EARNING THEIR FUTURE
At 25 years young, River North Dance Chicago is as old as its current dancers, most born when it began. They grew up to find the perfect home for their non-negotiable talent. Celebrating that quarter century at River North’s Harris Theater home, Frank Chaves’s troupe displays its wares with a program featuring a company favorite, a national debut, and a somewhat ambivalent world premiere, now through Saturday.
Opening the brief program is the U.S. premiere of Spanish choreographer Iván Pérez’ Flesh, a work created for Nederlands Dance Theater, commemorating the parents he lost early in his career. As Keith Douglas’s overly rhapsodic poem “The Knife” is intoned—“the mystery of living in memory, the reminiscence of a past love and the permanence beyond flesh”—each stanza is illustrated by somber movements by the eight dancers, involving mostly rolling about en déshabillé or lying picturesquely to suggest loss and stasis. But mostly there’s rolling. This vertically challenged exercise in languor easily matches the elegiac musical moping of the score by Eric Whitacre and Arvo Pärt.
Much more interesting for its conception as much as its execution is the world premiere of Chaves’s In the End. It’s even more remarkable a feat because the wheelchair-bound choreographer had to rely on his performers—six male dancers—even more than usual. Chaves rather coyly bills this homoerotic, deliberately closeted offering—with eclectic music from six artists—as an exploration of “non-romantic” relationships among men, of the difficulty of enjoying anything more than “platonic” touching later in life when, presumably, the spontaneous intimacy of boyhood is discouraged by homophobia and stereotypical male bonding.
Beginning with a chain of attractive men holding hands and swaying in their own breeze, the men, breaking into three couples, tenderly sit in a line, nuzzling and fondling their beautiful bodies or balancing each other on their all-purpose torsos as if to become one body. The dance then breaks up into pas de deux conveying both frustration and exhilaration. A frenzied final number, with the men in silly suits and flapping ties, ends as they doff their corporate uniforms and become flesh and feeling all over again.
As much as In the End uses dance to argue for a more inclusive masculinity, these all-embracing, unashamedly affectionate encounters are also unconditional depictions of homosexual passion, whether enabled or thwarted. Methinks Chaves doth protest too much. In dance more than theater, what you see is what you get.
Finally, taking us back almost to the beginning, River North’s crowd-pleasing signature piece Reality of a Dreamer revives a 1992 frolic that’s gone national. Performed by the entire company and apprentices, pulsating with “Sweet Dreams” (the music of Douglas Johnson and Eurythmics), Sherry Zunker’s work a smoke-laden, funky group effort, displaying in flawless tandem some delightfully erratic aerobic movement. Moody and mercurial, this is an unashamedly forthright showcase for youth, strength, grace and stamina. You want to join the fun and, an instant later, you know exactly why you can’t.
photos by Cheryl Mann
River North Dance Chicago
SILVER: 25th Anniversary Fall Engagement
Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph St.
scheduled to end on October 11, 2014
for tickets, call 312.334.7777
or visit www.harristheaterchicago.org
for more info,
visit www.rivernorthchicago.com
for info on more Chicago Theater,
visit www.TheatreinChicago.com