In addition to her admirable infatuation with composer Charles Ives, Beppie Blankert is a choreographer inimitably willing to invert the usual relationship between music and dance.
In “Volume 2,” which is her second full piece honoring Ives, the 13-member Chicago ensemble, Non amnesia, not only sits in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art stage, but is raised slightly in a manner that keeps it in the spotlight. Conductor Rutger van Leyden actually enters from backstage with the work’s lead dancer, and Ives’ stand-in figure, John Taylor.
In one particularly edgy section, a violinist, after beautifully playing a solo, leaps onto the stage to argue with Ives/Taylor about its value. At the end, Taylor orders the strings offstage and the trumpet player to the rear of the auditorium, so that Ives’ other worldly, dissonant, richly American music literally surrounds the audience, which no longer sees any dancers other than Taylor, who stands enraptured and still.
There is plenty of dancing throughout from Blankert’s Holland-based company. But her structure celebrates Ives’ experimentalism and isolation.
In some ways that gives her a shield from criticism. She lets the music define the movement, so that much of the dancing, as unusual and tantalizing as it is, seems improvisational bursts of solos, duets and ensemble pieces building not on each other but as spontaneous gestures coming right out of the score.
But she also has a cagey sense of Ives’ structural layers. The differing, juxtaposed groupings illuminate distinct planes within the music. Though the image of artist in the wilderness is a bit much, “Volume 2” is an interesting study of the relationship between movement and melody.
Taylor, who often narrates, is a supremely elastic dancer, sometimes falling into splits and then contorting his legs as he nonetheless gracefully rises to his feet. The eight company members are not typical physical dance specimens. Some of them are thin or tall or unusual looking, unlike the often perfect athletes so often on view. That gives the company a humanizing touch, and their dancing is entrancing, so lithe and effortless you’re seduced by the end anyway.
Blankert’s pure, modern movement is often centered around a handful of weighted stools, which the dancers sit on, twirl around and develop into partners. Four women sit forward on the stools on one side of the stage in one section, while three men run on, dance and then collapse on the floor into the fetal position.
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Beppie Blankert and Dansers Studio
When: Through Sunday
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.
Phone: 773-989-3310
