RECOMMENDED

If you go to this “new musical” by legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp expecting anything resembling the musical theater you’re used to, you’re in for a surprise. “Come Fly Away” is a dance performance, not far removed from the kind of thing you’d see at the Harris Theater. (It brought to mind River North Dance’s “Valentine’s Weekend Engagement” from last winter for me.) Sure, there’s a somewhat more elaborate set than the dance crowd is used to, and a boisterous live band onstage accompanies the vocals of Frank Sinatra (given co-principal billing posthumously) by reprising and improvising many of his legendary arrangements, from the likes of Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Quincy Jones and others to a powerful effect. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A high wind in North Dakota forced Michael Estanich to pull off the highway and videotape the play of prairie grass that “looked like the ocean.” This is the inspiration for RE|Dance’s “Inhabitants of Tall Grass,” an austere trio of great beauty and tenderness. Midwest ancestral blood should stir at the horizontal extensions, the graceful and severe lines—planes on plains—evoking images of broad expanses under vast skies. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Megan McClure

A manic kind of energy radiates from the children thronging the dance floor of the Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center—spinning, jumping, running, screeching. Parents, at once anxious and excited, create an almost impenetrable boundary between the dance floor and the rest of the room. They crouch, sit and stand on the fringe, ready at any moment to swoop up a child that is upset and comfort them. Any person attempting to get around or through the press of bodies needs to weave, high-step and dodge. Getting from one side of the dance floor to the other is equally difficult. Adults working their way through the children look like ships plowing through constantly swirling waves.

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Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theatre/Photo: DeanPaul

RECOMMENDED

Bright colors and Latin rhythms come to the fore in this autumn’s Global Rhythms program, with performances by Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater and the Mexican Folkloric Dance Company of Chicago. The latter will be accompanied live by Sones de Mexico during the Sunday performance. Step Afrika! also returns with new pieces exploring the multifaceted world of stepping—the high-energy, rhythmic stomp-clap-and-shout form that came out of African-American fraternities and sororities in the early twentieth century. Read the rest of this entry »

Merce Cunningham

RECOMMENDED

Dance in the twentieth century was redefined by Merce Cunningham. During his immensely prolific, seventy-year career, Cunningham created hundreds of dances and “events” that approached choreography, collaboration and the relationship between movement and music in a way never before seen. He actively choreographed and mentored his company until his death in 2009 at the age of ninety. The Legacy Tour is the company’s farewell performance; the Cunningham Dance Foundation is preparing to close, handing over a massive body of work to a preservation trust established by Cunningham. Read the rest of this entry »

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange performing "The Matter of Origins"/Photo: Jaclyn Borowski.

By Sharon Hoyer

The terms investigation, exploration and research show up a lot in artist statements and program notes these days, but few artists use the words as comprehensively as Liz Lerman, former artistic director of the DC-based Dance Exchange. Lerman’s enthusiastic curiosity has led her to collaborate with numerous minds in the fields of science and academics as well as the arts, creating performances around topics as diverse as genetics, immigration, death, spirituality, Reaganomics, the Nuremberg Trials and the Underground Railroad. Lerman’s talent for uncovering how specialized fields intersect in dance springs from a very direct inclusiveness in her work that takes in the five generations of dancers represented in Dance Exchange and, particularly in the case of “The Matter of Origins” (playing as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival), her audiences.

“The Matter of Origins” explores physics and human theories about the beginning of time in two acts: the first is a traditional stage performance that includes massive projections of images like Marie Curie’s lab and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; the second is a tea party with chocolate cake (Lerman got Edith Warner’s recipe, the woman who served lunch to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists at Los Alamos while they were developing the nuclear bomb). The audience sits at round tables with local scientists and “provocateurs,” who help guide the conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Jessica Wolfram

RECOMMENDED

The centerpiece of River North’s fall program is Daniel Ezralow’s taut, gritty, high-octane “SUPER STRAIGHT is coming down,” a fifteen-minute piece inspired by a series of terse photos by Robert Longo entitled “Men in Cities.” The social pressure cooker of urban existence is given shape by ramrod limbs, whirling partnering and an industrial score by Dutch composer Thom Willems.

Frank Chaves, River North’s Artistic Director, was in the original cast (the piece was first set on Hubbard Street in 1989) and with the help of Sandi Cooksey, another original cast member, set it on his company. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Steven Caras

As the name professes, this all-male ensemble has street cred aplenty, especially on the major thoroughfares of Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard. Flashy moves and flawless technique have earned the Bad Boys accolades from across the high-profile entertainment spectrum, from competitive TV dance shows to Carnegie Hall, sharing bills with the likes of Lady Gaga and Elton John. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: William Frederking

Rachel Damon’s project for four dancers, a year in the making with help from a Chicago Dancemakers Forum grant, begins simply enough: a greeting in one-word phrases to the audience (small; capacity is about twenty-five), then Damon and Ni’Ja Whitson roll two of three six-foot square walls to opposite sides of the stage. Behind them is Adriana Durant—dressed, as is the whole cast, in grey with three brown leather belts around the hips—who proceeds to quietly explore short movement phrases to a soundscape of water and wind, mixed live by Russell Weiss. She is soon joined by the compelling Marc Macaranas and the phrases grow longer, broader, more florid. Concepts of echo and amplification are introduced. As the piece unfolds, however, the echo becomes muddied, the message lost in the clamor. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Sheryl Mann

By Sharon Hoyer

As Julia Rhoads, director of Lucky Plush Productions, points out, marriage is not a popular subject for dances… or many other performance arts for that matter. The ambivalent states of trust and doubt, of taking on a new identity for oneself and for the world outside the marriage and of lifetime romantic fidelity are a lot harder to explore in a two-hour performance with any kind of depth or sensitivity than the purer emotions of, say, infatuation, grief, aggression or joy. Read the rest of this entry »