Collisions ahead

I met percussionist Frank Rosaly at around 6pm on June 14, 2010, at Lakeview performance venue Links Hall. We chatted briefly while he set up a medium-size kit tricked out with a WWII-era tone generator mated to a slightly newer tape loop machine called an Echoplex. Two hours later, he was drumming madly while the rig emitted bassy, gut-juggling throbs. Occasionally, he’d draw a horsehair bow across the edge of one of his cymbals, which sang cleanly while he faded everything else out.

I hadn’t heard much music like his before, which made it both easier and more difficult to improvise my solo dance performance. Sometimes, as I swung an arm or turned my head, I’d notice him thwack a tom in sync with my movement. Likewise, I picked up some of the oscillations of his machines and used their blurred rhythms to structure my dancing. Exactly 20 minutes later, both drenched in sweat, we finished our duet. “I’m not used to having that much fun when improvising,” Rosaly told me later via e-mail. I wasn’t, either. The experience stands out as one of my most satisfying performances.

It was the last date of the collision_theory series, improvised collaborations by movement artists selected mostly by Rachel Damon (a local dancer-choreographer) and bands picked primarily by Dan Mohr (a musician active in Chicago’s experimental scene). Lively post-show discussions became a hallmark of the cheap ($12), popular monthly.

Beginning Monday 17, collision_theory returns to Links for a five-month encore, this time with Mohr alone in charge of each menu. (Damon says she loved the idea of continuing the series, but other commitments precluded her prior level of involvement.) A possible sixth installment would coincide with an improvised dance festival at Columbia College in June.

Damon and Mohr wanted to “create a frame inside which improvised performance doesn’t seem off the cuff, doesn’t seem like a frivolity,” Mohr says, “but like a real, artistic, nuanced event, created by experienced practitioners.” (Mohr notes the emergence, since he and Damon launched the project in October 2009, of similar ventures at Dance Union like OosImaginary; Echo Den, a partnership between vocalist Carol Genetti and former TOC Dance editor Asimina Chremos, also charted these waters.)

At collision_theory, clashes weren’t seen as failures. The second installment found dancers Darrell Jones and Kirstie Simson meeting their mismatch in electronics-and-prepared-piano duo Technical Drawings. “During the discussion after that one, people were really honest about what they didn’t like about it,” Mohr recalls. “Not catty or inarticulate, people weren’t defensive, but it was a heated dialogue in a constructive way, as in, What the fuck just happened?” Having the performance in full swing by the time audience members arrived was deemed a misstep. “We were asking people to digest a lot of artistic information in a single evening,” Damon says. “It was a little overwhelming when we didn’t give them a way to settle in.” Together or in turns, the pair added brief welcomes to the ritual, and encouraged the dancers and musicians to warm up together to get a feel for each other’s energy beforehand. Links Hall’s versatility allowed them to try out different seating arrangements, and lighting was manipulated on the fly as well.

Besides one-of-a-kind performances, Mohr says collision_theory provides space for two insular communities to become more familiar with each other’s cutting edges. “Dancers have to have some sort of fluency with music, although I think a lot of times they don’t, and so this is a way to introduce new ideas about working with musicians, as opposed to wallpapering a room with prerecorded sound.” Likewise, he says, local band Zelienople, which performed with dance group the Architects, “were like, ‘Okay, we’ll do it, but it’s probably going to suck.’ They left saying they’d had the most fun performance they’d had in years.”

Dancer Adam Rose makes things up with Male at Links Hall Monday 17.