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Friday, February 3, 2012

Review: River North Dance Chicago at George Mason Center for the Arts

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Review: River North Dance Chicago at George Mason Center for the Arts

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Pamela Squires,

Jazz-based contemporary dance ensemble River North Dance Chicago is tasty, talented and has the technical proficiency to pull off a fun program with serious panache.

On Friday at the George Mason University Center for the Arts, River North presented seven old and new works that ranged from fierce to folkloric. This company has strong links to Chicago’s superb Hubbard Street Dance: River North’s artistic director Frank Chaves danced with Hubbard from 1987 to 1993. Both companies are imbued with the same spirit and sassiness, both claim jazz roots, though Chaves sees Hubbard as having moved over the years more toward European-flavored contemporary dance while River North has remained based in jazz. He defines jazz dance as “accessible and entertaining.”

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( Cheryl Mann / ) - River North Dance Chicago performs their piece “Sentir em Nós (Even for Us).”

( Cheryl Mann / ) - The dance ensemble performed Friday at the George Mason University Center for the Arts.

It’s a good thing that Chaves is not a stickler for strictly defined categories, because the four works on the program that he choreographed all speak with a body language solidly based in ballet. Chaves cleaves to line and structure. For example, in his 2011 “Simply Miles, Simply Us,” set to the music of jazz great Miles Davis, the clear musical structures that Davis so favored become visible to the eye. Chaves plays the saxophone and was a music major in his first year of college. No wonder, then, that he describes himself as a “music-first choreographer.” When he hears a piece of music, he says, he sees the dance in his head. In “Simply Miles,” the choreography deploys riffs, follows themes and responds to changes in key. It brings to life textures and timbres and channels the delicacy and “cool” jazz of Davis’s music.

Also on the program were “Evolution of a Dream,” “Beat,” “Sentir em Nos (Even for Us),” “Train,” and “Fixe.” The lively and folkloric “Habaneras, the Music of Cuba” brought to a successful close the kind of evening Chaves likes to call “a little escapism here at the theatre for a couple of hours.”

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