Photo courtesy William Frederking

RECOMMENDED

It’s been a fruitful year for budding choreographers, starting with Hubbard Street’s “danc(e)volve” program in January, then the Link Up residency at Links Hall in March and this weekend with The Dance COLEctive’s showcase of in-house talent. Incubating and presenting the creative gifts of her company members is nothing new to Margi Cole, who made nurturing and promoting the creativity of emerging artists a bullet point in her company’s mission statement and whose “COLEctive Notions” program is an annual event. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

High-tops meet taps in the Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s annual celebration of National Tap Dance Day. The all-male, high-voltage FootworKINGz will make an appearance delivering the furious, foot-flying, floor-scorching moves that have garnered the crew national press and two members appearances with Madonna both on video and on tour. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo courtesy John Sisson Photography

By Sharon Hoyer

“In this day of YouTube and mediated ways of having engagement and interaction, I feel it’s very important to have human-to-human direct experience in the same space,” says Nicole LeGette, founder of blushing poppy productions. “There’s something that situation enables that’s not possible through a mediated technology. That’s one thing with my performance work—it works a lot with energy and with how to activate the imagination and the invisible space. Those things are very difficult to translate in video. It’s about the live, shared experience between performer and audience in a very visceral and I think very human way.” Read the rest of this entry »

Megumi Eda and Luke Manley in "The Watteau Duets"/Photo: Erin Baiano

RECOMMENDED

Noise rock meets ballet in a revival of Karole Armitage’s 1981 piece “Drastic-Classicism.” Dancers share the stage with the band, which includes Chicagoans Mike Vallera and Shelly Steffens. Armitage’s aggressive movement vocab captures well the adolescent rage and sexual fervor that made your parents hate the music and wait up for you in the living room with the lights off. Is this piece really more than thirty years old? Read the rest of this entry »

Photo courtesy Herbert Migdoll

RECOMMENDED

The Joffrey closes their season on a Romantic note—the capital R specifically pointing to Edwaard Liang’s “Age of Innocence” and Jerome Robbins’ “In the Night.” Both pieces are favorite Joffrey standbys: the former a lush ensemble piece inspired by Jane Austen, in which white-clad dancers play out formal, yet passionate courtships before three red velvet curtains; the latter a series of duets depicting three different romantic dynamics. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo courtesy Amitava Sarkar

For good and ill, the American century had some important lessons for the globalized millennium to come—about the creative power of multiculturalism, about the permeable and sometimes illusory nature of identity, about confrontation and coexistence with the Other… and alongside those the attendant difficult, ongoing lessons about the ugliness of ignorance, racism and marginalization. Shirley Mordine, director of Mordine & Company Dance Theater, and Hema Rajagopalan, director of Natya Dance Theatre, explore cultural collision via dance, bringing their two companies together in a new evening-length work called “Pushed to the Edge.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Three years ago, spoken word and dance artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph brought an interdisciplinary musing abut the complications of identity on “planet hip-hop” to the MCA stage. Now Joseph is back with a synthesis of music, dance, story and visual art, culled from community-based “eco-festivals” he held in four cities around the United States: Chicago, New York, Oakland and Houston. The focus this time is sustainability—of the natural environment, of communities (some consider these mutually dependent)—in the face of violent crime, poor education and the immediate crises facing communities of color. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo courtesy Paul Kolnik

RECOMMENDED

In his first year as artistic director, Robert Battle is setting an ambitious course for Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, judiciously honoring the past while infusing the Ailey rep with fresh works outside the company’s signature fare. Programs for the six Chicago performances each conclude with the requisite staging of “Revelations,” Ailey’s iconic work set to African American spirituals, but the journey from curtain to bows is an eclectic one. Read the rest of this entry »

Joseph Kudra, photo by Jonathan Mackoff

RECOMMENDED

Gustavo Ramirez Sansano said he was interested in how a machismo culture, like that of his native Spain, is obsessed with the image of the free woman when he chose to adapt “Carmen” for Luna Negra Dance Theater. Sansano uses Bizet’s famous, hummable score (sans vocals), placing it to contemporary dance in a way that should make opera aficionados hear the music with new ears. Other lush elements of opera are present, too, reduced to a level of suggestion that supports the abstractions in the choreography without interfering with them. Grayscale costumes by fashion designer David Delfin and ingenious all-white set pieces by Luis Crespo establish scene and character in the midst of Sansano’s, quick, athletic choreography that blends ballet, modern, gestural movements and hints of pasodoble and flamenco. The mise-en-scene is inspired by Picasso, who inserted Carmen into more than 140 of his paintings. Read the rest of this entry »

Naci/Photo: Rosalie O'Connor

Three years ago Eduardo Vilaro stepped away from Luna Negra Dance Theater, the Chicago company he founded ten years before, to return to New York City and take the helm of Ballet Hispanico. Vilaro spent his childhood in New York and danced with Ballet Hispanico early in his career. This month he brings the company to Chicago to perform at the Dance Center of Columbia College, where he learned, taught and served as artist-in-residence.

Along with a new work by Vilaro, the program includes “Espiritu Vivo” by Ronald K. Brown, inspired by the intersections of African and Latino diasporas, “Naci” by Andrea Miller about Sephardic Jewish culture in Spain, and a piece on the greater human condition by the inimitable Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. I spoke with Vilaro via phone, catching him in New York between tours. Read the rest of this entry »