Save the last dance

OFF THE MIKE Karen Christopher, left, Lito Walkey, center, and Matthew Goulish caught in motion during The Lastmaker.

Photo: Courtesy of Alfred de dvore Theater and MOTUS.

This is your last chance to see Goat Island, “one of the most important and influential [performance] companies working in Chicago,” says Peter Taub. The ensemble’s evening-length performances combine elaborately structured dances with theatrical elements. Taub is director of performance programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the group’s final work, appropriately titled The Lastmaker, has its U.S. premiere Thursday 27. The Goats have toured internationally, even performing at the Venice Biennale, a major contemporary arts festival. “They are widely influential,” Taub says. “But they have not been seen by a broad enough public in Chicago or the U.S.”

After 20 years together, Goat Island decided this project would be its last. “We wanted to seize an ending before it seized us, to begin something else while we were still strong,” says company director Lin Hixson. “The ending didn’t come about because of internal conflict. I really liked the idea of taking on an ending creatively—to provide an example for younger companies of how one could end in a creative, respectful and dignified way.”

The company, which works collaboratively and takes up to two years to develop a new performance, took the question of what it means to come to an end as a starting point for its new work.

Hixson explains that one section of Lastmaker is based on The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s documentary about rock group the Band’s farewell concert in 1978. Much like Goat Island, the Band decided that after 16 years on the road, it was time for a change. “We created our own version of that concert,” Hixson says. The company developed a series of vignettes, each about the length of a pop song, which feature famous last words and actions, including the last 60 seconds of Bach’s final composition, some of Lenny Bruce’s last monologues, material from a last interview with the poet Stanley Kunitz and the last words of author Emily Brontë.

A second section of the performance is a long dance inspired by a Byzantine dome the company saw during an artistic residency in Zagreb, Croatia. The dome is housed in a building called the dzamija, which has served both spiritual and secular purposes during its history. Another source of inspiration for the dance was the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which was converted from a church to a mosque and then finally to a secular museum.

“When we started this piece,” explains company member Karen Christopher, “we were looking at ‘doubleness’ in architecture and the kind of change a building has to make to go from Christian to Islamic, from church to mosque.” Both kinds of architecture “have very specific requirements and they’re not in line with each other,” she says.

“[The Lastmaker] is about how you shift something just a little and make it completely different,” Christopher says, citing the way the Hagia Sofia was reoriented so that everyone could pray toward Mecca when the building became a mosque.

Company member Matthew Goulish says the multiple-use architecture concept is a strong organizing theme of the performance. “All of these ideas about ‘lastness’ have to somehow funnel in through the structure [of this piece],” he says. He also says the process of making Lastmaker has given rise to a feeling of courage and a sense of possibility for members of the company as they have seized opportunities to put their stamp on this final work.

“Ending could be looked at as something tragic,” says Christopher. “But you can look at the beautiful side of something sad or difficult and find ways to make it positive—or, if not positive, interesting.”

Goat Island’s The Lastmaker takes a final bow at the MCA Theater on April 6. Read a web-exclusive review of the Goat’s new book, Small Acts of Repair here.