On the stage are multiple video screens. Each screen plays a separate series of very short clips from film, animation, rehearsal footage—any number of two-to-three second images of a human body in motion. Dancers watch and mimic the simultaneous motions depicted on the screens, performing physical tasks by command. This is live processing, a performance approach conceived by actors in the Wooster Group in New York, and adopted by choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Koosil-ja Hwang as a means to study movement without the burden of narrative or characterization. In an effort to eliminate the political traps of interpretation, Koosil-ja creates a video score of movement material never before seen by the dancers; the demand on the performer is to connect immediately with the images, freeing their mind from judgments about who or what is performing the movement on screen—though many images are pulled from famous films—and replicate what they see. This game of referential Simon Says has an ambitious goal: to create movement free of signification, to transform the dancer’s body into a conduit for pure motion, liberated from conceptions of identity like age, gender, even motivation. Read the rest of this entry »

By Sharon Hoyer

“Everything goes spiral. The spiral is the DNA of Tai Chi.”

I’m talking with Lee Ching-chun, the associate artistic director of Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan, about their celebrated piece “Moon Water,” coming to the Harris Theater this weekend. It’s 9pm Taiwan time and the sun is not yet up in Chicago—what better time than daybreak to discuss a dance form derived from the ancient martial art, exercise and meditation form Tai Chi Tao Yin.

Tai Chi training inspired Lin Hwai-min, artistic director of Cloud Gate and the choreographer of the company’s signature work. “He wanted to create a piece based on this energy training, to make it into a dance movement,” Lee says. The movement originated, as with any meditative practice, with the breath. Read the rest of this entry »

By Brian Hieggelke

Dance exploded in the zeroes, fueled on by successful transitions at major establishments and the opening of significant new venues. Any consideration of dance in Chicago starts with our world-renowned homegrown company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC), which commenced the decade with the transition in its artistic leadership from Lou Conte, who’d founded the group in 1977 and built it into one of the city’s leading cultural exports, to Jim Vincent. Vincent didn’t miss a beat, building on Conte’s foundation, and greatly expanding the company’s formerly rather limited performance presence in its hometown by expanding to quarterly Chicago engagements, thanks in part to the opening of the perfectly sized Harris Theater for Music and Dance in November 2003. By 2008, HSDC had grown to a seven-million-dollar operating budget and Vincent himself was moving on, returning to the Nederlands Dans Theater, where he’d spent much of his career as a performer, passing the artistic reins at HSDC to his former associate, Glenn Edgerton.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s national reputation as a dance center was being augmented by its resuscitation of the esteemed Joffrey Ballet, which, in a state of financial crisis in the mid-nineties, had thrown something of a Hail Mary pass by departing the nation’s cultural capital of New York to see if it could make it in Chicago (it had long been extremely successful here on its tours, a tradition mirrored today by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which sold a whopping 14,416 tickets to its annual engagement at the Auditorium Theatre in 2009). Make it here it did, and by the dawn of this decade, it had established itself as a pillar of Chicago’s cultural community, even becoming the subject of a Robert Altman film, “The Company,” in 2003. Read the rest of this entry »

By Sharon Hoyer

In an uncommonly lucid analysis of plagiarism and influence published in Harper’s Magazine a couple of years ago, Jonathan Lethem mades the case that appropriation and originality are indelibly fused in the creation of art. The balance of the former to the latter is often the subject of heated debate, especially when copyrights (read: money) is involved. Artists tend to be fiercely protective of their work and rightfully so; the creative product is their cultural and, to a fortunate few, economic currency. By the same token, acute awareness, frequently to the point of paralysis—what Harold Bloom fetchingly labeled the Anxiety of Influence—of one’s creative predecessors is the cumbersome bag of inspiration that comes with the informed creation of literature, music, plastic arts and, since the advent of video, dance.

