Steadily and without preciousness, the choreographers involved with The Seldoms’ 3×3 each took the vastness of the Dance Center stage this weekend and owned it. Darrell Jones’ Whiff of Anarchy set two tones–smooth athleticism and a pronounced darkness–for the evening as its opening work. The stage’s four-digit square footage was left mostly bare, save two setpieces by Grant Sabin splitting center upstage: Piles of television sets with flat wings suggesting the city. The tube sets displayed mostly static during the work’s opening, gradually folding in images and video of protest, riot and civil unrest as the piece progressed. I liked Jones’ explicit invocation of the urban as a unique set of conditions; it’s a work about people who live in cities and, as an urbanophile myself, I responded to Jones’ taking for granted that we all understood that Whiff wasn’t about small-town America and why don’t we just get that out of the way and do this thing. The costumes (dancers’ own garments with consultation by the inimitable Jeff Hancock) and styling (dramatic, spiky updos and kohl-rimmed eyes) reminded me of Anne-Marie Veevaete’s designs for Crystal Pite (a good thing), a précis in costume and movement of the gritty drama from his most recent piece, 2007’s excellent third swan from the end. The dancers move as a group, as a herd, even when split in two facing lines or sorted by gender and staring each other down–Jones creates and dissolves compositional elements with variety and skill. There’s a sparse vocal layer running atop Whiff that never really breaks into language; they hiss and yell at the room, at no one in particular, at one point growling “ffffff-k YOU” with considerable effort. It combines with the vocabulary, this work’s strongest component, to impart a sense of frustration and blockage. Jones seems to be suggesting that the riot mentality, or submission to the violent impulse, is not a release of energy but rather the result of its imprisonment.
Carrie Hanson. Photo by William Frederking.
I appreciated the control Jones has over tone–each subsection is a slight pull away or toward the ones that bracket it, and his ability to move the entirety of the work, and cast of seven, around tonal space with the precision of a surgeon is impressive. As with third swan, he prefers a DJ’s compositional touch to a composer’s, and Whiff stays in the custody of Franco De Leon throughout, whose selections (DJ Qbert, Jaylib, OH NO and Youngblood Brass Band) recalled DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…... As he can as a performer, Jones brings the dance’s vocabulary into and out of acrobatic trickery with real style and no-big-deal panache, the body mechanics unpredictable in sequence but essentially informal. I think Jones and Peter Carpenter are notable in Chicago for having found a unique language that feels considered and complete despite their employment of the generative skills of the ensemble. This approach calls upon the same part of the brain as a DJ’s trade does, in fact, and like in music, well done is well done. No choreographer is automatically handicapped for not having invented all of their works’ material. The dancers were amply flattered by Whiff‘s content and Jones’ direction, especially Seldoms newcomers Daniel Gibson, Damon Green, Todd Rhoades and Jackie Stewart. The women (including Seldoms director Carrie Hanson) comprised a powerhouse quartet.
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