There’s been more talk than usual lately about dead choreographers, due to the passing last summer of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch. A few weeks ago in the New York Times, Arthur Lubow used Cunningham as a jumping-off point to wring his hands at length over the evanescence of dancing and the difficulty of notating choreography. But Cunningham himself didn’t seem to care much about preservation. A member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company board told Lubow the master didn’t appear interested in “what happened to the work,” and Carolyn Brown, an original company member, wrote that Cunningham paid little attention to revivals because he was usually busy making new work.
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The wisdom of revisiting some of those dances by putting them onstage is less than obvious. On November 13 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, the Thodos Dance Chicago fall concert featured the much-touted “world premiere” of three Fosse works, reconstituted by Fosse protege and domestic partner Ann Reinking from pieces choreographed for late-60s TV shows. (The program repeats this weekend at the Harris.) Fosse Trilogy turned out to be the show’s low point, while what saved the evening were fresh recent works, many of them created in TDC’s incubator project, New Dances. Pieces by artistic director Melissa Thodos and company member Jessica Miller Tomlinson communicated in ways that the Fosse works didn’t—and maybe couldn’t.
The costumes are better in the TDC version, but it’s still dull, in part because Reinking dutifully uses the dated original music, which drags the dancing down with it. As the YouTube mash-ups reveal, setting the Ed Sullivan clip to hotter music (like Unk’s “Walk It Out”) vastly improves the choreography.
Architecture runs counter to the Thodos aesthetic of seamless flow, which apparently makes it a little uncomfortable for the dancers. But its insistent start-and-stop phrases mesmerize, often ending in unpretty, powerfully suggestive poses reminiscent of Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces. Set to music by Dmitry Shostakovich and Alfred Schnittke, Architecture is like a cubist painting come to life, angular solos and duets popping out of a line of dancers as it crosses the stage in an inexorable, glacial march.
