We Heart the Midwest

I’m at Links Hall, watching dancers warm-up on the creaky floor to Girl Talk. Running, internal, shaking, quaking, flowing, articulating, you name a verb and that’s what is done to warm-up, as I type and try to put the pieces together in one audience chair among many audience chairs.  I’ve somehow brought together a really amazing and inspiring set of woman to perform in this curated show The Purple State – women in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, who have chosen to make dance part of their lives/identity with components of daily practice, higher education, continually inquiring into the form, families, living and travelling where dance jobs and opportunities lead. The entire show taking away the barrier between the dance space and the audience with intent, ownership, years of experience on stage. 

Warm-up, Links Hall, Chicago

In our talk back Friday with Lucia Mauro, topics were discussed surrounding one particularly intriguing question, does the Midwest have its own dance aesthetic?  With so many part of the show alumni of Ohio State University dance, and Meghan currently a visiting professor, what came up is that there seems to be something to the OSU training method that draws out sensibilities of individuality, the ‘thinking’ and collaborative dancer, the choreographer following where the work leads.  A OSU thing, a life-long dance artist thing, a locational thing, wherever it derives from, there is not always a sense of individual identity – whatever that is prescribed as – in choreography in Chicago.  My bias being that I am drawn to this,  I see in  Chicago (the Midwest? a generation?) a general presentational quality of keeping the audience at a distance, assuming the exact stylings/emotive qualities of the choreographer, an ‘otherness’ in the dancer that is not transparent of them.  Is this the elitism that dance has carried as a badge of honor and a deterrent for audience members to try out this abstract dance form? Is this embedded from training methods, from the historical flow of modern dance, left over from the pioneers, the postmodernists, the ballet, musical theater? Half-questions, vague answers, huge research questions, this is an intriguing show from top to bottom.