Trickle-down dances

BEHIND THE MASK Donnell Williams goes where Reagan wouldn’t.

With its ability to engage the human form with both abstract and narrative ideas, dance as an art form tackles a broad map of territories. Chicago choreographers take full advantage of this, tackling a range of topics from the body’s inherent intelligence (Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak’s Stamina of Curiosity) to intellectual property rights (Lucky Plush Productions’ upcoming Punk Yankees). However, in Peter Carpenter’s My Fellow Americans, opening Thursday 8, we find perhaps the most unexpected theme currently active in the city’s choreographic output: American life during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Carpenter has a history of using dance to explore ways in which politics, social mores and beliefs are literally embodied and acted out. In his 2003 Bareback Into the Sunset (revived in 2006 at the Dance Center), he staged the complex interactions and emotions surrounding sexual behavior and AIDS; in 2008’s Sky Hangs Down Too Close, he took on the dynamics of a community infected with desire for power, money and greed. With this in mind, the topic of life during the Reagan years seems a natural one for Carpenter.

As part of his research for the work, he visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in California. “The museum is full of images and videos and life-size images of Ronnie on a horse, eating a jelly bean, walking down a hallway in the Oval Office,” Carpenter says. “For Reagan, there was one kind of American. It was a ‘he,’ white and working-class. He couldn’t see beyond his own experience.”

In Fellow Americans, Carpenter strives to articulate, in danced and theatrical scenes, the experience of those citizens who didn’t fit into Reagan’s viewpoint. “The cast is a motley crew. We have different body types and different ways of being who we are, male or female, gay or straight; different racial profiles for lack of a better word,” Carpenter says.

As he was developing his work, Carpenter thought it might become an angry rant, “but that got old really fast,” he says. He was initially surprised at the images of vulnerability and frailty that developed during the creative process with dancers Lisa Gonzales, Suzy Grant, Atalee Judy and Donnell Williams. “Bodies working together is anti-Reagan,” he says, citing Reagan’s philosophies of pioneering individualism.

Carpenter also gained some unbargained-for sympathy toward Reagan while reading some of the President’s writings: “He was a really creative guy. He became more human [for me], in spite of his propaganda,” Carpenter says. “He was smart. He was not an intellectual, but a very imagistic thinker. He wrote with broad strokes and heart.”

My Fellow Americans stands tall at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater Thursdays and Fridays through October 16.

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