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 »

Photo: Antoine Tempé

By Sharon Hoyer

When Reggie Wilson answers a question he tries to hand you a complete story, traveling down side streets, pausing in front of windows and cracks in the pavement, gathering all the details he can carry. When asked the origin of his current project, a collaboration with Senegal-based choreographer Andréya Ouamba entitled “The Good Dance—dakar/brooklyn,” he begins with his family roots in Alabama and Mississippi, follows them up to Milwaukee where he was raised, takes it to New York where he currently resides (being sure to mention influential colleagues like Ohad Naharin), then sets out across the globe, talking about his research and travel in the Caribbean, West Africa and Central and South Africa. When asked if there was a story behind the name of his company he began, “there’s a story. There are lots of stories.”

Fitting then that Wilson should cast his raft on two very long and storied rivers—the Mississippi and the Congo—and follow their tributaries where they might carry him, doing his best to notice similarities along the way. Most immediately notable: both have violent histories and both nurtured cultures that spread through their respective continents. First and foremost, the music. Wilson says, “It’s strange that both of those places had dark histories, but how much impact the music had that came out of those regions. The Mississippi Delta blues, gospel music and jazz from New Orleans all the way up to Chicago and Minneapolis… I even put in the relationship to the Detroit motor city sound. The Congolese music has that same kind of reach and impact. You think of rumba as coming from Cuba, but it came from the Congolese slaves and traces back to Angola and Central Africa. That’s what got me started thinking about the central African impact. It didn’t matter if I was in a nightclub in Johannesburg or Dakar or Morocco or Nairobi; by the end of the evening everyone was playing the Central African music.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It’s a mixed repertory for SPDW at the Dance Center this weekend, including a world premiere by guest choreographer Carl Flink, artistic director of Black Label Movement, a Minneapolis-based company named not after Mr. Walker’s 12-year-old Scotch but, even more badass, generic brand food labels, a la Repo Man. Flink’s work looks hard at damage, from shipwrecks to wrecked hearts, oil spills to televised wars and his subject matter for SPDW is physical collision. “HIT” asks the audience to embrace collision as event; anyone who has been in a bicycle or vehicle accident knows there’s nothing like high impact to stop time and notice the minutia of the moment. Also on the program is Joanna Rosenthal’s noir-inspired intrigue “Grey Noise,” a finalist from last fall’s audience-judged dance competition The A.W.A.R.D. Show! and “To Have and To Hold” by Joanie Smith and Danial Shapiro. (Sharon Hoyer)

Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 South Michigan, (312)369-8330. Thu-Sat, March 10-12 at 8pm. $26-$30.

Photo: Toni Gauthier

By Sharon Hoyer

Kids don’t know their family is unlike any other until they leave it. I wasn’t aware that adoption was anything but commonplace until the subject came up casually in first grade; I was suddenly surrounded, for the first time, by a small crowd of gaping 8 year olds who peppered me with questions that seemed either obvious or unimportant. (And though the approach is usually more delicate, I get most of the same questions from my adult peers: do you know who your “real” parents are? Have you ever wanted to find them?) One minute you’re you, flipping through storybooks and building snow forts in the front yard, and the next you’re in the position of explaining things about yourself of which you never gave a moment’s thought.

It is with thoughtfulness that Robert Moses addresses the complications our world imposes on nontraditional families (and, if you look closely enough, isn’t that most of them?) in his piece “The Cinderella Principle: try these on, see if they fit.” Moses collaborated with playwright Anne Galjour to collect and weave together stories from families that still exist outside the American imagination. Moses staged movement to further explore the emotion in the text, which is read from behind a translucent scrim upstage of the action. You hear from kids who were teased by their classmates and from parents trying to walk the line of tolerating the curiosity of strangers while shielding their children from the often hurtful ignorance of the outside world. Read the rest of this entry »