April has been a heady month for dance in Chicago, including appearances by two national heavy hitters, Parsons Dance and Twyla Tharp Dance, and a 40th anniversary celebration of Nan Giordano’s leadership of Giordano Dance Chicago.
Also deserving mention is the Red Clay Dance Company, which opened a three-night run Thursday at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago as part of the 51st season of this essential, sometimes risk-taking dance venue, which supports both established and new talent in the field.
The 268-seat black-box theater does not have the offstage space or certain other amenities of the city’s larger houses, but it provides an uncommon intimacy that palpably thrusts audiences into the action taking place on the stage.
Red Clay’s program is titled simply “16,” a testament to the durability and growing success of this 16-year-old South Side organization, which made an important debut last year as a resident company at the Harris Theater with the culmination of its biennial La Femme Dance Festival.
The highlight here is the premiere of “Field: New Ground,” a Red Clay commission by Bebe Miller that smartly and perceptively showcases the nine solidly trained, highly committed members of this all-female company.
Miller, who was present Thursday evening, is a nationally known dance figure who formed her own eponymous company in 1985 and has choreographed more than 50 works for it and dozens more for other dance groups around the world. Her collaboration with a Red Clay is a coup for the Chicago company.
“Field: New Ground” opens with a solitary dancer alone on the left side of the stage furiously waving her right fist in front of her face as her left hand grasps her right forearm. Soon, another dancer comes and stands next to her just looking intently. It is a strange, unsettling sight that sets the tone for all that follows.
The tightly composed, 30-minute ensemble work has a coolly entrancing, sometimes almost hauntingly detached feel. Even when the performers partner and interact, they often still seem disconnected, a dancer pushing aside an outstretched foot, for example, and then just moving away.
Though there is some floor work and a few lifts, the movement is mostly grounded with always shifting configurations. The dancers are often split into swirling groups of threes, but these trios quickly break apart and blur and then inevitably regroup.
Dichotomies abound. Fast action and slow motion. Urgency and calm. Pull away and lean in. Some dancers move, others just watch. Sometimes the action stops, only to start again when someone yells, “Now!” The work is performed to a sometimes startlingly mixed soundtrack which ranges from the electronic sounds of Michael Wall to a solo piano work by Alexander Scriabin to Pamela Z.’s choral-like “Unknown Person,” with lyrics drawing on all-too-familiar questions from the TSA.
Red Clay bills itself as an “Afro-contemporary” company and its ties to African dance can be seen vividly in the evening’s opener, “Written on the Flesh.” The ensemble work was created in 2016 by the company’s founder and artistic director Vershawn Sanders-Ward in collaboration with her dancers for a performance at the DuSable Black History Museum and revised for this revival.
The original version was inspired by a Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay in The Atlantic in which he wrote, “elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring,” and this newer version also draws on Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” The work’s socio-political message remains ambiguous until near the end, when the stage turns red, two dancers put their hands up and three others crumple to the floor, apparent victims of violence. An American flag projection appears at the back of the stage and then seems to crack. The final scene consists of the performers marching off the stage to Public Enemy’s forceful “Fight the Power,” with the dancer in the lead carrying a red-and-green American flag, which draws inspiration from the Pan-African flag.
Like Miller’s work, “Written in the Flesh,” runs about 30 minutes, but it seems longer because some of the sections feel a little repetitive. But overall, the work makes good use of the dancers and keeps the mood ever-varied with the help of lighting designer Jacob Snodgrass.