Chicago’s Next Dance Festival may not offer as avant-garde a feast as its title suggests, but this lively, well-staged series, now in its fourth incarnation, is becoming an annual joy.
Last weekend’s lineup, one of five programs assembled for the festival through Feb. 7, offered six intriguing works, including a smash of a finish. Indeed, Harrison McEldowney’s “Spiked!” glows with two great virtues: the inspired idea to create a work to Spike Jones’ inimitable, sound-effect compositions in the first place and McEldowney’s exquisitely goofy, imaginative visual responses.
Jones, in essence, combines ’50s schmaltz with his own ongoing noise machine, and McEldowney serves up a dance that is alternately ballroom glitz and fractious lunacy. Just as a kazoo will interrupt a lovely melody in the score, McEldowney’s seven dancers echo the intrusion with a jerky move, a slapstick tumble and all manner of delightful stage nonsense–including one riotous segment on matadors.
The rest of the program was more serious and, though dotted with slow spots, provided moments of imagistic, haunting dance. Atalee Judy’s “Dust on Her Tongue” may be a bit too imagistic, with its lead figure often prone in a hospital bed and images of earthquake rubble projected onto the back of the stage. But this magic-realism trio is also both different and disturbing, using writing by Rodrigo Rey Rosa to depict a woman who seems at first disoriented and possibly deranged. In fact, she’s victim of a recent earthquake that took the life of her husband. Lisa Marie Flores was the victim, while Judy and Mary Chorba, graced with the work’s most striking solo moves, play figures who alternate as nurses and guardian angels.
Two works combine dance with a striking display of onstage musicians. Ginger Farley’s “Ruglamp” ingeniously weaves the four jazz musicians into the dance, one of them riffing with the dancer in a graceful echo of rock-band bonhomie. The resulting give-and-take between the dancers and the quartet delivering composer Cameron Pfiffner’s music was all the more impressive given Farley’s sizeable ensemble of nine dancers.
Christy Munch’s weird, often comic “Bird’s of Paradise” featured a story of an Appalachian trailer lad’s lust to escape his world, punctuated by surrealistically clad dancers and onstage musicians on theremin and saw.
Two more traditional works from the Dance COLEctive were nonetheless pretty good too: Margi Cole’s “Hairtrigger” and Ellie Klopp’s “Channel” solo.
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Chicago’s Next Dance Festival
When: Through Feb. 7
Where: Harold Washington Library Theatre, 400 S. State St.
Phone: 773-278-6453
