By Sharon Hoyer

Carrie Hanson has built a reputation for making location-conscious dances. Her works created for The Seldoms—most famously “GIANT FIX,” performed in a waterless swimming pool—are constructed very much within their environs; place is as integral a facet of the performance as music and costuming. No surprise then that the impetus for her newest work, a collaborative effort with visual artist Fraser Taylor, percussionist Tim Daisy and costume designer Lara Miller, was an inquiry into boundarylands, or the spaces between spaces. “Marchland,” playing this weekend at the estimable MCA Stage, is a departure of sorts for Hanson—at least in terms of locale. The minimalist room provides a sparse, formal canvas for Hanson to create her middle space. The Seldoms are the only Chicago-based dance company on the MCA program in recent memory, an impressive nod to Hanson’s work.

“Oh, it’s dreamy,” Hanson says of performing at the MCA. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1952, ballet dancer and choreographer Amalia Hernandez founded a small company dedicated to collecting and presenting traditional dances from across Mexico. Now, more than fifty years later, the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico de Amalia Hernandez has more than quadrupled its ranks and amassed a remarkable catalog of indigenous Mexican ceremonial, spiritual and celebratory folk dances, each awash in color and bursting with energy. In this, the centennial year of the Mexican revolution and bicentennial year of Mexican independence, the Ballet Folklorico is touring the U.S. with a special celebratory performance; voluminous dresses will swirl, Cuban heels will stomp, and Charros will leap in a program high on spectacle, featuring revivals of several pieces, some that haven’t been performed in fifteen years.

I asked Salvador Lopez, executive director of Ballet Folklorico and (grandson of the late Ms. Hernandez), about the challenges of presenting vernacular dances, culled from small villages and intended for participation over performance, in a grandiose setting like the Auditorium Theater. Read the rest of this entry »

By Sharon Hoyer

Choreographer Akram Kahn has gained renown for cross-pollinating contemporary dance with kathak, a traditional Bengali dance form. His work “Bahok,” an ensemble piece forged from the experiences and histories of eight dancers from around the globe, plays this weekend at the MCA. I spoke with Mr. Kahn over the phone about the piece.

How did the idea for Bahok originate?
It starts from an experience I had in Japan. I was staying in a hotel where a world conference was taking place. I was in the lift and a Japanese woman came in wearing a kimono, an African gentleman came in wearing a traditional African outfit and a couple came in wearing suits. I wanted to ask the Japanese woman about the clothes she was wearing, what the markings on them signified, but the lift was quite small, everyone was looking up at the ceiling and it was rather awkward. The lift went up and I thought that I couldn’t communicate with this woman because maybe she doesn’t speak English or maybe she would think I was being rude, or that I was a stranger imposing on her personal space. And the lift got stuck. After about a minute, everyone starting panicking, including me, speaking different languages. And it occurred to me that in a moment of crisis that we shared together, here comes a situation where everyone has to communicate. I wanted to explore this in my own work.

The body is our home. And the subject is home: what does home mean to us? I realized my body carries my tradition, it carries my religion, it carries my education, it’s a political body. It’s many things. I wanted to explore with different dancers from different cultures: how does that operate? There’s a South Indian guy who has studied martial arts but also contemporary dance, there was the National Ballet of China, but now we have other ballet dancers from Hong Kong, we have a South African dancer who is contemporary-trained but also has strong African tradition of dance, we have Spanish contemporary dancers. So in a way I was using the lift experience, seeing where we would take that using our bodies. Read the rest of this entry »

The Joffrey Ballet’s return of Sir Frederick Ashton’s “Cinderella” is well danced but lacks magic. First performed by the company in 2006, this retelling of the classic never gets as dark as the original source material and never gets as frothy and bright as more modern adaptations. The talents of the stepsisters are much appreciated exceptions: hilarious brawling divas so specific in their detail that the fact they are played by men becomes secondary to their comedic ability. Thankfully they dominate a bulk of the ballet. It isn’t until the end of the first act that Joffrey’s female corps takes the stage as fairies and stars and the audience gets a real taste of the magic this company is capable of. When a dozen or so of these remarkable women perfectly execute the quick, intricate formations the power is breathtaking. In act two, the men get a chance to show off their virtuosity at the ball. But these moments aren’t enough to keep the ballet from dragging, and the spectacle (like the rest of the production) is not nearly as exciting as the anticipation it evokes. (William Scott)

At the Auditorium Theater, 50 E. Congress Pkwy, (312)902-1500. Through February 28. $25-$145.

For the past five years, the Space/Movement Project has been making dance as a collaborative group without sole leadership. Their current project, “Safety in Numbers,” was performed last year as a collection of individual pieces, but has since been revised, amended and edited into a singe work by multiple authors. After a run-through of the revised piece, all the members of SP/MP sat down to talk with me about the show. The flow of their conversation—the swells of excitement over shared ideas, the still moments of individual reflection—provided both a glimpse into their creative dynamic and a fair representation of the considerable rewards of rigorous collaboration.

