GDC Jump Starts Spring with Panache

About 90 seconds into Sneaky Pete, Giordano Dance Chicago’s opening piece in its 56^th Spring season Saturday night, you knew the evening was going be solid.  The sleek machine founder Gus Giordano created over half a century ago is still purring like a Ferrari as it continues to capitalize on the company’s many strengths. 

Listing Sneaky Pete’s dancers as actors in the show’s program, the composition places them in a world of high stakes seduction where love is a game of titillation.  With Zachary Heller as the charismatic center of a fast-flowing plot told in dance, the sexy back and forth of these love connections might raise eyebrows in Mayberry but couldn’t be more at home here in the urbane confines of Chicago.  Music by Kerry Muzzey, Abel Korzeniowski and Adam Crystal kept anticipation high with a score that never relaxed its grip.

Throughout the dance, a high-energy reimagining of film noir aesthetics that cleverly blends hopeful expectation with menace, it’s the prowess of the dancing that makes the work sparkle.   The many synchronized sequences show off the company’s balletic skill. Mr. Heller’s supreme gifts in his solo runs stunned for their speed and impeccable execution.  And the theatricality of his canny performance added credence to his billing as lead actor.

Original music by Dan Myers and John Ovnik; with Myers himself performing the composition on violin live on stage, kept the intensity high in the second dance, commonthread, as well.  Choreographer Autumn Eckman matched movement to the beat in ways that complemented each with its nod to old school expressions of what beauty looks like in dance form. 

Ron De Jesus’s 2003 inspiration, Prey, proved itself the evening’s juggernaut.  Here opposite worlds came together to blow the audience away.  Masterfully weaving the ancient and the modern into a mosaic of mystery and suspense, every sensory element converged to take you to a place you never knew existed.  One that was as exotic as it was beautiful and as thrilling as it was captivating.  Add to this complex stew power and strength and you have Prey.  In the ever so capable hands of GDC, the work opened with two female dancers in sheer flowing red mirroring one anothers expressions of homage over a sound track echoing antiquity.  From there the piece took form as Kodo drums assumed dominance and the dance became a journey where time is suspended and a fascinating narrative unfolds in movement.  Undeniably exciting, the aggression of the female dancers stood out in high relief and allowed their physical power to share center stage with their grace.  If anything, Prey proves how art only grows and becomes more stimulating as its diversity of input broadens.  Here, it triumphed.

Giordano Dance Chicago’s premier of Miranda Davis’s Flicker saw a tone shift as the dance commemorated her view of life from the prism of someone who’s had to confront mortality through serious illness.  With dancers dressed in clinging white, gestures and motion gave the piece auras of sacrifice and the baptismal.

A work dedicated to the acumen of just two dancers, Alloy, a second work by choreographer Autumn Eckman in the night’s performance brought a pair of its most accomplished dancers to the fore.  Maeghan McHale and Devin Buchanan in combination have been with the company nearly two decades.  Their technical accuracy and natural style stand out in everything they do.  Each will be leaving the company soon to pursue greater opportunities and their performance in Alloy constituted a public farewell.  Heavily romantic and displaying a formality common to pas de deux, the work profiled the silky discipline and smoothness of flow each of these dancers is known for and Saturday’s audience so rapturously appreciated.

Who doesn’t like leaving a performance walking on clouds which is ones only recourse when GDC closes on Soul.  A million miles from the ethereal, choreographer Ray Leeper’s tribute to philanthropist Candace Jordan is all about the earthy honesty and inescapable magnetism of soul music as danced on jazz trained feet.  The combination couldn’t be more ideal; especially when riding on the vocals of Gladys Knight, Al Green and Tina Turner. 

A full company piece that exuded release, every segment incorporated moves adapted from 60’s R &B revues and applied to contemporary dance. The result, a joyful marriage between soulful style and close group precision.  Ultimately spilling out into the aisles of the theater, pony tails snapped like whips and bodies moved in serpentine temptation as they commemorated a Golden Age of American music.

Giordano Dance Chicago

Live in the Momentum

March 22, 23   2019

Harris Theater

Millennium Park

www.giordanodance.org