Evil & Good: Chicago Tribune
Biting off more than anyone could comfortably chew, Chicago Dance Crash tackles good and evil in the new “Evil & Good,” a rough collection of nine vignettes that actually achieves a semblance of coherence, limping off the battlefield with honor. That’s due in no small part to nonstop, entertainingly varied, high-powered dance in the hip-hop idiom. Now there’s an inarguable good.
Well-chosen thematic elements further unify the work. The concept of Pandora’s box (here seemingly opened by a man, not a woman) begins “Evil & Good” and closes it, as the final section — “Elpis,” the Greek word for hope, the last item in Pandora’s box — returns to the first to give it serenity, resolution. Comedy reigns in two samplings of pop culture, a Dance Crash staple: a classic Disney cartoon of Pluto being wooed by his good and bad angels, and recordings from the TV game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” the unlikely source of a series of moral questions.
The first two sections feature her brand of Hip-hop Lite, an agreeably airborne, smoothed-out style influenced by contemporary dance and particularly well-suited to the four women performing “Pandora.” Christopher Courtney, artistic director of Culture Shock Chicago, contributes a harder-hitting style, especially in “… The One He Fed the Most.” Set to the show’s only true hip-hop track, El-P’s “Tasmanian Pain Coaster,” this full-cast section builds inexorably to a spectacular finish. Kaitlin Webster, Dance Crash’s rehearsal director, provides a strong sense of theater in her sections, particularly “So You Think You’re Moral,” in which the dancers act out the ethical conundrums elucidated (or not) by the “Millionaire” game-show participants.
Though all the performers expertly negotiate the piece’s different styles, David Ingram, Brian Humpherys and Webster do yeoman’s work in the morality play at its center, and newcomers KC Bevis and Zak McMahon are especially fun to watch.