“It’s amazing how you can tell when something works and when it doesn’t,” said member Larisa Eastman. “Group intuition is really powerful. And we’ve been learning to edit ourselves; there’s a lot of ego check.”

“I don’t think there’s a lot of ego here,” replied Chloe Nisbett, who’d just re-entered the room. Chloe had ducked out to change, presumably because she hadn’t contributed any of the initial choreography, but joined the group later on. Megan Schneeberger remarked on the importance of adding fresh blood to the project. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Joffrey Ballet stays true to Sir Frederick Ashton’s definitive version of the world’s best-known fairy tale with plenty of frills and spectacle, including a life-sized pumpkin coach. The wicked stepsisters, played by men, lend a slapstick edge to the saccharine tale. Wendy Ellis Somes, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet, staged this production for the Joffrey, ensuring the piece, already familiar to the Joffrey, resonates with the grace and charm of the original, first produced in 1948, restaged in ‘65. Score by Prokofiev, splendorous sets—this one is for lovers of the classics. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E Congress Pkwy, (800)982-2787. February 17-28, $25-145.

RECOMMENDED

Each year Duets For My Valentine pulls together an eclectic mix of dancers and companies from across the city to woo young lovers for one night at the historic Park West. The styles range from breakdance to ballet (and in the case of companies like Chicago Dance Crash, both at once) so both parties on the date are bound to be enthralled, if not by serial fuetes, then by windmills. This year’s lineup includes the aforementioned Dance Crash, Joel Hall Dancers, Chicago Tap Theatre, Breakdance Chicago, Elements Contemporary Ballet, Crooks Crew, Corpo Dance Company, Same Planet Different World, DanceWorks Chicago, dancer/choreographer Jeffrey Hancock, and Framework Dance Chicago. After the show, the audience is invited to put down their wine glass and take the stage to do a bit of dancing themselves. (Sharon Hoyer)

“Duets For My Valentine” plays at Park West, 322 W. Armitage, (773)929-1322. Saturday, February 13, 8pm. $25.

RECOMMENDED

Once again River North gives ticket buyers their money’s worth in its annual V-Day engagement, packing the program with two world premieres, two pieces that premiered last fall and four popular works from the company’s repertory. Brand new works include a driving three-way dance battle by, coincidentally enough, New York choreographer Robert Battle, and a look into the tension between group creativity and individual expression by commissioned choreographer Lauri Stallings. Frank Chaves, River North’s artistic director, restages “Forbidden Boundaries,” his intensely personal, athletically rigorous premiere from last fall that seeks quite literally to strip away the protective layers of self-doubt and inhibition keeping us from success. Romantic, valentines-y pieces on the program include Chaves’ stormy duet “Sentir em Nos,” set to the über-sexy vocals of Andrea Bocelli, and Battle’s “Ella,” a physical scat that sets pace with formidable vocal dancing of Ms. Fitzgerald’s “Air Mail Special.” (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph, (312)334-7777. February 12 and 13, 8pm. $30-$65.

On the stage are multiple video screens. Each screen plays a separate series of very short clips from film, animation, rehearsal footage—any number of two-to-three second images of a human body in motion. Dancers watch and mimic the simultaneous motions depicted on the screens, performing physical tasks by command. This is live processing, a performance approach conceived by actors in the Wooster Group in New York, and adopted by choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Koosil-ja Hwang as a means to study movement without the burden of narrative or characterization. In an effort to eliminate the political traps of interpretation, Koosil-ja creates a video score of movement material never before seen by the dancers; the demand on the performer is to connect immediately with the images, freeing their mind from judgments about who or what is performing the movement on screen—though many images are pulled from famous films—and replicate what they see. This game of referential Simon Says has an ambitious goal: to create movement free of signification, to transform the dancer’s body into a conduit for pure motion, liberated from conceptions of identity like age, gender, even motivation. Read the rest of this entry »

Self-identity can be a malleable thing; we tend to define ourselves by objects, situations and people we gather around us. And why not? It’s easier to present a correlation between personality and the concrete trappings of life than to reveal the fragile subjectivity that rules our individual experiences. Perhaps this is why Margi Cole, who presents two premieres this weekend with her company The Dance COLEctive, has an easier time talking about the piece that explores collecting than the one about identity.

“IMe,” a new work by Cole created in collaboration with Jeff Hancock, combines spoken text with movement to examine how we express identity. Originally conceived as an exploration of human relationships mediated by electronic socializing, Cole discarded the internet factor and distilled the subject to personal boundaries in general.

“It’s really about how we put ourselves in a forum and how we use that to define ourselves,” she says. “What we choose to show and hide.” The piece is for the full company and is set to music by Billie Holiday and Johnny Cash. Read the rest of this entry »