Gia Kourlas, NY Times - September 24, 2009

In "This could be it" Jillian Sweeney is unflappable, providing the right kind of precision to get beyond the cliche of a solo performer making a dance based on stories from her life. It helps, certainly, that her tales don't have linear cause and effect but focus on surreal themes of duality and the search for self.

It's funny too. This bewitching performance piece, directed by Jeffrey Cranor of the New York Neo-Futurists theater troupe, who wrote it with Ms. Sweeney (they are husband and wife), begins with her standing at the back of the industrial space. She haughtily poses against a wall with one arm pressed onto its brick surface. Advancing to the front of the stage, she passes her hands over her neck and abdomen, moving with a distinct stutter. Suddenly it's as if she were an actor in a deteriorating vintage film.

With the help of a voice-over she has a conversation with herself; lines like "As far as I know" and "The fact of the matter" are continually interrupted by the sharp interjection of "Say it." That recorded voice, along with the sound of chimes, commands her to lie down, stand up or start a movement phrase over.

The references in "This could be it" include the horrific tale of Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia) and the film "Amadeus." But the root of the work seems to be based on another story: the time Ms. Sweeney read George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and had a brief out-of-body experience.

Ms. Sweeney dances a duet with her image as seen in a film by Brian Rogers, who also created the sound; it is an obvious moment when past and present fuse. More eerie is the way that throughout the work, magnificently lighted by Chloe Z. Brown, Ms. Sweeney resembles two people depending on where she is standing. It's a haunting visual feat, as if somehow the voices in her head had found their way to reality.

Gia Kourlas, Time Out NY - September 3, 2009

For their new shared program, Milka Djordjevich and Chris Peck pose some fairly impossible questions: Can music and dance become indistinguishable? Or can dance be so musical that it is not perceived as a dance? In "An Evening with Djordjevich and Peck," which opens the Chocolate Factory's fall season, Djordjevich, a choreographer, and Peck, a composer, use a series of short works to examine the relationship between the two art forms - from many odd angles.

"Right away I want to say that I don't think it's an original idea," Peck says. "I think we're tackling a big, unsolvable topic that many people have tried to tackle before. We started off with the circular question of making music and dance indistinguishable, irrelevant, and we wanted to resist making some kind of totalizing statement."

Likewise, they hope that their method of presenting an evening of short pieces is a more open and productive approach. Using text-based scores - words are mutual ground for a choreographer and composer - Peck will move, and Djordjevich, who is actually a classically trained violist, will play instruments. Above all, the evening is a framing of an issue, rather than a conclusion. The pieces, they hope, will form a collection of cohesive ideas. "It gives us a different kind of freedom of not trying to knit them together in a big piece that has a bunch of transitions," Peck says, before laughing. "Maybe the real answer is that we're just lazy and that we don't want to try to come up with transitions."

Djordjevich met Peck, an esteemed composer who has created scores for numerous contemporary choreographers, when the pair served as curators of the 2008 Movement Research Spring Festival (along with Jeff Larson and Anna Sperber). "I studied music and abandoned it because I felt it was too rigid and that I didn't have the space to be expressive in it," Djordjevich says. "I felt I was going to be trained to be a robot or something. So meeting Chris was great because I felt like he encouraged me to think more about music, and we were also able to talk about this music-dance relationship that has so much baggage to it; I could understand certain things musically, and also he was so familiar with dance."

In addition, the relationship grew out of the notion that both are intrigued by, as Peck puts it, "the gray areas between artist curation and creation." For the program, they crafted a series of improvisational scores. Much relates to simple, repetitive movements, in which the scores give attention to different aspects of the body. In "Chris's Score," which Djordjevich created, the instruction starts off with the choice of one body part (for instance, the hips, hands, ribs or head), articulating that area in a "repetitive looping or binary action" and amplifying it. Gradually, more body parts are introduced. Another focuses on the electric guitar; here the emphasis is less on performing traditional sound and more the movement of the hands.

"In one piece, I just play and sing a song on the guitar, and Milka choreographs to itัit's not even a song that I wrote," Peck says. "If anything is difficult for me in the relationship of music and dance, I'd say it's the use of pop music in general. I have a lot of issues with how pop music gets used in different performance contexts. That's not to say that I never like it, but 90 percent of the time, it kind of drives me nuts. So I'm playing a pop song that hopefully can be read as some kind of comment on the use of pop songs."

For Djordjevich, pop music's relationship with contemporary dance is more complicated. "At first when we talked about it I thought we were joking with each other a little bit," she says. "I think there's also something to say about reality and the fact that we do listen to pop music and that it's part of our life and we like it and we do dance to it; we have rehearsals and we mess around and it's fun. Of course, there's humor to what we're doing, but my hope is that it becomes a sincere act."

While Peck sings in that number, there will be plenty of other opportunities to watch him dance; Djordjevich, for one, is entranced by Peck's skill as a mover. "I sometimes think he can do things more brilliantly than a trained dancer because he has a level of detail and awareness from his sound experience that really affects how he approaches movement," she explains. "In general, I've been working with dancers and trying to get them to move in a way that's not like a dancer, that's breaking the trained ironing-out of action that we do as trained people. When you work with someone who's not trained like Chris, it's natural. It's directing in a different way. And he's a performer. He's really charismatic and he likes to dance." She laughs. "He likes to dance on the dance floor."

Claudia La Rocco, NY Times - September 12, 2009

As the audience filed dutifully up the stairs into the Chocolate Factory's white-brick theater on Wednesday night, one woman whispered, "This feels like the first day of school."

For her, like many there, the factory's season opener heralded the beginning of the brutally busy fall performance schedule. Getting back into the swing of shows after the summer lull is something like returning to school: you have to build your endurance for sitting quietly and paying strict attention. In this context, "An Evening With Djordjevich and Peck" unfolded like a gentle performance primer, one that offered quietly thoughtful meditations on the shared experience of live art.

Plus, there were group exercises: "language resistant" ones, naturally. Aided by an onstage screen, the choreographer Milka Djordjevich and the composer Chris Peck led the audience through tongue twisters, songs, incorrect grammar quizzes and repeat-after-me aphorisms like "Art is science for the impatient."

This was sometimes sweetly endearing, sometimes challenging and sometimes tedious. It served the greater purpose of forging a strongly felt group identity; we were in this together, pass or fail.

It didn't hurt that our guides were charming and encouraging. But they also seemed nervous; at several points in the two-hour show they verbally undercut their actions, even apologizing for the length.

The unscripted remarks were probably as much a reflection of the intimacy of the contemporary performance scene, with audiences full of familiar faces. And nerves have a way of settling. Let's hope so, as they ill served an evening that relied on gentle camaraderie and slowly building, sophisticated spells.

In one particularly magical section, ghostly chanting voices swirled and surged from the factory's basement space beneath the theater, which lay dark. As architectural details emerged in the shadows, artificial light slowly flooded the shaft connecting the two levels. A woman appeared, walking haltingly backward up the steps to the theater: a ghost come to life, offering a delicious, spooky jolt.

The surprise continued as four women followed her in. Still chanting, they moved purposefully throughout the space, creating a shifting soundscape and keeping their backs to us until a final, breathless and triumphant reveal.

The push and pull of music and movement was explored throughout. Mr. Peck executed a simple, awkwardly beautiful dance by Ms. Djordjevich. She performed his "Screwdriver Action" on an electric guitar, until he joined her on a second guitar. Such mischievous and surprising duets abounded. But the larger collaboration enveloped everyone in the room. Returning to school isn't always painful.

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