Julia Rhoads and Lucky Plush Productions waded into the murky subject of appropriation, intellectual property and theft this year, inviting people to steal, buy or share dance on their Web site stealthisdance.com (derived from Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book”), and probing their own mental spaces for choreography remembered and misremembered. The video housed on their site—memory “samples,” impersonations, donated moves and choreographic “mash-ups” blending iconic dance phrases from “Swan Lake,” Martha Graham, “Thriller” and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”—is source material for their performance this weekend, entitled “Punk Yankees.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The world lost a creative luminary when Merce Cunningham passed away in July of this year. Cunningham’s approach to choreography—divorced from music, rejecting exterior symbolism, as a pure, self-contained form in its own right—reshaped the way we think about dance. Few artists since have so wholeheartedly resisted signification and embraced all styles of movement with equal sincerity and success. This weekend, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will stage two dance “Events” (though shifting variables of music and visual design will make each performance unique) over the course of three days at the Dance Center. With musical contribution by Robert Woodbury, the Dance Center’s music director, and visual art by Columbia College professor Anna Kunz, each Event is a choreographic collage of excerpts from the company’s repertory, performed alongside other media that stand apart, yet speak to one another in spontaneous and unexpected ways. Cunningham created his events to be site-specific and immediate. I can think of few venues in Chicago more intimate to experience this work. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan, (312)369-8330. Thursday, Oct 1 at 8pm, Friday, Oct 2 at 8pm, Saturday, Oct 3 at 3 and 8pm. $38

The New York Times is reporting that Merce Cunningham, the titan of dance and interdisciplanary art, has died. Merce’s company is scheduled to perform in Chicago this fall, at the Dance Center of Columbia College, where he’s been a regular every other year for the past several years. While it’s too early to tell whether anything will change regarding the Chicago schedule, Cunningham was actively planning for a specific legacy for his company after his death, involving a two-year tour and then a closure of the company.

The Dance Center of Columbia College announced today that choreographer Jessica Miller Tomlinson is the winner of the first Chicago edition of The A.W.A.R.D Show! and took home the $10,000 first-place prize. Tomlinson is a member of Thodos Dance Chicago.

Runners-up Allyson Esposito and Megan Schneeberger (The Space/Movement Project) and Julia Rhoads (Lucky Plush Productions) each collected $1,000.

A panel of experts selects a dozen talented applicants from a pool of hundreds to compete for a sizable cash prize. The chosen contestants—all disciplined, all deserving—must appeal to the audience, who will select the winner via popular vote in what is perhaps the only lasting example of pure democracy in action. “The A.W.A.R.D. Show!” (the title a sly blend of acronym-happy high-ish culture—Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance—with that retro, low-culture Pavlov bell of excitement, the exclamation point) started in New York three years ago, bringing the game-show format to contemporary dance as a vehicle for audience feedback, dialogue between artists and sorely needed funding. Only in this case, the public doesn’t get to gawk at the supercilious, deluded and awkward in the initial auditions; only the best go on display. This year the show goes national, with editions in Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle. One winner in each city will take home a cool $10,000 toward the creation of new work. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from The Dance Center:

DANCE CENTER SEASON EXPLORES SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND DANCE

2009–10 Season Includes Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan,
Koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO, Troika Ranch, Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, Three Chicago Companies

CHICAGO—Leading visionaries in the field of contemporary dance and artists exploring the intersection between dance, science and technology highlight The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago’s 2009–10 season. Among companies performing are Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan (at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park), Koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO, Troika Ranch and Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, along with three Chicago companies. Subscriptions and single tickets go on sale July 20 at The Dance Center, 1306 S. Michigan Avenue, 312-369-8330 (NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER) and online at colum.edu/dancecenter. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Delfos Danza’s introspective, near-mystical approach to dancemaking has yielded not only a repertory of unflagging nuance and truthfulness, but also seems to have practically instilled the company members with the power of flight. The seven dancers gather and distill kinetic energy from the atmosphere, careen, tumble, hurtle across the stage, leaping and diving into one another from NBA altitudes. This celebrated Mexican company (awarded the best in the country by the Critics Union) brings a collection of five pieces, showcasing the choreography of founders Victor Manuel Ruiz and Claudia Lavista along with two other company members, entitled “Rincones de Luz” (Light Corners), to close out the Dance Center’s remarkable season with a roar. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan Ave, (312)369-6600. April 2-4, $24-28.