Street dance doesn’t get much respect — and that includes Chicago’s homegrown style, footworking. Though kids have been doing it on the West and South sides for nearly 30 years, in parking lots and alleys and parades, few in the established dance world knew anything about it. Because they’re kids, right? And they’re from the West and South sides.
The Era, founded in 2014, wouldn’t settle for that. And though its dancers have been guests with DJs internationally, and performed with Towkio this year at Lollapalooza, they’re not really into second billing. Aiming for a focus on footwork dance, which preceded footwork music, they applied for a grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum — and got it. The result was a free show Saturday at the Hamilton Park Cultural Center, “In the Wurkz.” The Era wanted to open it on the South Side, where most of them grew up, but hope to bring it to other Chicago venues and beyond.
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Richly layered and textured, this incendiary work begs to be seen again. The dancing — to tracks with insanely high BPMs, by the likes of DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad — is a study in opposites: Flying, twisting feet connect just enough with the floor, whether skating or pounding, to propel the dancer to a hover zone just above it, while the upper body dives and sways to counterbalance the lower. At its best it looks light, even effortless.
Talented, imaginative, the Era could be poised to bring this street dance to widespread knowledge. In a path familiar to black dance artists — like Pearl Primus with African dance and Rennie Harris with hip-hop (whose Puremovement just performed three Chicago Dancing Festival shows) — the Era has managed to access the resources and clout of the white dance establishment, with the help of jack-of-all-trades company member Wills Glasspiegel, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale. Good for them. Good for footworking.
Yet “Wurkz” hasn’t quite transitioned from footwork battleground to concert stage. And maybe it shouldn’t, not completely. But promising new elements got lost at this venue. Lyrics by four of the five Era dancers gave a personal dimension to footworking’s surface flash, definitely a step in the concert-dance direction. But only snatches of the texts came through. Ingenious lighting — dancer headlamps, a bare bulb on a stand, saturated backdrops — sometimes did battle with the video, and neither won.
At the same time, these young dancers, all in their mid-20s, take huge steps beyond the battleground. Choreographed unison bits deliver an incredible punch. The six sections describe a rough storytelling arc, beginning with the lives of these dancers: pushing brooms (cleverly transformed into props for dancing), stocking supermarket shelves (and dancing in the aisles). The middle sections bring them into performance mode, rapping into a mic, at times expressing anxiety at entering a new world of white walls and white people, “so far from home.”
But the dancing is the thing here, and like tap dancers, each eventually makes himself known: P-Top, both weighted and miraculously airborne; lanky, loose Dempsey, commandeering his impressively long limbs; neat but expressive Steelo; elegant Litebulb, smooth, fast, integrating his entire body; and Chief Manny, troubled yet self-contained, disciplined.
My biggest complaint? Too little dancing. But that’s understandable: Footworking is so aerobically challenging it’s difficult to sustain over long periods. But the Era found a partial solution in the final two sections, returning “Wurkz” to the battleground. Guest artists Battle Ftr. — remarkably diverse, featuring men and women of various ages — burst onstage to show us what’s what. Then we were beckoned from our distant seats to approach the stage, and footworking came electrically alive. And when the dancers jumped offstage, and we circled them, I couldn’t see a thing. But I could feel the heat, the energy.
Laura Molzahn is a freelance critic.
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