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For Valentine’s Day weekend, River North Chicago Dance Company has hooked up with two in-demand choreographers, Lauri Stallings and Robert Battle. Stallings—a former Hubbard Street dancer who’s won commissions from American Ballet Theatre and, with Big Boi of OutKast, Atlanta Ballet—contributes the brand-new Suppose. Showcasing Stallings’s grounded yet mercurial movement, Suppose includes whirling collapses into lazy seated poses. At a preview, Stallings assured us that the movement will ultimately “drop out of [the dancers’] heads to the groin,” but it looked fine to me. Battle, the choreographer responsible for RNCDC’s much-loved Train, has created the new Three, a male trio that, he says, “looks abstractly at boys at play but has a dark edge.” He’s also set his solo Ella, performed to the great Fitzgerald’s scat vocals, on an RNCDC dancer.
