Three women, dressed in slips, get ready to go out for the evening, each examining herself in an invisible mirror and reacting to the process and the prospect.
Pretty retro, right? Maybe a dance set to the 1958 “I Enjoy Being a Girl”? But choreographer Raphaelle Ziemba, who recently received a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, describes “In the Depths of the Sensuous” as more of “a meditation on performing gender.”
Part of Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre’s lineup Saturday at the Ruth Page, Ziemba’s trio exemplifies the troupe’s mix of accessible entertainment and social awareness. At SAIC, she says, “I became extremely aware that I was different.” She hadn’t been in a traditional classroom in 10 years, and “everyone but me was capable of sitting the whole time” in their three-hour classes.
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At first she thought she was feeling out of step because she was a dancer. Then she took a social theory class that introduced her to the writings of Judith Butler, who argues that gender isn’t determined by sex but by action — and performed variously depending on the person and the circumstances.
“This is where I started to realize that perhaps people’s reaction to me was not so much because I was a dancer,” Ziemba says, “as that I was extremely comfortable with my body and enjoyed being a woman.”
Embracing her way of performing gender, Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre’s associate artistic director based the choreography for “In the Depths” on her own liquid, sensitive movement, documented during various school projects. Yet she also brings out the differences between the three performers. Describing herself as the most inclined to be self-critical, Ziemba says Rachel Cortes is more confident, and Jillian Endebrock goes back and forth on “caring what she looks like.”
Like most of CRDT’s dances, “In the Depths” will be performed to live music: musical director Stu Greenspan’s arrangement of a Tin Hat Trio composition, played onstage by the CRDT music ensemble. When composer-musician Joe Cerqua and dancer-choreographer Wilfredo Rivera founded the company in 1996, they did more than pay lip service to the importance of live accompaniment — they made it fundamental.
CRDT’s resident dance and music ensembles definitely foster collaboration. Cerqua asked Ziemba to set her as-yet untitled quintet, a premiere, to the music he composed for a production of Stephen Karam’s play “Sons of the Prophet.” Ziemba was thrilled. She’d heard some sections of the composition. which Cerqua describes as a mix of Lebanese and Catholic music about dealing with loss and grief when you’re not religious, at CRDT’s show last spring. “Everybody was just blown away because they were so beautiful,” she says.
Under the influence of co-founder and painter Matt Lamb, CRDT has also always aimed to integrate projected images with live music and dance. Some video sleight-of-hand in Ziemba’s new quintet allows us to see a single dancer three ways: live onstage, in a live-feed projection and in a delayed feed — “like a ghost image of her,” Ziemba says.
In general, this show explores new video options. “We’re using Isadora software, which can manipulate projections any way you want, really,” Ziemba says. “We’ll maybe move the images around more, incorporate them more with the live music and dance.”
Co-artistic director Rivera adds to “Recuerdos” (“Memories”), whose first section was performed last spring. A tribute to his musician parents, it’s inspired by and set to the songs he heard as a child in Honduras. He’s also choreographed a new solo for Rachel Pike, set to the Ray Charles version of Kermit the Frog’s “Being Green.”
Dancer Marc Macaranas contributes the new “Elastic Pash,” which Ziemba says is about “the excitement of meeting someone for the first time — like seeing someone from across the room, making eye contact, and then that rush or butterfly feeling that builds up. You can see that in all the little gestures. It’s really cute.”
Also worth noting
Khecari + Happy Dog: Khecari reprises “Esther & the Omphali” and performs a new “duet investigation,” while Happy Dog offers a piece from its “Crowning Series” trilogy, about the reproductive process. 7 p.m. Friday-Sunday, Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave., $15-$25 at 773-281-0824 or linkshall.org
Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre
When: 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St.
Tickets: $25-$30 at cerquarivera.org