Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, whose current artistic director Jim Vincent is leaving to take the helm at Nederlands Dans Theater, has appointed Glenn Edgerton, a former artistic director of the same Dutch company to take his place. And if you’re wondering what’s so great about about NDT, it just so happens that they’re performing in Chicago next week at Auditorium Theatre.

Here’s the press release from Hubbard Street:

GLENN EDGERTON APPOINTED AS THE THIRD ARTISTIC DIRECTOR IN HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO’S 32-YEAR HISTORY

Nation’s Foremost Contemporary Dance Repertory Company to be led by Former Artistic Director of Nederlands Dans Theater I

CHICAGO – June 10, 2009 – Today, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC) announced the appointment of internationally renowned artistic leader and dancer, Glenn Edgerton, to the role of artistic director.  Edgerton’s appointment results from an international search conducted by the board during the last several months following the announcement of the departure this summer of Jim Vincent, HSDC’s artistic director of nine years.

Edgerton, 49, brings over 30 years of experience working with the great dance institutions of the world including the Nederlands Dans Theater, The Colburn School of Performing Arts and The Joffrey Ballet. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Chicago Dramatists:
CHICAGO DRAMATISTS 2009-2010
Production, Development & Education

Chicago, June 10, 2009 After a massively successful 30th Anniversary Season, Artistic Director Russ Tutterow announced Chicago Dramatists’ 2009-2010 season of programming today, featuring world premiere productions and a slate of programs engaging over five hundred playwrights throughout the year.

Programming will include collaborations with Chicago  institutions such as  Stage Left, The Second City, and the playwriting programs of DePaul and Northwestern University; four quarters of Playwrights’ Studio Classes; the distinguished guests of the Visiting Artists Program (previous artists have included Jeff Daniels, Paula Vogel and Sarah Ruhl); and signature developmental programs such as The Saturday Series, Script Lab and The First Draft Series. World premiere productions of Lucinda’s Bed by Resident Playwright Mia McCullough and Jade Heart by Senior Network Playwright Will Cooper will represent the culmination of plays that have been developed and fine tuned in many of those same programs.

As the only theatre in the country that is both a playwrights’ workshop and a full producing theatre, Chicago Dramatists’ programming focuses on the three major stages of a new play’s life: Production, Development and Education. Working with playwrights at every step of the writing process, Chicago Dramatists will continue its thirty-one-year old mission of developing new plays and playwrights for the American theatre. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A Lyric Opera donor cancelled his subscription a couple of seasons ago, and wrote across his cancellation that when Lyric starts paying serious attention to opera as a current art form, he would consider reinstating his subscription and his donations.  Even over at Chicago Opera Theater, which has always been more adventurous than Lyric, you usually get a single twentieth-century opera in a three-opera season and, this year, that opera was almost forty years old.

Enter Chicago Opera Vanguard, a new presenter in the City’s ever-evolving cultural landscape that is climaxing its inaugural season (called season 0) of cutting-edge opera with the long-overdue Chicago premiere of British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s transposition of the Oedipus myth to the Margaret Thatcher era, “Greek.”  Based on the 1980 Stephen Berkoff play of the same name and commissioned by Hans Werner Henze for the Munich Biennale Festival, Turnage’s operatic treatment is the work that established his reputation as the wunderkind of British new music, a reputation that would later propel him across the Atlantic to become a Chicago Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence in 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

Larry Adams and Catherine Lord/Photo: Rich Forema

RECOMMENDED

Just as “Sweeney Todd” is the work closest to opera in the Sondheim canon, “A Little Night Music” is the closest Sondheim work to operetta, with its consistent use of waltz-like rhythms (virtually everything is in triple meter) and some of his most melodic material, including his most popular song, “Send in the Clowns.” Additionally, it is Sondheim’s most elaborate use of the kind of counterpoint that Leonard Bernstein had experimented with in the climax of “West Side Story,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics, and also includes an orchestration that is at times evocative of Ravel’s “La Valse” and Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier;” musically, it ranks among Sondheim’s most ambitious and adventurous works.  As such, it is the ideal vehicle for Light Opera Works to tackle as its first fully-staged Sondheim production in more than twenty-five years, not counting last fall’s Sondheim revue “Side by Side by Sondheim” at the company’s smaller venue. Yes, show voices can sing this stuff, often quite nicely, but oh, isn’t it rich to be able to hear such oft-done pieces heard in context and done up with trained voices that can really due full justice to their nuances and accompanied by the lilts and extravagance of a full orchestra with an ensemble cast in colorful costumes that often literally dances its way in and out of scenes.  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Stridulation is the production of sound achieved by rubbing two body parts together. One of the opening—and most stunning—moments of the new collaborative work by choreographer Rachel Damon and voice artist Dan Mohr casts a spot on two humming dancers, stacked back-to-back and rotating like a giant nocturnal insect inspected under a flashlight. Stridulate is divided into numerous such segments by blackouts; sound generates all movement in these little chapters and the performers generate all sound: hums, croaks, snippets of invented language and rich, major chords. Damon and Mohr explore a wide range of ways to embody the versatile voice over an hour, from gestural, improvisational movement fueled by playful grunts to the meditative stillness achieved by a sustained hum. The press release notes that this is an exercise in formalism and (like many such exercises) it feels lacking in content at moments, like when sounds are coded directly to movements and repeated in fugue. But this isn’t to say exercise doesn’t yield fruit. One example: when a kneeling Jeff Harms—who inhabits the sounds he creates with his entire being, thin body vibrating as if hewn from wood—emits a disturbingly hypnotic croaking while the supine ensemble members arch and writhe as though shaken in their graves. (Sharon Hoyer)

