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Published on 5/17/08
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Cheer up! Life isn’t so bad, at least not on Thursday 8 at the Chicago Cultural Center, when dancer-choreographer-performance artist Matthew Hollis and his team perform as part of the center’s free About Dance program. They’ll lift your spirits with chants like, Let’s go love! Let’s go live! Let’s go life!, all inspired by the positive messages abounding in daytime-TV shows and cheerleading. Hollis’s new show, The Power of Cheer: Let’s Go Love, suggests fun strategies to handle the often harsh realities of life—even toughies like depression, heartbreak and homophobia.
Hollis and dancers prance about, cheering words and phrases that are fun and encouraging, simultaneously tackling difficult issues. And you can’t possibly get too bogged down in gloom: The whole group is dressed in cute little cheerleading outfits: tight shirts and supershort shorts, accompanied by silver pompoms.
“A couple years ago, I was living with a friend who had recently gotten out of a relationship with his boyfriend. We were both just sitting around watching a lot of Golden Girls together,” Hollis says. “I was doing the Dago T. Variety Hour at the Elbo Room, and the organizer wanted me to construct something for it, and I had been watching a lot of Suze Orman, and she’s [always] like ‘I have all the answers!’” Hollis decided to make up his own show, emulating Orman’s authoritative stance.
He found that announcing you have “all the answers” and expecting people to listen to you, however, isn’t that easy. So he introduced “the power of cheer” to help bring his ideas to the fore. “Originally it was just a self-help philosophy based on the fundamentals of cheerleading—like cheering yourself through life’s obstacles, turning setbacks into touchdowns, the value of having a supportive squad and how to use pompoms correctly,” Hollis says. “But then I realized that you can deliver any sort of message as long as you cheer it—it’s not as upsetting for people to digest the information.”
Through his performance pieces, Hollis and the “squad”—which includes an equal number of men and women—shout out cheers about breakups, friendship, love and even childhood. Hollis also plays with assumptions about gender: “Oftentimes when you’re expecting the girls [in the squad] to respond, I have the boys respond because I have a lot more feminine men than [feminine] women in the squad,” Hollis says. “And also when you put a man and a woman together, all of a sudden there’s an assumed relationship, which is not really the case in dance at least when you see two men dancing together.”
The sneak peek at the Cultural Center won’t feature Hollis’s childhood home videos or a retro ’80s Pepsi commercial he dug up (though the completed show—booked for July at the Theatre Building—will). Instead, you’ll get a glimpse of the show’s real meat: the cheers. With the cheerleading comes a camp element that helps tell Hollis’s own deeply personal stories. “There’s a certain sadness in life in general, especially when it comes to love,” Hollis says. “But camp adds some levity to it. So even if it’s a sad story, it’s surreally comic. There’s some dark humor.”
In one of the stories Hollis has dramatized, four men wear high heels and short shorts for a stroll at Navy Pier. Hollis also tells a story about getting called a “faggot” while walking down the street with another man even though they weren’t holding hands or being physical.
That incident, says Hollis, “made me think about this idea of a global love. Fifteen years ago people calling me ‘faggot’ on the street didn’t seem too weird, but now it just seems antiquated. They wanted to drive a response out of me, and I was like, ‘Let’s love each other, let’s go, let’s do it.’”
Raise your voice with Matthew Hollis on Thursday 8 at the Chicago Cultural Center.
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