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Donnell Williams in My Fellow Americans. Photo by Cheryl Mann.

Many scenes in Peter Carpenter’s “My Fellow Americans” are as barren and dusty as the Santa Fe Trail. In fact, dancer Atalee Judy, enacting a series of clichéd gunfight deaths from old Westerns, even fakes an echo as she makes the sound of a pistol’s shot through clenched teeth like a boy playing Cowboys and Indians during the Eisenhower era. The paradox of this new dance theater work, as in all of Carpenter’s pieces I’ve seen, is how the simplicity of its surface contains such a densely-packed mass of codes, references, suggestions and arguments. Becoming absorbed by the dances he makes is like reaching nonchalantly for a block of styrofoam to find out it weighs as much as an anvil. Click here to read the entire article at SeeChicagoDance.com