Random thoughts about watching and working in the arts, from HMS Media co-founder/executive producer Scott Silberstein
And I remember walking into the theater at Evanston’s National Louis University in October of 1989 to see a performance by the Lynda Martha Dance Company. I remember watching the performance, feeling like I was falling forward into the stage, experiencing wave after wave of WOW, and being certain that just as I knew I was built to love girls and baseball, I was built to love dance.
I can tell you the name of each piece the company performed that night. I remember every piece of music, and I still know the names of each dancer. I can even tell you what the costumes and light cues looked like.
You never forget your first time. And while there’s nothing quite like falling in love yourself, watching other people do it is a close second. Tonight was the opening night for The Chicago Dancing Festival, and I watched my friend Katie fall in love with dance. Katie’s a handful of years younger than I am, a whip-smart professional with a background in marketing and psychology. She lives in the western burbs. She’s very verbal, funny and expressive. Candor runs in her veins, and she’s incapable of BS. I thought it would be fun to bring her to the Chicago Dancing Festival, and see what a “newbie” might think of the evening, knowing full well that if it wasn’t her cup of tea, I’d know it.
Happily, for Katie this was high tea of the first order. She was already hooked tea had been served; having worked in the dance world for more than twenty years now, I have the great fortune of knowing a lot of people in it, and scores of them show up for a big festival like this, and once Katie started meeting them, any fears that the people in the dance world have Black Swan Fever were dispelled. As self-involved, narcissistic and hyper-competitive as that film (and others) portrays dancers, the reality is that the vast majority are among the nicest, smartest, warmest and most embracing people you’ll ever meet. Before we’d made it to our seats, Katie’d already received more welcoming hand shakes and hugs in thirty minutes that she’d probably had all year.
Upon taking our seats, she marveled at the wonderful site lines of the Harris Theater, and the communal feeling inside the Harris Theater. She’s right about that – it’s an easy place to recognize people, and get to them for a good conversation or laugh. We quickly read the program notes and Katie hit me with one of her delightfully nutty non-sequiturs. “I feel like I’m at the racetrack!” she giggled, noting the names of the pieces – Lux, Uneven, Motor, Habituation, Martha Speaks – to her they all sounded like great names for horses. Very funny, and exactly the kind of playfulness that serves you well if you come to a dance concert. Let your mind go and your heart, soul and sense of humor will follow.
And follow they did. “Uneven” was the first piece up, wherein Aspen Santa Fe Ballet gave a primer in the staggering beauty and flexibility of the human body, courtesy of the breathtakingly choreography of Cayetano Soto, at once liquid and jagged. I’m not sure human bodies ever looked so stunning as they did here, and having seen a lot of dance I can’t even tell you why that is, but I felt truly astonished that I found myself discovering more ways for people to look and move gorgeously. Set to a cello score that was partly performed live, partly pre-recorded and what sounded like partly looped, and starkly lit to cut the images of the dancers beautifully against the dark background, “Uneven” took my breath away, and I wasn’t the only one for whom that happened. It took all of three seconds and one startling move between two dancers for Katie to gasp audibly at the audacious and unexpected beauty of what she was seeing. During the break between this and the next piece, she commented that she had assumed that after the dancers started the piece as individuals, moving at their own pace and connecting and disconnecting here and there, that they’d eventually settle into a series of unison movements, because that’s what these people are supposed to do, right? They should conform into something pretty in the end, shouldn’t they? And when she realized this dance was going to resist that convention, she realized liked it even more. “There’s too much ‘should’ in the world,” she remarked. “People ‘should’ all over themselves.” (She does have a way with words.) “I liked that there was no ‘should’ in that dance.” Amen, Katie.
