the evening and, considering the venue and its history, it could not have been more appropriate. Created by artistic director Melissa Thodos and choreographer Ann Reinking, the fifty-minute story ballet takes inspiration from Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, a thrilling historical account of the architects who built the World’s Fair and of the serial murderer who shocked Chicago when his crimes were revealed shortly after the exposition closed down.
Thodos and Reinkin’s ballet unfolds as a series of vignettes that merge the optimism, romance and joyful energy associated with the construction of the Fair together with the isolation, madness and violence of the time period. In the opening sequence, we see the architects who build the Fair arguing around the drawing table in John Root’s studio. The dancers are dressed in tails and top hats (Nathan Rohrer’s beautiful costumes achieve the double feat of signaling the time period while allowing the dancers to gracefully perform their brisés and cabrioles); they twirl around the table with sharp, energetic, staccato movements and regale us with a few visual surprises. In the next scene dancer Brennen Renteria shows us his towering John Root as a Blakean visionary in the throes of death. Then we have the Fair’s Opening Day, where the crowds admire the stunning buildings: it’s like a scene out of a Renoir painting.
However two disturbing figures pierce this golden mood. The high point of the ballet is H.H. Holmes’ duet with one of his victims. Holmes was the killer who lured young women to the hotel of horrors he designed and built, in order to murder them gruesomely; dancer John Cartwright gives us a vigorous and creepy villain. What begins like a sensual encounter full of erotic possibility with a young woman (performed by Tenley Dorrill) soon turns into a cruel cat and mouse game with tragic consequences. The other dark character is Patrick Prendergast, a disturbed young man obsessed with Mayor Carter Harrison, who ends up shooting the mayor right before the closing of the Exposition. This is a marginal plot in Larson’s book, but Thodos and Reinkin make it central to their piece, perhaps because of its compression and simplicity. And therein lies part of the problem: as an exercise in narrative dance, the ballet tries to pack too much, and the storytelling feels confusing and hurried. More importantly, I kept wondering if Larkin’s tale —essentially a meditation on Modernity’s steam-powered belief in progress and, also, on its ugly underside of poverty, exploitation and violence— is best told through a balletic idiom. Yet, like the original White City, Thodos and Reinkin’s piece enthralled its audience.
The second act’s opening piece redressed some of these shortcomings. Lucas Crandall’s Tsuru, which can be best described as a gripping taiko drum version of The Rite of Spring, throbs with hunter-gatherer ritualism and primeval energy.
The evening continued with two revivals of Chicago modern dance legend Sybil Shearer, (Time Longs for Eternity andSalute to Old Friends) and concluded with Brian Enos’ Lullaby. These pieces, which ranged from the robotic to the festive to the contemplative, highlighted the emotional and physical versatility of the dancers, and offered a perfect counterpoint to the evening’s first half.
The White City, Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 played at the Auditorium Theater on November 29th. More information about the show is available at www.thodosdancechicago.org andwww.theaterinchicago.com.
December 1, 2014