The pluck and perseverance of the Moving Architects

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  The Moving Architects dancers Laura Vinci de Vanegas, left, and Natalia Negron

  Photo: Saverio Truglia329.da.da.op.MovingArchitects.jpg148107671
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  Erin Carlisle Norton, director of the Moving Architects, with students on a recent tour of Tajikistan.

  Photo: Jessie Young329.da.da.op.MovingArchitects1.jpg148107692
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  Erin Carlisle Norton, director of the Moving Architects, with students on a recent tour of Tajikistan.

  Photo: Jessie Young329.da.da.op.MovingArchitects2.jpg148107713
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  Erin Carlisle Norton, director of the Moving Architects, with students on a recent tour of Tajikistan.

  Photo: Jessie Young329.da.da.op.MovingArchitects3.jpg148107734

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The Moving Architects dancers Laura Vinci de Vanegas, left, and Natalia Negron

Photo: Saverio Truglia

06/14/2011

On January 1, 2007, five days before her 27th birthday, Erin Carlisle Norton resolved to start a dance company. By early 2008, she was preparing the Moving Architects’ debut, a collaboration with local group Accessible Contemporary Music, inspired by a collection of stories by ’20s journalist Ben Hecht titled 1001 Afternoons in Chicago. The company garnered acclaim the following spring for Stops on the Line, an ode to Union Station danced in a church near Union Park. Throughout 2010, Norton and a band of fierce performers churned out some of the city’s freshest, most polished, most unique choreography.

Friday 17 through Sunday 19, the Moving Architects premieres its latest, PLUCK, alongside a mini documentary about its recent trip to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, on the heels of its first performances in NYC.

“I was always pushing for the next thing,” Norton tells me by phone from Ohio State University, where she’s completing an M.F.A. in dance. “But I’m still adding just one element at a time, so it’s organic the way the company grows, not, ‘I have a million resources, and I need to use every single one of them immediately.’ ” With the disclaimer that she’s being “optimistic about her life expectancy,” Norton adds, “I feel like I’ll be making dances for the next 40 years. I used to be in a big rush, but I feel confident now that there’s time. There’s a vision.”

Board president and self-styled chanteuse Linda Solotaire, who’s worked with numerous dance companies as a press liaison, remembers when Norton called her “out of the blue” to ask for help in launching the Moving Architects. “[Norton] said that she wanted to do it right,” and so Solotaire advised going the nonprofit route, stressing that “there’s very little support for independent [dance] artists [in Chicago]. You really have to be a 501c3.”

She also warned against a misstep she’d seen other young choreographers starting arts organizations make: tapping friends to be their advisers and fill their boards of directors. “Frankly, if you’re a young artist, your peers are probably a lot like yourself, with lots of ideas but not a lot of money or connections to people who know how to raise it.… [Norton] really understood that you need to be assertive about getting out there and making connections. This past year didn’t happen by accident,” Solotaire says.

Nevertheless, it was a high-school friend of Norton’s, McKenzie Milanowski, who Facebooked her from the State Department asking whether the Moving Architects would participate in a cultural-affairs initiative in Tajikistan. Norton and five dancers flew to Dushanbe, 250 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan—Milanowski’s next assignment—in March, visiting more than a dozen schools and orphanages. They did the same in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, closing with a performance at a youth center in Bishkek for an audience of more than 800.

PLUCK amplifies Norton’s signature, angular movement, which she says grew partially out of the distance between her and her company. “About 80 percent” was choreographed via Skype, Sprint’s WiMAX data network and projectors, from OSU’s Columbus campus to TMA’s Wicker Park studio. “I want everything more extreme, because that’s the only way I can see it [on video],” Norton says.

“I’m also looking at power in relationships, hierarchies, passivity, control, and those play into these extremes as well,” she explains. “There’s a bunch of things that bring it up. Watching politics over the last couple of years. Being in Central Asia. Seeing different classes of people.… It all fed into my thinking about ways of seeing power in society. I just started seeing it everywhere and wanted to address that very clearly. There is no level playing field, there just isn’t.”

PLUCK premieres at the Fasseas White Box Theatre Friday 17 though Sunday 19.