Mordine and Company Dance Theater, Lake Street Church, Evanston, Illinois, March 6-7, 1998. Jan Erkert & Dancers, Athenaeum Theater, Chicago, Illinois, March 13-22, 1998.

LAKE STREET CHURCH, EVANSTON, ILLINOIS MARCH 6-7, 1998 JAN ERKERT & DANCERS ATHENAEUM THEATRE, CHICAGO MARCH 13-22, 1998 REVIEWED BY LAURA MOLZAHN

Two female veterans of Chicago's modern dance scene--Shirley Mordine has been making dances for about thirty years, Jan Erkert for about twenty--by chance had concerts within a week of each other. Both programs featured an earlier work and a new piece, and each revealed a choreographer clearly capable of remarkable freshness and originality, though occasionally a dance got bogged down by the trappings intended to give it meaning.

Mordine's For Five Women, a work in progress, fully exploited the power of movement. Created to celebrate the "five handsome women" in Mordine's company, it combined idiosyncratic music (traditional Tuva throat singers and a string composition by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovksy, both recorded) with Mordine's very personal meditations on womanhood to produce an intriguingly murky female underworld.

This world was full of variety. In the first section, the women often looked self-involved and isolated; in the second they made more connections. Yet things began to break apart: one dancer took a girlish pose--head lowered, knees together, hands on knees--while shortly afterward another was flinging herself across the stage. The choreography in the third section (my favorite) resembled a crazed square dance, with a line of women taking big, space-eating strides backward and forward; even lying on their backs, they were not quiet--their arms were spread wide, their hands splayed. The dancers had the most intimate connections in the fourth section, but they were always mysterious: one woman tossed, chased, and nestled into a pillow.

Dancing was the raison d'etre of For Five Women, but Mordine's 1997 Animare was driven by its concept and props. She's added puppets (by Michael Montenegro), making what was already rather obvious in the choreography blatant: when the dancers molded a tiny object, then seemed to place it inside a woman's belly, we didn't need to see the "child" in wizened puppet form. There was little or no attempt at theatrical illusion on the in-the-round stage at the Lake Street Church, and setting this dance about birth and death in a church seemed inappropriately pointed.

If props bedeviled Mordine in Animare, the set was the stumbling block in Jan Erkert's 1997 UnWeavings. Though Laurie Wohl's movable curtains--hanging strips of cloth in pale colors--were beautiful in themselves, the dancers' manipulation of them interfered with the choreography. The solos, duets, and trios of this quintet about the dissolution of human relationships came across as fractured and unrelated. Although Erkert may have meant to scuttle any potential sentimentality, the performances were too impassive to communicate loss.

By contrast, Love Poems, Erkert's premiere, was gloriously active and alive. A piece about the emotional upheavals of early love, it relied more on the dancing than on the props--a writing desk, folded love notes, poems projected on an upstage screen--for its impact. Claudia Howard Queen's original score for percussion and voice was alternately eerie and joyous, capturing the contradictory life force that surges through new relationships.

As did the dancing, especially in three of the six sections of Love Poems. The metaphor inherent in "Butterflies in My Stomach" was taken to fantastic physical heights, and in "Breathing Fast" the three women explored the fine line between passion and rage, hurling themselves into the men's arms with ragged abandon. In the final section, "I Want You, I Need You," all six dancers reunited in passionate recapitulations, the kind of kinetic conflagration that is Erkert's trademark.