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 »

Aggression, territoriality and myths of masculinity emerged as central themes when Synapse Arts founder Rachel Damon, independent performance artist Erica Mott and the all-female dance collective the Space/Movement Project applied to share a bill at the Dance Center of Columbia College. The venue, either consciously or sub-, no doubt influenced the subject matter: the Dance Center is a big step for all three Chicago-based companies. Watching Damon rehearse one of her quartet numbers in a small third-floor studio in Wicker Park, I got an inkling of the challenges a choreographer faces when they create movement in a space one-fifth the size of their performance environment.

Our post-rehearsal conversation became about more intimate spaces. “I’m fascinated by territory as a human and martial artist,” Damon tells me. “You learn in that training about the red zone, the personal space between people.” She leans toward me, her face about six inches from mine. “This is a little less comfortable if we don’t know each other than…” she sits back to a socially acceptable two-foot remove, “that. Your brain responds to that space in one of two ways—you can go down the intimate track where I trust this person or you can go down the defensive track. The intimate track is a lot more cognitive-based and the defensive track has a lot more to do with back-brain, my lizard sense going off. That’s where the churning comes from: stirring up the space.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Sandbox Studio Chicago

The space between performer and audience is where Molly Shanahan and her collaborators in Mad Shak work. Her Stamina of Curiosity project, now in its fourth year, is an ongoing exploration of authenticity and the moment through the lens of Shanahan’s fluid, ceaselessly rippling and spiraling choreography. Last year’s iteration, “Sharks Before Drowning,” brought aggressive, masculine energy into the previously vulnerable equation. This chapter, entitled “The Delicate Hour,” goes beyond, recognizing both the potential of strength and the power of dismantling it. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Mark Palmer

RECOMMENDED

The title of Margaret Jenkins’ evening-length work exemplifies the ethos of the performance, both in the connotative meaning of the words and in the gentle play of syllables on the tongue and lips. Massive-scale projections by Naomie Kremer transform the theater walls into a dream-universe of constellations and kaleidoscopic light, bearing equal importance on the stage as on the white-clad dancers, who sidle in to play against a vast field of shifting lights. Read the rest of this entry »

Darren Criss (#4) with Team StarKid

With our criteria shifted back to artistic accomplishment in theater, dance, comedy and opera this year, our task got infinitely tougher. Because while the number of performing venues grows at a steady rate, the increase in the number of noteworthy artists seems to grow exponentially. For everyone we name on the list below, we had to leave off five, an embarrassment of riches for Chicago. We made a conscious effort to introduce a meaningful number of new faces to the list this year; the necessary absences should not be construed as a loss of worthiness as a consequence. We often find trends when we do the research these lists require; this year we’re starting to see a more meaningful effort to redefine performance itself in the internet age, from the runaway success of StarKids, to the more calculated endeavors of Silk Road. So what defines a “player”? Consider it some complex stew of career achievement, recent “heat” and, in some cases, rising stardom.

Written by Zach Freeman, Brian Hieggelke, Sharon Hoyer and Dennis Polkow

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By Sharon Hoyer

The young king of England takes his troops into France and, against great odds, is victorious. Esteemed choreographer, director and writer David Gordon, founder of New York-based Pick Up Performance Co(s), compressed the Bard’s five-act history play into an hour-long show using original choreography and his own meta-chorus character, who provides commentary on Shakespeare and our own time. Gordon also mined the recent history of “Henry V” to retell the tale of prince Hal; “Dancing Henry Five” uses iconic recordings of Shakespeare’s text as performed by Laurence Olivier and Christopher Plummer, along with William Walton’s soundtrack from the 1944 film.

Why did you revive “Dancing Henry Five” now? Read the rest of this entry »

"Continuous Replay"/Photo: Paul B. Goode

Just scanning the proper nouns of Bill T. Jones’ resume gives a glimpse into his influence in the dance world over the last thirty-five years: MacArthur ‘Genius,’ Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Tony, Obie and Bessie, The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, Wexner Prize… distinctions pepper his professional history from start to present day. His work spans genres and disciplines, from avant-garde movement experiments to Broadway musicals (most recently, a musical on the life of Fela Kuti written, directed and choreographed by Jones).

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The modern-day professional conference is one of the more strange and awkward offspring of capitalism. Hundreds of people in the same field, many of whom already know one another in a less artificial context, pressing flesh in a cheaply carpeted airplane hangar and downing coffee by the pot to stay alert for long days of workshops, speakers and power lunches and nights of overpriced (but partly tax deductible) downtown cocktails. This week the plastic-housed nametags catching the fluorescent lights of McCormick Place will not rest on polo-shirted potbellies but dangle instead from the supple necks of dancers and the administrators who support their work. The event is well justified; in today’s, to borrow a now-familiar phrase, economic climate (that is, one increasingly hostile to art) the dancer must be equal parts artist and hustler. They compete on the same Darwinian playing field as software developers and Hollywood moguls—the measure of success: buzz and dollah dollah bills.

Dance/USA is the national professional organization offering career development, advocacy, the occasional funding opportunity and other business-y resources to individual dancers and their companies across the country. This year’s annual conference program is designed to help dance orgs stay calm and afloat in a stormy abyss of funding cuts, as well as offer related advice on issues like collaborating nationally and engaging and holding the attention of Generation Tweet. Titled, somewhat cumbersomely, “Design It. Dance It. Be the Architect of Your Future” the conference offers managerial, marketing, financial, legal, tech and a smattering of creative insights, couched in the soft-focus language of break-out sessions and speed-consultations. Read the rest of this entry »

Nancy Stark Smith: "Exactness of Weights of Feeling Kuva"/Photo Raisa Kyllikki Karjalainen

RECOMMENDED

A new week-long festival celebrating the creation of art in the moment firmly establishes Chicago as a thriving center of vital, groundbreaking dance. Presented jointly by the Dance Center of Columbia College and Links Hall, the fest pulls national and local artists together to teach, perform, lecture and discuss in venues across the city. Highlights include contact improvisation workshops with veteran Nancy Stark Smith, a performance and a workshop by Bebe Miller, an artist talk and performance inspired by the sculptural installations in Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at IIT, and a free improv jam in Grant Park, timed to get the city amped for SummerDance. The fest also quite rightly takes ongoing musicians-meet-dancers improv series “Collision Theory” under the umbrella. Individual tickets to events are available; fest passes get you in to three, four or five performances and discounts on workshops. (Sharon Hoyer)

June 12-June 19. For information, call (773)281-0824 or visit linkshall.org/DanceImprovFest.shtml. To register for workshops or purchase tickets, call (312)369-8330.

Photo: Ace McCarron

“Sometimes I shy away from the word meditative,” says Phillip Zarrilli, swiftly disarming the first adjective that came to my mind when thinking how to describe his newest work, “Told By The Wind,” “because it’s so loaded. What’s important in performances is that people are present to what’s happening in that moment, in that environment, with the other people present.”

Zarrilli has been cultivating this kind of deeply nuanced awareness in actors for more than thirty years, using a blend of martial arts and yoga to increase psychophysical awareness and, as the title of his master class at the Dance Center indicates, give the body eyes. “These are things that can complement the usual tools actors use,” said Zarrilli, referring to Stanislavski’s method. “They can take actors into a subtler level of awareness, of co-presence, of inter-subjectivity, of how to be available in space and time. These are material things, they’re not abstract.” Read the rest of this entry »