Sharleen Chidiac, a choreographer, dancer and musician, lives for scale. What could she produce with a big space and a team to go with it? So far, her ambition hasn’t caught up with reality. She’s dealing. “My work is like the D.I.Y. version” of a spectacle, she said. “I think that it also makes it kind of punk, and that is also true to me.”
Chidiac, whose mix of dance, music, theater and fashion is forceful yet fantastical, is blazing a new artistic path where the formalism of dance strikes against the glitter and seediness of rock. Within her are traces of the rebellious Scottish choreographer Michael Clark — he had a punk aesthetic, too — and the actress, dancer and singer Ann-Margret, whose flair she admires: “It’s very wild and it’s precise,” Chidiac said, “but it’s raw.”
An elegant wisp of a dancer, Chidiac can ground the stage with surprising ferocity. She knows her way around costumes; for a time, she choreographed fashion shows for Marni. This is a performer with inherent style and an innate sense of how to move a production along — sometimes with a tambourine and a well-timed kick.
In her new show “All the Rage,” Chidiac, 35, is embracing excess. “I decided that I was going to try to make a musical,” she said. “Whatever that means for me.”
She is experimenting with ways to merge her artistic selves, musician and dancer. The rage comes across more controlled than demonic, but within the show’s campy, over-the-top atmosphere is a subtle sense of what it takes to fight through hurdles.
A founder of Pageant, an artist-run dance space in Brooklyn, and the lead singer of Voyeur, a post-punk band — its sound plants you right in the 1990s — Chidiac has made a highly personal work with “All the Rage.” The show, through Friday, is at Kaje, in Gowanus, Brooklyn, a spot so intimate that the dancers’ bodies, voices and jittery angles practically singe your skin.
Chidiac has covered the floor in red Marley and built a rail in front of the first row. “There’s no extraneous space,” she said. “Every corner is being used either for audience or for show. I really like that. It’s a complete world.”
“All the Rage” is her first work in two years. It’s been a tumultuous time. Her parents are ill. An uncle died in a car crash, and a good friend, the indie music impresario Billy Jones, died of brain cancer. Jones was close with Chidiac and Jake Lazovick, her boyfriend, who is responsible for the music and dramaturgy of “All the Rage.” (Lazovick is also in Voyeur, which tours with Kim Gordon in September.)
“How do I make this piece deal with all that I’ve been dealing with?” she said. “Pain and tragedy, but then also these two identities that I have. The idea of making a musical isn’t from a fascination with musicals” — though she loves Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse — “but more of wanting to put together dance and music in a really blunt way.”
There’s no linear story, but characters grapple “with desire and ambition and personal freedom,” Chidiac said. “Something that I struggle with in my work is that I don’t just make dance, but that it involves all these bells and whistles — characters and people and dialogue and music and costume and set. I want that, but then some part of me is like, it’s too much.”
Instead of toning down, she’s ramping up. There’s even a hint of “Grease” in the show, which features exaggerated personalities in search of independence and fame. Chidiac referred to Owen Prum, the only man, as Mr. Freedom. (He is her Danny Zuko. ) “He is really like the man in the room,” she said.
The middle section unfolds in a series of tableaus during which letters crash down from the ceiling to spell “catastrophe.” For an extended period, the dancers, underneath it, slowly sink to the floor.
Chidiac has been thinking about how being a musician relates to her dance life — how it has changed her dance life. She grew up studying classical piano and training as a competitive cheerleader; she came to dance late, which has led to insecurities about technique.
But singing and dancing in Voyeur — and creating some of the most captivating music videos out there — have freed her. She’s trying to pass on her throbbing, almost possessed way of moving while singing to her cast.
“It’s thrashing and it’s intuitive — it’s from inside,” Chidiac said. “It’s almost like finding a hypnotic movement.”
The women — Lauren Fern, Angelina Hoffman and Clara Kim — tip into extreme arabesque penchées, flaunting jagged edges.
If any moment encapsulates Chidiac’s pursuit of freedom in the name of rage, it comes with Kim’s frenetic yet deliberate repetition of arabesques.
Kim just keeps going. And that’s the point. “I spent a lot of my life being afraid of being seen,” Chidiac said. “With the band, it’s the most realized. I wanted to bring that feeling into the piece, that I have this desire and that it is being seen.”
Cinematography by Chris Palermo
