The contemporary dance company Para.Mar Dance Theatre began in a parking lot.
Launched at the height of the pandemic, choreographer Stephanie Martinez turned the lemons of losing months of work into lemonade — making a single short work, “Kiss,” to introduce Para.Mar to Chicago with a handful of freelancers and scores of red carpet runners laid across an asphalt pad in Avondale.
“Kiss” felt like a miracle. Para.Mar was among the first Chicago dance groups to eschew screens and figure out how to make pandemic live performance happen. It’s been rather slow going ever since as Martinez figures out how to translate that magic to more conventional spaces and keep the company’s momentum going as her schedule fills back up.
Slow going until now, that is. Apparently, Martinez has been working on “Mujeres” since 2023. The stunning evening-length ballet premieres this weekend with just two performances at the Logan Center on the University of Chicago’s campus.
“Mujeres” is based on a series of texts by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, who was the first Latin American Nobel laureate in literature. The 1954 poems, collectively titled “Locas Mujeres,” or “Madwomen,” capture vignettes of women in extremis — at the literal or figurative point of death.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the University of Chicago Press published a well-regarded English translation of the collection by Randall Couch. And Friday’s performance seemed to also play in that bilingual sandbox, most notably in an evocative soundscape that spans a wide range of times and geographies: South American rhythms like mambo and samba, Afro-Caribbean flavors, Flamenco (hailing from Spain’s Andalucía region), European classicism and original, multi-factorial compositions by Gigi Dahill-Fachel.
To drive home this point, some of the new creations by Dahill-Fachel sound distinctly mid-century. As in 20th century, even replicating the sound of vintage recordings in a mix that favors higher pitches when what one really wants is the bass.
Similarly, “Mujeres’” trappings (jointly fashioned by Adrianna Desier Durantt, Antonia Contro, Alasdair Dodd, Josiah Rubio and Wynn Lee) are neither fully “now” or “then,” brought together through a magic combination of Contro’s muted artworks in projection form at the back of the stage, a garnet red floor, a simple table and chairs, a moveable door and frame plus smatterings of circa-1950s valises scattered about. Lighting designer Kaili Story and costumer Branimira Ivanova likewise complement this quasi-purgatory with elegant, appropriately understated designs.
Martinez grew up in the borderlands, near El Paso, Texas, and that “in between-ness” has been a throughline of her entire career. Her time on stage, mainly with the now-defunct jazz-contemporary company River North Dance Chicago, morphed into a freelance choreography career that began a little more than a decade ago with commissions from Chicago Dance Crash and Luna Negra Dance Theatre (another now-gone, very missed contemporary ensemble). In the years since, spent on a kind of choreographic hamster wheel, Martinez has created more than 60 ballets, set on ballet, jazz, hip hop and contemporary companies.
Throughout, I’ve thought of her as a kind of chameleon — a shapeshifter who can seamlessly adapt to virtually any environment. That’s what women do, after all. Even the “locas mujeres.”
Still, Martinez has a signature aesthetic: Grounded, luxuriously legato phrase work frequently punctuated with quirky oddities and quasi-pedestrian motifs. Plus, a healthy dose of props.
While those “isms” make their way into almost all of her works, what Para.Mar gives Martinez is a chance to be totally, authentically herself and to craft works outside the strict bounds of a three-week commission for a group of strangers. “Mujeres” is proof of concept that time and resources — in this case three years and a gaggle of residencies — produce special pieces.
“Mujeres,” is, indeed, special. And not just because it’s so pretty.
Like Martinez, Mistral spent more time away from her home than in it, exploring dualities of identity and womanhood as a throughline of her work. The “Locas Mujeres” — the ballerina, the sleepless woman, the anxious woman, the fugitive, the abandoned and the sleepless, among others — appear here, sometimes literally, as in Julienne Buenaventura as the delightfully apathetic ballerina, who gets tossed about in a frothy and wonderfully ridiculous quinceañera dress. Other references are less obvious. In a spectacular build-up, the ensemble’s four men don unforgiving black pumps over their sport socks. Once the women join, a sensational strut unfolds, with symbolic nods to, let’s say, 1980s-era boss lady vibes, a la Melanie Griffith in “Working Girl.”
What happens after that feels like a bit of an afterthought, or perhaps sections jumbled in the wrong order in haste. After a blackout, yielding awkward, hesitant applause, the piece restores the same look and feel of “Mujeres’” beginning, with some additions: a game of musical chairs about the table, followed by a pretend tipsy section, then a pretty flimsy one set to Ken Jenkins’ “Palladio.” That’s a perfectly good song, but one that has yet to release itself from an association with the 1990s-era “diamonds are forever” De Beers ad campaign.
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.
Para.Mar Dance Theatre presents “Mujeres” (3.5 stars)
When: Through 7 p.m. Saturday
Where: Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.
Running time: 70 minutes
Tickets: Saturday benefit tickets $100 at paramardance.com
