En pointes of reference

Recalling the last 12 months of dance in this city, the trendy catchphrase consuming culture comes to mind. Aside from its annoyingly shopaholic overtones (it sounds so much like consumer culture), the term also points to how culture is something we take into our bodies through our senses as a form of ethereal nourishment. The most memorable performances left us feeling deliciously full: of ideas, inspiration and renewed energy.

Mark Morris Dance Group in Mozart Dances
It was a joy for us when we brought a dance skeptic along for his first viewing of the internationally famed Mark Morris Dance Group at the Harris Theater back in August, and he really loved it, citing the group’s professionalism and the dancers’ obvious pleasure in performing Morris’s gracious forms. The live renditions of beautiful Mozart piano concerti (expertly played by Music of the Baroque) only added to the pleasure.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in From All Sides
While this world premiere took place almost a full year ago (in January), we can still recall the animalistic, edgy freshness of Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo’s From All Sides as it was performed with musicians of the CSO and dancers of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago sharing the stage at Orchestra Hall. When the same piece was repeated during HSDC’s Harris Theater engagement later in the year, musicians were absent: The music (an original score by Mark-Anthony Turnage) was piped through the sound system. Somehow, the work lost something. Without the live orchestra, which created an audiovisual accompaniment to the dancing, the ballet seemed more of a severe exercise in austere modernism and less of an inventive, restless living structure.

Martha Graham Dance Company at the MCA
While sometimes it seems that newness is what makes an impression, historic works that have stood the test of time proved their ability to hook the psyche and move the soul. Case in point is the matchless Graham company. In a laudable, bold move, the Museum of Contemporary Art brought the Graham troupe to its theater for a program of pieces choreographed by Graham roughly between 1920 and 1950. These works, now considered classics, revealed the deeply formal and sometimes surprisingly humorous imagination of American modern dance’s most well-known pioneer.

Margaret Morris Dance in Laying of Hands
The newest of new choreography being created in Chicago lit up stages around the city and offers auspicious portents for 2008. Margaret Morris Dance’s Laying of Hands, offered at the Galaxie in July, was especially stunning during a scene that featured extended repetition of a single movement phrase. Morris’s small cast of dancers seemed to enter a trance-like state as they reiterated a martial-arts–style sequence over and over again, battling invisible demons.

Darrell Jones and dancers in third Swan from the end
The Galaxie, a Logan Square dance studio that transforms into a raw theater space, was also the site of independent choreographer Darrell Jones’s third Swan from the end in September. Jones revealed his tough yet vulnerable approach in this work, which started out with a celebratory catwalk by dancers from the voguing club scene and proceeded through a series of raw and yet well-crafted pieces performed by a bright, exuberant cast. We can’t wait to see what he has up his couture sleeve for the new year.

Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak in My Name is a Blackbird
Finally, we must take a moment to savor that moment in My Name is a Blackbird (at the Building Stage in April), when soloist Molly Shanahan accomplished a seismic shift in the room with just the smallest of weight shifts in her body. Delicious.