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 »

Photo: Austin Forbord

By Sharon Hoyer

Compassionate and with gentle humor, Joe Goode’s dance theater is distinguished by a humanity both wonderful and rare. This weekend his San Francisco-based performance group brings two works to Chicago: “Wonderboy,” about the fears and desires of an exceptionally empathetic puppet, and “29 Effeminate Gestures,” a solo work incorporating verbal riffs and power tools. He spoke with me via phone about the performance.

What inspired you to incorporate puppetry into your choreography?

I’ve never been attracted to puppetry; I’ve been a bit of a puppophobe. I met Basil Twist and he enticed me to choreograph a moment in a show of his. The puppets were so transformative, they had so much character and Basil and I decided we wanted to do something together. We thought it would be fun to make a puppet the central character in a dance drama. We came up with Wonderboy, whose superpower is that he’s very sensitive and fragile and able to feel things in a very profound way, and while that makes it difficult for him to live in the world, it gives him great insight and sympathy. This is a not very hidden metaphor for the queer child—a boy who has great sensitivity, but it isn’t valued if he’s not sportsmanlike or athletic. Finding a way to bring that into one’s life as an asset is kind of the story of the artist. Read the rest of this entry »

As the economy slowly lifts us back to our feet and we look around, we see a remarkable sight: a performance industry in Chicago that survived the worst recession since the Great Depression wholly intact. Sure, we had a few brushes with death, and no doubt a few very small, very new theater companies threw in the towel, as they do even in good years, but unlike many other cities across the country, we’re in pretty good shape. How good? The League of Chicago Theatres issued a press release last week proclaiming our town as America’s theater leader, with more than 250 professional theaters, including four Regional Tony Award winners, and a combined annual budget of $250 million serving five million audience members. Add in our thriving dance community, a comedy scene that’s the envy of the nation and two world-class opera companies and you’d have to say we’re doing pretty damn good. But neither the economy nor any cultural organization is fully out of the water yet, and the dramatic uncertainty injected into the political sea by Mayor Daley’s decision to call it a day means Chicago’s performance community will need some steady hands at the wheel these next few years. Accordingly, for this edition of The Players, we’ve broadened our horizon and taken a closer-than-ever look at the individuals in charge of the financial fitness of our local institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Alexndra Corazza

RECOMMENDED

Contemporary dance/Kabuki artist Yasuko Yokoshi has excellent timing. She comes to Chicago fast on the white-painted heels of revered Butoh company Sankai Juku; fortunate dance audiences have had their attentions freshly honed to the restrained and minute. Not to compare the two performances; Yokoshi is very much a Japanese American—Hiroshima born, in New York since 1981—with the attendant consciousness of displacement, complications of identity and the mutability of culture. Yokoshi, classically trained with postmodern predilections, collaborates with Masumi Seyama, a revered master of Kabuki Su-Odori—a less ostentatious, makeup-free form of Kabuki. Their last collaboration, an interpretation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” won Yokoshi a Bessie.

This newest work, entitled “Tyler Tyler,” uses a twelfth-century Japanese tale of warring clans to explore ideas of impermanence and power. The six-person cast—half of them American, half of them Japanese, and one American singer-songwriter playing Cat Power and Carpenters tunes, engage in a referential shuffle of cultural imagery quiet and powerful: the American man holding a fan, moving ever so slowly with elegance and grace still has a pistol on his hip. (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 South Michigan, (312)369-8330. October 28-30, 8pm. $26-30.

By Valerie Jean Johnson

Cutting through the pitch-blackness, a flicker. A faint, pulsing light reveals a large, somewhat pod-like circle. Slowly, the expanse is illuminated, revealing a scatter of similar circles across the stage floor covered in sand. Water drips from somewhere overhead, as five bald figures, powdered stark white and cloaked in long, stiff white shrouds, lie in fetal crouches within halos of soft light. A sixth, identical figure stands stoically in the middle of this strange, vaguely ominous landscape. And then, the dance begins.

