Fall Concert: Timeout Chicago
Like a Synergy drink or a Kombucha, Chicago Dance Crash is a pure mix of unadulterated, raw ingredients: a potent surprise upon first taste, and deliciously smooth by drinks end. It’s not about additives for this crew’s natural movers.
Last night, the company opened its 2012 Fall Concert at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. The troupe produced seven pieces in a concert setting, sans an all-encompassing gimmick. It’s an awesome and welcome format, and suits the company extremely well. This past summer’s “Gotham City” had invention and energy, but the theme-show packed a lot in two acts. Here, the pieces sustain equal amounts vigor, with comfortable distance and pauses in between.
Act one opens with Jessica Deahr and Mark Hackman’s I Didn’t Realize I Wasn’t Minding My Own, a nice snapshot of tricks in the battleground of a desolate scene. Six dancers take their solos in a quiet display of skill, each with his or her own signature trick: a windmill kick, some back inversions, flips and handstands. Deahr and Hackman design an appreciation of hip-hop’s sometimes singular, reverent act of confrontation.
In We Deal With It In Different Ways by Lindsey Rhoads, a couple faces the realities of their differences, moving in unison and varied solos. The pain of inevitable separation looms. Set to music by Imogen Heap, the choreography could easily have fallen in timid or mushy territory. Instead, the movement remains intensely physical. The emotion spins from the realization that the differences have created too much of a gap for the relationship to survive. For anyone that’s ever been through a breakup, you’ll recognize the effects. It certainly resonates, and the piece feels like one of the show highlights.
Where Martinez’s piece is ambitions, the most inventive work of the evening is Jon Lehrer’s Morphic Slip. In dim light, the cast wears full-body unitards, slipping and sliding in canon to music from Aphex Twin, a score that blends the Far East with sharp bits of techno scattered throughout. The dancers—smooth in their transitions—are reminiscent of koi fish swimming in approximated rhythm, albeit in a much more vibrant, Chicago Dance Crash-kind-of-way.