To find the latest performance piece by the rising experimental dance company Khecari — “rhymes with ‘treachery,'” explains founder Jonathan Meyer — go to West Rogers Park on the Far North Side. Specifically, Indian Boundary Park on Lunt Avenue, an oasis of green hemmed in by duplexes, apartment buildings and family homes. Once there, you will move instinctively toward the 1929 Tudor Revival fieldhouse on the south end of the park; it seems to be the only conceivable place for a dance performance here. But continue past, to the north end: On a brisk autumn evening, the only sound should be the rustling of trees, the only smell the damp foliage. If you can feel the drama, congratulations: You’re getting closer to Khecari.
After a minute of walking, you will find yourself standing before strings of white lights roped across the tops of what appears to be the cages of a recently abandoned zoo. These are the cages of a recently abandoned zoo: Last year, the Indian Boundary Park Zoo closed after nearly 90 years in operation; it was an eccentric neighborhood spot, at one time a home to pumas, yaks, monkeys and peacocks. Maintained by the Lincoln Park Zoological Society, it was the lesser of Chicago’s two zoos, and therefore perpetually on the verge of losing its funding. When it was finally closed, only a solitary goat, two ducks and some chickens remained.
Open the steel gates to this old zoo. Walk past its empty cages. Consider its vaguely after-the-apocalypse serenity. Continue to the red brick barn that was once home to a single black bear, the zoo’s first resident.
Here at last: Khecari, one of Chicago’s most innovative dance groups.
For 17 more shows, through Dec. 7, Khecari will perform inside this barn.
But really, Meyer and Julia Rae Antonick, co-artistic director, would like you to take in the entire context — the zoo, the evening, the history, the drama.
As Ginger Farley of the Chicago Dancemakers Forum puts it, “Khecari has become one of the more interesting companies around partly because they don’t just present you with the novelty of an environment — they steep in it, they make it a part of their work.”
And so, as if a contemporary dance group performing in a former zoo wasn’t enough, there’s the piece itself, created by Meyer and titled “Oubliette.”
As in, a dungeon.
Which is essentially where the four dancers of “Oubliette” perform, at the bottom of a 6-foot-tall drop, inside the zoolike confines of a 5-foot-by-8-foot box. This is their stage. Meyer, however, prefers “microtheater.” He built it with several friends, using lumber from Home Depot. It stands in the center of the barn and leaves room for only 12 audience members per show, who sit on elevated benches at opposite sides of the pit. To watch the dancers — who careen, climb, flip and crash violently within their cage — the audience leans onto a railing and peers over, “looking down upon these creatures,” Meyer said.
Frankly, Meyer — long, lanky, closely resembling Johnny Knoxville of “Jackass” — is not at a loss for metaphors. He said an early inspiration for “Oubliette” came as “I was closely following what was happening with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and thinking a lot about confinement, about internment camps.” But he hesitated to relay this, or suggest the piece should be viewed as merely political. Or just about zoos. In the program notes, he describes drawing inspiration for the dancers’ movements from fetal development, sea sponges, the flocking patterns of birds, movements of schools of fish and tectonic shifts of the Earth’s crust.
And yet, pretentious as that sounds, each of those metaphors comes across.
Along with a few others: The stage also suggests, oh, a cockfighting ring, an open grave and, uh, well …
On a recent weekday night, a few days before Saturday’s opening performance, Antonick, who is also one of the four dancers in “Oubliette,” apologized that she couldn’t talk longer because “I have to go back in the box.” Joe St. Charles, who is half of the orchestra for the show, overheard and added, channeling his inner serial killer: “The dancer does this, it puts the lotion in the basket, it does this whenever it’s told.” A sly nod to the fact that the stage, as viewed from the audience, can also seem vaguely reminiscent of that dungeon in “The Silence of the Lambs”: deep, hopeless and more than a little unnerving.
But that’s basically the idea.
As Indian Boundary Park supervisor Phil Martini, himself a former dancer, said, “A general rule for dancers is, the more space the better.” So when he realized what Khecari was creating (the group has been the park’s artist-in-residence for a couple of years), he wondered if he would feel claustrophobic just watching. The answer is yes.
“I think one of the more exciting ways Khecari has distinguished itself is by thinking as much about the choreography of the audience as it does the dancers, how the audience moves, how it feels in relation to the dancers,” said Roell Schmidt, director of the Links Hall performance space. She said the group’s “becoming kind of like a dance version of Sean Graney,” director of the Hypocrites theater company, which has become known for rarely putting its audiences in traditional seats or presenting traditional experiences. In 2011, Meyer and Antonick — who form Khecari’s core and write their own material — staged a show in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, placing the audience on elevators and dancers on various floors; as the elevator’s glass doors would pass each floor, a new dancer was seen in motion. Last year, Khecari put the audience for another of its shows on moving platforms, which were rolled around the stage and the dancers. Decks of playing cards have doubled as show programs; for “Oubliette,” the programs are mock passports.
Just recently, Antonick and Meyer were discussing a new piece, she said, when “Jonathan began saying to me, ‘You know, this one could be 12 hours long.'”
They have a lot of energy.
Meyer is 42, grew up in Lombard and didn’t become interested in dance until attending Oberlin College in 1990. He spent years alternating between dance and working with at-risk youth in “wilderness therapy programs,” then founded Khecari in New Mexico in 2002. The company’s name is Sanskrit, loosely translating as “magically flying.” One work performed in New Mexico featured Meyer in a window box suspended above the stage. In 2006, Meyer moved back to Chicago, and within a year began performing with Antonick, who is 33 and grew up in Batavia. She said they never saw the company as a way to fill a niche for avant-garde dance in a fairly traditional contemporary dance scene, “only to make a distinct space for ourselves.”
The results, though, have placed Khecari to the left of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago and the majority of local dance companies. “They are definitely pushing boundaries, though with real substance,” said Phil Reynolds, executive director of the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, “and one of the ways they have done that is paying close attention to the architecture of a piece.”
It’s hard to sit — or rather, to perch — through “Oubliette” without being keenly aware of how close you are to the dancers. Most of the time, you’re at arm’s length; at other times, much less. Certainly, you’re close enough to wince as they knock their heads against the walls, to see the sweat collecting on their heads, to feel uncomfortable at a little mildly erotic writhing. But you’re also close enough to notice that the performers — who at times seem to be rehearsing a prison break, and at other times are bleakly resigned to living in the box — are locked in an intense, complex pattern of repetitive movements. Looking down on the stage, they become animals in a cage. But also — add this to the list of metaphors — like cogs in a chugging machine.
The music helps.
St. Charles and accordionist Sarah Morgan sound like an oompah band in hell. Morgan runs her accordion through the kind of electric pedals normally associated with electric guitars. St. Charles plucks at the inside of an old piano with a spoon, winds up music boxes and bashes at railroad ties, creating layers of sound.
But also, throughout, Meyer stands at one end of the stage, above the pit, working the lighting, watching his dancers, always present, always hovering. “It’s a weird thing to have a person tell people how to move in front of a group of other people,” he said, when asked if he wanted to be noticed. “And we take for granted that this is what choreographers do. So, yes, in a way, I suppose that I wanted to, subtly, depict that role.”
Mission accomplished.
On Saturday night, as audience members filtered out of the zoo after “Oubliette’s” debut, they came to a stop: The gates were padlocked. They couldn’t leave. The zoo itself had become a cage! Their world was a confinement, a pit with high walls! Yes, yes, it was a message: Quit your jobs, think outside the box — break your chains!
Or perhaps …
A park worker rushed over with a key: “Oh, sorry about that, my bad, my bad!”
Twitter @borrelli