For thirty-five years, esteemed Butoh dance company Sankai Juku, with founder/director Ushio Amagatsu at the helm, has been crafting its singular performances, acclaimed by audiences in both its native Japan and around the globe. Through a collaboration between MCA Stage, The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, and the Harris Theater, the company makes its auspicious Chicago debut with a one-night only performance of its signature work, “Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away.” “I have always known that Chicago is a great city with a vibrant cultural life,” says Amagatsu via email, “and I was very happy to hear that our North American tour producers Pomegranate Arts had arranged an engagement of my work. Many years ago, we had the opportunity to perform in the outlying area, but this is our first time in the city… . It is a great honor.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Cameron Wittig

By Sharon Hoyer

Alaska-born, Minneapolis-based artist Emily Johnson choreographs in a sense more all-encompassing than physical movement alone. Her intimate performances orchestrate storytelling, dance, live music, local history and an acute sense of connectivity that invites audiences to perceive their surroundings with fresh eyes. Her most recent work, a collaboration with musicians Joel Pickard and James Everest entitled “The Thank-You Bar,” explores conceptions of displacement, myth, longing and home.

Why did you decide on such an intimate seating arrangement for The Thank-You Bar?

As I was making this dance about displacement and home, I was thinking about how we construct our home structures. So if my current home is in Minneapolis, I build my relationships, my work, my bus route—we create everything we need to consider someplace home. I was doing research with animal behaviorists. I asked them about displacement—like when we build a new building in an area where a certain kind of bird nests and it’s detrimental to these birds. Researchers talk about the capacity for adaptation that so many animals have developed. That humans and animals can, to varying degrees of difficulty, pick up and move our homes and build them again. This idea is so interesting to me that I tried building things. I tried building a beaver lodge. It isn’t used, but I tried creating a structure like a beaver lodge. I had a few seating arrangements in mind in terms of building a home for this dance, for the audience and the performers.

Why did you abandon the beaver lodge?

Well, I didn’t all the way. It’s adapted into one point in the dance. I did use it in one of the first informal showings. I brought a small group of friends into the beaver lodge and told them the story there. The beaver lodge is still under my friend’s front porch. Read the rest of this entry »

Vershawn Sanders

By Sharon Hoyer

I have an artist friend who, like most professional artists, teaches part-time to make rent, put bread and beer on the table and fund his projects. Unlike (hopefully) most working artists, his attitude toward teaching is downright dour. Of the those-who-can’t camp, he would far rather spend his classroom and preparatory hours on his craft than struggling to make an endless stream of gum-snapping 18-year-olds pause their texting, get interested and, most daunting of all, think.

The perspective is to me, the child of oft-frustrated small-college professors, the girlfriend of one teacher, friend to a dozen more and a former/occasional teacher myself, as understandable as it is offensive. Educators, the good ones anyway, are the world’s great communicators—as I would argue are the most skillful and successful artists. Moreover, teachers trade professionally in ideas, in analytics, in aesthetics, cultivating in their students the critical faculties to question what’s before them and the plasticity to appreciate new and challenging ideas. In short, they create good audiences: pure gold to the working artist. Read the rest of this entry »

Philip Adrian Elson/Photo: Ryan Bourque

Here’s the concept: a panel of dance experts from Chicago, New York, LA, San Francisco, Seattle and Philadelphia convene in Chicago to collectively select twelve choreographers from each aforementioned city to participate in a competitive performance series judged by audience vote. Both experts and audience judge the artists on four criteria: Potential, Originality, Execution and Merit (it spells POEM by design). The winner takes home $10,000. Take a TV game show, reduce a season of elimination to two rounds, replace the amateur competitors with serious dance artists, toss in the opportunity for actual dialoguing with the audience beyond woots and text messages and you get The A.W.A.R.D. Show!, or Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance—the acronym-mad performance series that, despite a title that’s trying a bit too hard to garner excitement either sincerely or ironically (I’m not sure which, though the exclamation point certainly suggests the latter), does a number of exciting things for the dance community on local and national levels. One is that choreographers are given the chance to receive substantial feedback from the audience both verbally and in writing, and the audience is in turn able to share their thoughts, substantial or otherwise. Another is that the participants are chosen by dance experts who have never seen or heard of them before. This means lots of brilliant, innovative, independent artists and smaller companies were seriously mulled over by heavy hitters from the Joyce in New York, On the Boards in Seattle, Dance Affiliates in Philly and the Dance Center of Columbia College, among others. The result is an eclectic mix of artists you probably wouldn’t see on the same program at the Dance Center had the panel been entirely Chicago-based judges. Read the rest of this entry »