At Galaxie, 2603 W. Barry. June 12 and 13, 19 and 20. Friday shows at 8pm, Saturday shows at 4pm and 8pm. www.brownpapertickets.com/event/59695 for tickets. $15

The local bar is probably the last place you’d go to check out an opera concert, but Opera on Tap is looking to change that. The group initially started in 2005 in New York in order to make opera music more accessible to the masses. Erin Thompson, the general managing diva of Opera on Tap’s Chicago branch, found out about the group in 2007 and felt that the concept would fare well in the Windy City. “It’s something that Chicago doesn’t have, but I think that it needs to,” she says.  Opera on Tap’s first Chicago performance will be held June 24 at Angelo’s Taverna, 1612 North Sedgwick. Each performance will revolve around a specific theme and each song will be accompanied by commentary so that viewers can follow along. Thompson is planning to host two-to-three shows a month and would like to branch out into several venues. She also hopes that the performances will give audiences a broader sense of what opera can encompass. “The audience for opera is shrinking and this is one way that we can help bolster that,” Thompson says.

Here’s the press release from the Jeff Awards:

JEFF AWARDS COMMITTEE PRESENTS NON-EQUITY AWARDS FOR THE 2008 – 2009 SEASON

Theo Ubique Receives Highest Number of Awards;
“Evita” and “Our Town” Garner Outstanding Production Awards

Chicago, IL.     Chicago’s nationally-renowned storefront and black box theatre community gathered at the Park West today for its annual celebration as the Jeff Awards Committee gave out 26 Non-Equity Jeff Awards in 24 categories. In addition, a Special Award was given to Pegasus Players’ founder Arlene Crewdson for her lifelong contributions to Chicago theatre. The festive event was emceed by actor-composer Jon Steinhagen, appearing in that role for the third time.
Read the rest of this entry »

David Cross and Bob Odenkirk

By Andy Seifert

Chicago may be an improv town, but Chicago also likes a little one-on-one action every once in a while, as in the audience versus the entertainer, one guy or gal throwing out his or her material in the hopes that it will produce a moments worth of euphoria in a crowd of onlookers and they can reap all the glory. That’s stand-up comedy for you, and it’s the format that will dominate the “Just for Laughs” Festival, which makes its American debut after twenty-seven years in Canada.

Legitimate Hollywood stars, alt-comedy favorites, Comedy Central stand-bys, Chicago theater troupes, and fresh-looking up-and-comers (yet to be chewed up and spit out by the industry) will converge in the Second City between June 17-21, meaning a ton of talent and a number of borderline personality disorders will be on full display. Spanning twelve venues throughout the city and including a fluid, diverse lineup of about forty shows, the Just for Laughs festival should appeal to a wide range of audiences and, like any festival, has its share of both immensely exciting shows and left-field head-scratchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Blessed Child

By Monica Westin

The second annual Alcyone Festival opens this week, dedicated to celebrating female playwrights and combating their lack of representation on American stages. Newcity spoke with Tony Adams, the artistic director of Halcyon Theater and curator of the festival.

Tell me about the concept for this year’s festival. Is there a through-line or common theme? How will the plays work together?

We’re focused on bringing women writers to light, specifically playing with outdated notions about the plays women write. The idea of the festival has been to undermine the idea that women write small domestic dramas, and we tried to get as far away from that idea as possible. Last year’s festival was inspired by the playwright Lillian Hellman, and we played with the idea of “1000 years up to Lillian Hellman,” producing plays of early female playwrights from that entire span of time. This year’s show will focus on themes as far from domestic drama as possible: terrorism and the cult of martyrdom in different variations. (They take place in locations from Palestine to Bosnia to a non-specific milieu reminiscent of Denmark.) Read the rest of this entry »

Julia Rhodes

By Sharon Hoyer

In their tenth-anniversary year, Lucky Plush is working to unravel the tangential and emotionally charged knot of issues tied up with intellectual property. Artistic director Julia Rhodes and company use YouTube—that trove of choreography, ripe for appropriation or plunder—as a departure point, poking at conceptions of influence, memory, theft and the monetary value placed on art via their new website StealThisDance.com (a nod to Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 guide to rebellion, “Steal This Book”). I spoke with Rhodes about their upcoming show at Links Hall, “In the Middle, Somewhat Replicated”—a collaborative effort with San Francisco-based Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts.

How does this performance fit into the larger project?

When I was thinking about our tenth-anniversary season and how so many companies do retrospectives I thought, I don’t do repertory pieces…maybe I’ll sample bits and pieces to fit into an evening-length work. Then I thought why stop there? Let’s really talk about sampling in dance; it’s a hot topic and needs to be discussed, with the vast amounts of appropriation happening on the web. Read the rest of this entry »