Lots of us, including me, try to tidy up the great house of Art. We walk into one of its rooms and start sweeping, dusting, and straightening, looking for allusions and patterns and, ultimately, meaning. When that impulse is stymied, arts consumers often exact a quick revenge. “My three-year-old could have painted that.” Or “I don’t get it”—the preferred response to dance.
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Pales drops viewers into an ongoing story introduced at “intermission” by Meyer’s “lecture.” After Lowesleaf, Khecari administrator/performer Suzy Grant comes onstage and urges the audience to take a “six- to eight-minute break” even as she breathlessly announces the imminent arrival of a distinguished guest. “Go—no, stay!” is her message. Then, a bit at a time, Meyer tells a nonsensical “historical” tale about a Croatian shepherd digging garlic, vampires, the invention of cigars, the world’s longest intermission, how the Inquisition abolished intermissions, and a carpet square. Plus a whole lot more.
Slowly, concepts from the Inquisition—claiming territory, intimate combat, watchling and passing judgment—begin to pervade Pales (the noun pales here meaning “stakes” or heraldic stripes). The dancers’ gauzy hoods, which they pull out of pockets in their costumes and stuff back in, suggest monks. But their fussing with fluttery little rectangles of fabric on their arms and legs is just distracting. Meyer and Grant, seated on high, seem Grand Inquisitors who initiate and interrupt the action, but their periodic pronouncements about how “moving” they find the piece are perhaps the single most annoying element of Pales.
Such creepy associations run throughout the eerie Lowesleaf, divided by blackouts (and subtitles) into a dozen vignettes. Fear haunts Meyer’s and Antonick’s interactions, which often revolve around who’s in control. For years they’ve been exploring duet forms, from the tango to capoeira—and it shows in the way they’ve distilled those conventions here and married them to indistinct fairy tales. By the time Meyer and Antonick are stumbling along together like marathon dancers in the last vignette, “Carcass Drag,” they’ve come to seem paired forever in an enchanted land of hair-raising embraces.
Through 7/29: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph, 312-742-8497, khecari.org, $15-$25.
