“Strings and Stones” is a program combining the works of choreographer Paula Frasz and her DanszLoop Chicago with two by Brian Carey Chung and his Collective Body/DanceLab.
The program, unveiled during the weekend at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, heads to New York, where Chung is based part of the year. Unfortunately, it does not make for a happy marriage. Chung’s two pieces, while graced with some originality and intelligence, ultimately lack dramatic discipline and plod more than they entertain. And while Frasz is a dance maker with more focused personality and finesse, she’s not well served here, her efforts weighed down a bit and, in the case of one expansion of an earlier piece, she’s author of her own misfire.
“Let’s Pretend We’re All Wearing Sunglasses,” Chung’s opening piece, is impressive in theme. Employing a microphone and verbal commentary, performed on a carpet made out of countless newspapers, it explores the cacophony of our information age and criticizes our indifference to its horrors. The oppression of women in some countries and cruelty to animals stand for facts today we choose to ignore, content on our subway rides behind our sunglasses, as it were–an indictment of modern apathy.
Chung works with a rich vocabulary of modern and ballet moves, but approaches them with an unsentimental, hard eye–there’s a bluntness to the style, a threadbare avoidance of prettiness and nicety by the large cast that suits his theme. The trouble comes in a tendency to meander rather than focus and develop–images move from one to the other without much punch, and his climactic solo for Cristian Laverde Koenig, an impressive dancer with an impressive resume that includes the National Ballet of Cuba, falls short.
Chung’s “Bloom,” set to Arvo Part, is more classical, though admirably just as clean and forceful. The problem comes from the design, architecture and drama, the latter often achieved by contrived glances of angst.
Of the Frasz works, the folk trio “Old Woman of Wexford” still fetchingly blends lilting color with dark undertones, and Paul Christiano shows off his wondrous skills in “Eater of Hearts.” But a solo expanding “Frida,” her work with Aerial Dance Chicago, is repetitious, incessant and ultimately flat.
