Erica Mott’s The Victory Project | Classical preview

“I’ve had some of my most intimate conversations with strangers on public transport,” Erica Mott says. The choreographer has phoned me at 11pm to chat. “I think that when you don’t know somebody it’s possible to go deeper than when you do. There’s an unspoken permission to let go.”

Talking to strangers opened the creative floodgates for Mott. An artist in residence at Cook County Juvenile Detention Center a couple of years ago, the 36-year-old struck up conversations on the Roosevelt bus with women veterans heading to or from the neighboring Jesse Brown VA Medical Center.

“This one woman, Lynne, invited me to come in,” Mott says. Early for work, Mott hopped off the bus and followed Lynne inside. During conversations with the women there, Mott began mulling over notions of war and the female body. “It kept playing in my mind that perhaps victory is a gendered term. What might be considered victorious to a woman may be very different from that of a man.”

The Avondale-based artist’s brainstorm has resulted in a new three-part work, The Victory Project, a multidisciplinary confluence of dance, visual art, puppetry and music that investigates the female body as representation of victory and war in art, propaganda and literature. A series of vignettes, performed by six dancers, references specific moments in history, from the ancient Greco-Roman era to present day.

Award-winning composer-about-town Ryan Ingebritsen jumped on board as the project’s sound designer. A sometimes collaborator with International Contemporary Ensemble and eighth blackbird, he previously worked with Mott scoring one of her smaller pieces, In Print, in 2006. The Victory Project is their first major collaboration.

The Missouri native devised a shifting soundscape to be generated by the dancers’ movements and mixed live from an onstage desk. Contact mics on the set and props trigger samples as the performers stomp and slap. Ingebritsen used a similar technology with children and a jungle gym in his 2009 work “Audio Playground.” In one of Mott’s more elaborate and thrilling sequences, dancers support their bodies on “crutch wings”—latched-together metal crutches—forming human sculptures.

The composer gleaned many of the samples from the Internet. It’s a broad mix of sounds: Opera divas hold one resounding note; a delicate, glittering Victorian music box chimes; amped-up kids chant in the street after Osama bin Laden’s death. “YouTube plays very prevalently in this piece,” the 38-year-old jokes, enjoying a glass of red wine in his living room as we speak via Skype.

Ingebritsen has found himself stepping outside of the typical composer’s role as Mott has roped him in for a cameo performance. In a duo inspired by the suburban lives of 1950s housewives, Ingebritsen must throw pots and pans at a dancer. Hard. “Apparently the faster I throw the pans, the more focused the dancer becomes,” Ingebritsen explains. “She catches them and builds a towering sculpture on her chest. When Erica asked me to do that, I was like, you gotta be kidding me! I’m a sound designer. I can’t be physically throwing stuff at your dancers. Erica told me not to be such a wuss. I have hit the dancer in the head a few times, though.”

The Victory Project runs Thursday 6 through Sunday 9 at Northerly Island Visitors Center.