Breakbone DanceCo.’s Excavation of Remains opens with corpses lying in a morgue—strangers thrown together to form a bizarre community. One wanted to die; one thought he’d never die. One is enraged by her death while another celebrates her long life. Several are obsessed with their toe tags, which they strain to read.
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A collaborative dance-theater piece created by the seven performers and directed by Breakbone artistic director Atalee Judy, Excavation of Remains is ambitious and appealingly odd, but also rambling and disjointed, with knobby excrescences like a bit naming young baseball players who dropped dead and an audience contest where you get a prize if you find a hidden toe tag. There’s a free-floating song about gasoline and kerosene. And the performances are uneven—not surprising given the artists’ varying levels of experience.
But vignettes that both cohere and suggest the mystery of death redeem the evening. Judy, long obsessed with strength and vulnerability, abandons her punishing “bodyslam” technique to mostly jog around the stage, often while singing or delivering text. Her character—a young, well-trained runner, a “soldier of the asphalt” who pushes himself too hard in a marathon—is a fascinating blend of bodily weakness and endorphin-fueled arrogance. He tells us he spent his first six years in leg braces, then fast-forwards to his method of running, which Judy demonstrates: standing still, she tips forward until forced to take a step to catch herself. The step turns into a run consisting of repeated saves from falling. Weakness is a source of strength and its symbiotic twin.
Judy’s in-the-round staging uses the Hamlin Park performance space inventively. Her character, the runner, turns it into a gladiator’s arena where every lap is a victory lap. Fillmore opens a door to offer a glimpse of chaos in a stairwell, a disastrous world of clutter. Meyers leans against a second-floor window with a sheer drop to the cement. And finally, the dead people gather around an old Park District piano to sing, laugh, and applaud one another, a community united by frailty.
Breakbone DanceCo., through 8/7: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Hamlin Park field house, 3035 N. Hoyne, 773-841-2663, breakbone.com, $10-$15.
