FOR THE RECORD
With only a matinee remaining today, it’s soon to be history, but this River North Dance Chicago is offering some stunning steps at the Harris Theater in their annual fall engagement, which includes two world premieres. The first, Get Out The Ghost, with choreography by Ashley Roland, delivers a seemingly chaotic tapestry of interwoven bodies dressed in denim and flailing foil wands or moving against their own shadows. Performed to an eclectic score, as exorcising and purgative as its title, the exultant ending retroactively made sense of this multi-revolving flow of forms.
The second world premiere was ascetic. Kevin Iega Jeff’s Dawn is a semi-barbaric ritualistic offering in the spirit of Rite of Spring, with exotically clad performers enacting a ceremony not meant to be disclosed. Heralding a “new age of enlightenment,” it seemed more a throwback to an earlier dawn–but abstract dance can fill in a lot of blanks.
Playful solos included Drew Fountain portraying Sondheim’s Mrs. Lovett as Angela Lansbury sings “The Worst Pies in London” in cadence to her carving and cooking’”very cute indeed. Much more rhapsodic, Jessica Wolfrum engages in dramatic costume changes to Puccini’s “Vissi d’arte,” swirling a large red cape with imperious abandon as she transforms from body to dream.
The ever popular 1989 Super Straight is coming down begins with the fashionably attired dancers stepping out of body bags, then indulging in semaphore gestures with robotic quickness and mechanical precision. Equally crowd-pleasing, Eva paid tribute to the late chanteuse Eva Cassidy as it regaled us with very different duets’”a languorous coupling, a torrid blues combo, and, using rolling to suggest longing, an autumnal tour de two, ending in an Ailey-like Wade in the Water.
photos by Cheryl Mann
Autumn Passion
River North Dance Company
Harris Theater
scheduled to end on November 17, 2013
for tickets, call 312.334.7777 or visit www.harristheaterchicago.org