The second piece was a giddy sequence of manual acrobatics by River North Chicago Dance Company. Like many brilliant gems of dance and music, Charles Moulton’s “Nine Person Precision Ball Passing” springs from a simple idea: 3 rows of 3 dancers are stacked like The Brady Bunch, each dancer holding a colored sphere the size of a softball, and instead of exchanging demented glances at each other like the Bradys, they swap the balls, from person to person, row to row, column to column, diagonally across the group, in one more surprising combination and permutation after another –by which I mean less mathematically calculated than witty, artful and positively grin-inducing. If tic-tac-toe and a pinball machine had a kid (and if the Bradys were all gorgeous, toned and insanely charismatic), this is what it would look like. It was a joy to watch. After it was over, Katie – who, remember, has a background in the business world – said, “They should bring that piece into every corporation in town and show them what team-building’s really like.” Katie met the choreographer at intermission, only to learn that corporations had, in fact, utilized “Nine Ball” for that express purpose. Who says that the arts have no relevance to the “real” world?
Third up was Doug Varone and Dancers’ “Lux,” which began with a solo dancer in front of round orange light, which hung over the lower part of the stage, reflecting off the Marley floor the way the moon often does over Lake Michigan. My angle from Row Q of the Harris overlooking the stage was almost exactly the angle my condo has overlooking the lake, and I’ve seen the moon rise with just that color of orange and reflect off the surface of the lake exactly the way this stage moon reflected off the floor. As black-clad dancers swirled, whipped and flowed across the stage to Philip Glass’ “The Light,” to me the piece resembled nothing so much as waves on the lake during a windy night. When the lights came up, Katie said, “They should call that piece ‘Aviary School.’” For her, “Lux” was as much about birds learning to fly as it was for me about a nighttime storm moving across the water. That’s a great thing about dance – it means what it means to you, and you’re never wrong.
After intermission (and more hugs and handshakes for Katie the newbie dancegoer), we were treated to a wonderfully comic solo set to “The Worst Pies In London,” from one of my favorite musicals of all time, “Sweeney Todd.” What led Adam Baruch create a solo performance to this ferociously clever song, sung by the amazing Angela Lansbury? No idea, and I couldn’t tell you what it was supposed to be about, either – other than flat out fun, which is certainly good enough for me. The effect was essentially someone lip-synching with his body instead of his mouth, and it was delightful. In addition to making Katie want to see “Sweeney Todd” (which is now playing in a wonderful production at the Drury Lane Theater), “The Worst Pies In London” left her speechless because she couldn’t stop giggling (“Who knew dance could be that funny?), and that’s a pretty darn good review if you ask me.
The last piece of the night was “Too Beaucoup” (another great name for a horse), choreographed by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar and performed Chicago’s own Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Katie must have had birds on the brain today, because to her the spectacular dancers comprised another flock, scooting about the stage frenetically and with jaw-dropping precision and energy. Me, I went a whole different way. Clad in form fitting white unitards and bizarre rounded wigs, and moving to the beeps and burps of a terrifically percolating electronic score, the Hubbard Street dancers reminded me of the sweet little aliens at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and I imagined that what I was watching was a day in the life of the Rec Room of the Mothership: Alien Pilates, Alien Step Aerobics, Alien Ballroom Dance Class, Alien Martial Arts Seminar, and full out Boogie Down Alien Dance Party. What a blast Richard Dreyfuss must have had with those guys, and what a funny and knock-out way to send a very happy capacity crowd out of the Harris Theater smiling.
On our way out, Katie met more dancers, artistic directors, former dancers, tech directors and dozens of other people who’d made the evening possible, and she had a chance to talk about what she’d seen and who she’d seen do it. What she learned was that however she felt about the piece, whatever she thought they meant, whatever worked for her and whatever didn’t – she was right. Dance, like all the arts, brings people together as a community, but still allows them their own individual expression and interpretation.
For Katie, the night was thrilling, eye-opening, transforming and more than a little dizzying. If I could have put a stethoscope on her forehead, I think I’d have been able to hear her brain buzzing. Even as we headed to the car, her eyes were both sparkling and glazed, and she was somewhere in a state between wired and dazed. She was ecstatic.
I know that look. Katie had fallen in love with dance. And I was very happy to have fixed her up.
(Ready to fall in love some more? The Chicago Dancing Festival continues Wednesday night with programs at 6pm and 8pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.)