Conspicuous Consumption
Time Out Chicago
By Asimina Chremos
The Seldoms, the seven-year-old Chicago dance-theater ensemble, has a history of dancing outside the box. One of its most memorable pieces took place in a huge, empty swimming pool; another in the confined space defined by the dimensions of a painting used as a backdrop.
The troupe's latest work premieres Thursday 3 in a regular dance theater (the Ruth Page Center), but the subject matter is no less thought-provoking than in past Seldoms jaunts. Monument deals with monuments – not the grand structures created in honor of political people or events, such as D.C.'s famous spire, the Washington Monument, but what artistic director Carrie Hanson calls "inadvertent" monuments, such as the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island that is large enough to be seen from outer space and soars higher than the Statue of Liberty.
As luck would have it, Hanson's landlord is a former landfill operator. "I've spent a lot of time interviewing him," she says. "I learned what makes a successful landfill. For example, compacting the trash from six feet high to one foot high. I realized a landfill is not a loose pile of garbage. It's built to last."
In Monument, "The dancers are sometimes the stuff of the landfill, embodying events of collision and leaching [liquid seeping]. Sometimes they are the machines, the compactors," she says. One of the more literal gestures the dancers perform is that familiar one of tossing a piece of trash over the shoulder. From this simple action, Hanson developed a series of "use and toss" duets.
"In this economy, my relationship to objects is so fleeting," Hanson, says, citing a paper coffee cup as an example. "I began to wonder how this translates to relationships between human beings."
Monument runs through April 12 at the Ruth Page Center.