No, “Cover Band” isn’t a Led Zep tribute concert. In celebration of the Chicago Moving Company’s 40th anniversary, founder and artistic director Nana Shineflug asked five Chicago choreographers to put their own spins—no restrictions—on five of her works. Matthew Hollis (aka “Mattrick Swayze”) chose Shineflug’s 1992 Nancy in the Dustpan, an autobiographical solo about romantic illusions. He changed only about four lines of Shineflug’s extensive text, he says—replacing her Buddhist chant, for instance, with his own mantra about push-ups. He also added a pop score suited to Cheerobix, his “heart-pounding, fat-blasting, smile-inducing” dance-fitness style based on pom-pom routines. A longtime cheerleading fan who created the campy/sweet Let’s Go, Love! (2008), Hollis is well qualified to interpret love and luv alike.
Atalee Judy of BONEdanse plans to reinvent Shineflug’s 1994 Crash and Burn while preserving its brick-throwing intensity. In a quieter vein, Peter Carpenter of the Peter Carpenter Performance Project is taking a second look at Shimmering on the Edge (1999); his cover is titled Rituals of Abundance for Lean Times #6: In Pursuit of Randomness. Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre artistic director Joanna Rosenthal tackles Altered (2002), Shineflug’s response to 9/11. And the Dance COLEctive’s Margi Cole takes on the overstuffed Sufi Tales (1988)—a piece, as Cole puts it, full of “fun and folly”—transforming it into a solo called My Sufi Tale.