Dance preview: “16 Artists, Thirsty Well”

Maybe you’re one of those people who’s never understood how dancing and talking fit together. It wouldn’t surprise me—building a performance universe in which their coexistence makes sense is exceedingly difficult to pull off. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying. There’s no shortage of unsuccessful examples, mostly made by choreographers who believe it’s requisite to contemporary dance-theater.

Which is what makes a shared bill like at Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater Thursday 24 and Friday 25, so refreshing and so important. The five works presented by Lucky Plush Productions, made and performed by—you guessed it—16 artists, are uniformly creative, deliberate and measured in their use of spoken text. Hoo-Ha, a men’s trio by Darrell Jones for himself, Damon Green and JSun Howard and investigative of “ritual feminized performance” is the technical exception, with speech only in its score (FlyLife cuts “enhanced” by Sammy Spriggs include audio of a vogue ball). But these men still make noise, with defiant, opulent flamboyance and claps, slaps and spit. Darkly staged and costumed except for a wash of red light and silver sneakers, Hoo-Ha lives in ceremonial slo-mo dips and moments wherein, like a pinch, the trio converges around a single point without warning.

Show opener Traitor gets deeper and more poignant each time I see it. Jones and Lisa Gonzales’s dual-channel conversation, first shown in 2009, draws its strength from the fact that most of their words are believably about the movement itself, yet meticulously chosen for having multiple definitions. “We’re going down!” shouts Gonzales as she runs toward Jones. With a modest jump, she grabs her partner’s shoulders and pulls him with her to the floor. Its closing moments hinge on the word “part” meaning both section and separation.

A similar slipperiness infuses Gonzales’s new trio the study of last things. Early on, fragmented attempts at direction from within (“Keep doing that,” “too tender”) are washed over by Gonzales’s voiceover, in turn taken out by a tide of rich noise by electronic musicians including Pan Sonic. Gonzales’s dance vocabulary—owned with clarity and simplicity by Maggie Bennett, Carly Czach and Dale O’Reilly—is a fascinating sustainment of opposition, nearly every action interrupted by its physical contradiction. The tensions—forward vs. backward, horizontal vs. vertical, travel vs. rotation—build to a kind of harmony in purgatory as the language fades out. Looping mechanical noises include a soft-focused locomotive horn, a sound usually marking finite space ripped from its moorings and drifting, the eternal last thing.

In contrast, Peter Carpenter’s Rituals of Abundance for Lean Times #2: Beyond What Is Possible finds Lia Bonfilio and Meghann Wilkinson grasping for an anchor to the here and now, or at least one of the two. Where in last things cycles are a portal to the infinite, in Rituals they’re openings to counterproductive oscillations like the aeroelastic flutter that brought down the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge or King George VI’s bloody stammer. Bonfilio and Wilkinson start and restart dovetailing discussions about the Chilean miners’ rescue and Chicago’s bloody school year that began in September with the murder of 16-year-old Deantonio Goss on South Saginaw Avenue. Like other Carpenter works, Rituals makes precise incisions into the grey areas of our grey matter, looking at how and why we choose between 33 survivors on CNN and as many dead teenagers in own backyards.

“16 Artists, Thirsty Well,” which, if you’ve missed my point so far, I recommend wholeheartedly, closes with a teaser for Lucky Plush’s October premiere at the MCA. Cocreated by Plush director Julia Rhoads and Leslie Buxbaum-Danzig with their cast, the “trailer” for this work, currently titled The Better Half, is both smart marketing and an effective piece in its own right. A dance-theater meta-fest quoting The Bourne Identity, Gaslight and Scenes from a Marriage, Half might at this stage in its development be best described as Clue remade by Charlie Kaufman, with a hilarious Timothy Heck in the Tim Curry role.