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On track
Erin Carlisle Norton and Ian Hatcher train their eyes and ears on Union Station.
Standing at the corner of Canal and Adams Streets since 1925, Union Station is a city landmark. If you’ve spent any time in its great hall, you’ve experienced the theatrical grandeur of the space. Anyone standing, rushing, ambling or waiting there appears as distinctly as a performer on the stage. None of this is lost on choreographer Erin Carlisle Norton or composer Ian Hatcher, whose new collaboration Stops on the Line is inspired by the architecture and history of the place.
The impetus for the project came from Norton, who connected with Hatcher at Links Hall (the indie performance venue and workspace in Wrigleyville) over a year ago while Hatcher was acting as house manager. Norton was ushering regularly, taking advantage of a work-exchange program that helped her defray the cost of rehearsal space.
“We found we had a lot of the same feelings after each show,” Norton says. Hatcher learned that Norton is interested in how architectural spaces affect people. “We talked about how spaces are built, and how they are designed so people move through them in a certain way,” he says. Their collaboration ensued naturally, and the two began doing research on the train station in October.
Norton prepared for the work by spending time in the station’s great hall, watching people and taking pictures. “I took a lot of detail photos, rather than grand views. I’m really drawn to shape, line and form,” she says. She noticed how the environment of the station is rife with contrasts between old and new, near and far: “From far away, things look very new and regal. Up close, you see chipping paint and things falling apart.”
In December, Norton and Hatcher went into the studio with the five dancers of Norton’s troupe, the Moving Architects, and began the work of translating their ideas into sound and movement. “I feel my work is more visual than kinesthetic. It’s very detailed; there’s not a lot of flow. It’s put together more like a painting.” She says the first and last sections of the work have spatial patterns inspired by the train tracks that lead to and from the station, incorporating long distances and crossings.
Rather than composing the music in a separate space, Hatcher was present at all rehearsals with an acoustic guitar, which he plays live during the performance—along with a glockenspiel. “The music doesn’t make much sense unless I’m watching the dance,” Hatcher says. “I watch the dancers and play directly off of them.” He says much of the music is inspired by the rhythms, signal crossings and switching sounds of the railroad system.
Stops is being performed in another large, equally beautiful yet worn historic space, the Epiphany Episcopal Church, a couple of miles west of Union Station at Adams Street and Ashland Avenue. “The audience will be seated on two sides and I’m at one end,” Hatcher says. The seating in this venue consists of old-fashioned wooden church pews, which echoes the seating in Union Station’s great hall. Norton says she always thought of the wooden benches in the station as being pewlike. “They give a sense of properness,” she says.
The church and the station have more in common than pew benches and impossibly high ceilings. Both structures reflect a sense of an earlier era’s hopefulness. During the research phase, Hatcher and Norton visited the special collections at the Harold Washington Library and found old manuals describing in great detail how the station was built.
Norton says the documents are “poetic and beautiful, about how the station was helping people to enter the future, that it would change the world, and that everyone who worked on it should be proud.” Hatcher echoes her, saying the manuals express a “utopian quality, that the station was built to serve the needs of people, not just to make money.” That’s an optimism we can get on board with, even in today’s era of jet planes.
Stops on the Line pulls into Epiphany Church on Friday 15.
