Dancer-choreographer Atalee Judy is also a theatrical cinematographer. The artistic director of Chicago’s Breakbone DanceCo — rooted in a rough-hewn style of movement — allows video images to bleed into the live stage action. That’s Judy’s approach to her 80-minute performance work “One,” which opened Thursday at the Dance Center of Columbia College.
But her beauty-in-pain aesthetic, entwined in her distressed, pre-Raphaelite-era dance portraits and in Carl Wiedemann’s gothic-inspired film, turn the stage into a literal and psychological bloodbath. The experience can be provocative or simply grueling. “One,” with its focus on isolated and suicidal women, edges closer to grueling self-involvement.
In her program notes, Judy says her seven-part “One” series is “about human lives — individuals struggling to feel and to find that one thing that makes their life worth living.”
While a palatable goal, the idea of cutting through anguish and reaching out to another gets overrun by Judy’s insistence on turning the stage into a goth-punk pastiche of bondage, self-mutilation, pallid maidens out of Edgar Allan Poe and a slasher flick. All the reveling in horror and desolation makes the final feeble coda of connection irrelevant.
“One” alternates between the dancers filmed in abandoned rooms of a medieval castle and re-creations of these vignettes onstage. An opening journey through the creaky, crumbling corridors sets an eerily Romantic tone — somewhere between English poet John Keats and “Excalibur” filmmaker John Boorman.
As the camera settles into various rooms, tortured women emerge — beginning with Elisa Foshay’s bound, latex-covered prisoner, who swats at the lens like a perturbed cat. The most chillingly beautiful section has Tabitha Faes in bare feet and satin gown playing the cello in a ruin-strewn cloister against a thunderstorm.
Later, onstage, Foshay and Faes push through their loneliness to the point that Foshay becomes a human version of the cello.
Then “One” becomes too enamored with shock value. Even the film begins to feel like “Poltergeist.”
The dangerously expressive Suzanne Dado drowns herself in a bathtub of rose petals. Then Judy thrashes around a bathroom with sharp objects and impales herself with large safety pins.
And though Breakbone boasts high production values (Stephen Arnold’s and A. Cameron Zetty’s mystic lighting, and Branimira Ivanova’s and Judy’s flowing medieval costumes), the multimedia elements remain numbingly cold.
Performances Saturday, May 5, 6 and 7 at 8 p.m. at the Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan Ave.; $20; 312-344-8300.
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