Lauri Macklin’s dances have always played nip and tuck with narrative. The dances tell stories, but Macklin creates dance images that only obliquely relate to them. In Macklin and Blair Thomas’s 1990 work The Boto, about a mythical porpoise man, six people dance under a 40-by-40-foot sheet of clear pstic, while electric fans make it ripple like ocean waves. Macklin’s images overlap like shingles on a roof: when one mysterious image is placed next to another, together they begin to tell a story. The way she handles images places her work in the same category as Carbone 14’s Le dortoir or Pina Bausch’s Tanzeater works. The Woman Who Kept Getting Stuck is an hourlong piece about the art of overcoming depression. Based on an evocative text by Michael K. Meyers, it concerns a housewife who “at night constructs and ascends staircases of optimism” from which “sorrows looked like toys.” She becomes so horrified at the evening news–gangs start gun battles in school hallways and children burn to death in tenements–that she finds she can no longer move. In this performance the work will be set among huge wooden sculptures by Jerzy Kenar. Wooden gallery, 1007 N. Wolcott, 604-8046. “Professional artists night” Thursday, November 5, 8 PM. $6. Then November 6 through 14. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 PM. $10.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Mark Krastof.