By Sharon Hoyer

A stirring dance show can make a body want to dance right out of the theater, swinging around railings and leaping down stairs. The Seldoms get to do just that as lobbies, stairwells, backstage, balconies, the primo seats and—why not?—the stage too, as every corner of the Harris Theater becomes performance space in “This Is Not A Dance Concert,” their highest-profile site-specific work to date. Dancers (and musicians, led by Tim Daisy) are stationed at different locations throughout the five-story theater. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: David Weathersby

RECOMMENDED

Honey Pot Performance invites audiences into the sensuous world of Chicago House, celebrating the feminine side of a movement that gathers all races, genders and sexual identities to the universal pleasure of losing oneself in a transfixing, danceable beat. The Sweet Goddess Project challenges the notion of House as a male-dominated scene, exploring not only female contributions to the scene, but also concentrating on the sense of community and empowerment inherent to the movement. Read the rest of this entry »

BONEdanse/Photo: Chrystyne.com

RECOMMENDED

Therapy, motivational albums, self-help books, tranquilizers, psychotropic drugs… Freud gave a language and a theory to our modern psychological damage, the rest of the twentieth century gave us ways to mend it. Atalee Judy and the newly christened BONEdanse delve into our peculiar cultural history of psychic damage control, including 1950s-era recordings from Dr. Beverley Weeks advising anxious housewives to up their tranquilizer regimen and case studies of characters suffering varying degrees of dysfunction: the hypochondriac, the hysterical housewife and, more daringly, the sociopath dictator. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s annual winter tap fest expands this year to two locations, adding a handful of performances to the regular program of multilevel workshops and master classes taught by some of the best hoofers in the business, including Lisa La Touche of STOMP. In the past, the Winter Jam focus has been on education, with classes taking place at CHRP’s headquarters at the Athenaeum Theatre. Read the rest of this entry »

Katie Petrunich, Shannon McGuire, Madelyn Doyle, Julie Brannen and Kaitlin Bishop.

“I’m pretty committed to doing solos every year,” Margi Cole tells me. “It’s important to me as a director and leader to put myself in a position where I’m learning.”

Taking that position this year involved a trip across the pond to work with American choreographer Deborah Hay. Hay—a Merce Cunningham alum—has made herself a nexus of artist development with the Solo Performance Commissioning Project, in which twenty dancers apply to learn a single solo piece created by Hay. After a week and a half of intensive study and coaching, participants disperse to their homes around the globe, continuing to work independently for at least three months before performing the piece in public. Read the rest of this entry »

Ana Lopez, Jesse Bechard and David Schultz in Terence Marling's twice (once)/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

The choreographer’s media are time, space and human beings—three very pricey (yet frightfully undervalued) commodities. Thus choreographers, more than painters or photographers or sculptors, must constantly scramble for sponsorship and funding before their work can even commence. Hubbard Street provides these resources to budding choreographers within the company, giving them studio time and the opportunity to choreograph on each other, via their annual Inside/Out Choreographic Workshop. Artistic Director Glenn Edgerton is taking the next step in cultivating new talent, by giving a few of these budding choreographers the chance to further develop and present selected works in a full-scale production at the MCA. Edgerton curated the program, which includes works by company members Jonathan Fredrickson, Alice Klock, Robyn Mineko Williams and Johnny McMillan, as well as resident choreographer powerhouse Alejandro Cerrudo and Rehearsal Director Terence Marling.

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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 »

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 »