Mordine & Co. Dance Theater concerts are never just about dance. Artistic director Shirley Mordine, who founded her local troupe in 1969, harbors an unquenchable desire to add more theatrical or technical elements to dance performance.
Her new, uncategorizable ensemble work, “Jump Cuts” (which premiered Thursday during Mordine & Co.’s spring engagement at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts) takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach.
Taking its cues from film editing and animation, “Jump Cuts” combines Lloyd Brodnax King’s Spike Jones-inspired score with John Boesche’s fragmented projections, which include a clip from a “Popeye” cartoon, cars moving backward and hands mimicking shadow puppets. The piece begins with elegantly fluid dancer Brian Robert Hinkle being invited to “step into the light” by an unseen director. He is joined by a fellow dancer, the more vaudeville-inclined Devin Preitauer, urged on by the disembodied voice telling him to “keep it simple.”
As this full-length dance-film (with broad Federico Fellini overtones) progresses, more dancers in Amy Page’s whimsical costumes emerge. Against the visible oversize hands of time, they clumsily try to craft a dance, often getting tangled in their own complications. The voice — which deconstructs their process as the dancers keep layering on more metaphors — occasionally resurfaces to guide them.
Mordine, in an attempt to show the frustrations of creativity — ideas being too abundant or too scarce — falls into her own muddled trap. With so many sounds, projections and movements swirling through the air, the notion of multisensory becomes oversensory. The exhaustive number of images threatens the success of a work that, somewhere buried in all the clutter, seems to be about reduction.
The program’s opening piece, Mordine’s lyrical “I haven’t heard from you,” exemplifies more tailored dance expression. Five female dancers (especially the vibrant and exacting Joanna Rosenthal) search for unspoken answers by visually entering Mozart’s music. Mordine has created a balletic elegy that dangles off-center as the performers cave in or open up like petals. Moving from billowing cloud images to prowling abstractions, they absorb post-modern dance into music that bridged classicism and freer forms.
The company also revived Mexican choreographer Miguel Mancillas’ 1999 primal-allegorical dance-poem “Desert Eye,” set to the echoing chants of Joaquin Lopez Chapman. Although this overearnest work can be more tightly edited, the ferocious emotion the choreographer elicits from ritualistic stillness leaves an unsettling impression. The quartet of dancers, who may be an indigenous tribe (or the earliest humans), vie for power through movements that are stark and violent yet tender and protective.
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Mordine & Co. Dance Theater’s spring concerts continue at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn Pkwy. Tickets: $13-$15. Call 312-337-6543.
