The early twenty-first-century U.S. is a rough place to be an emerging artist. Or an established one for that matter, as the recession delivers blow after blow to already-overstretched arts funders (see the much-beleaguered Illinois Arts Council, supporter of organizations as large as the Art Institute and small as Strawdog Theatre Company, which lost over 60 percent of its budget in the last three years) and artists are forced to scramble and/or go unpaid to bring their work to the public. Melissa Thodos, founder of Thodos Dance Chicago (one of the lucky IAC grantees to receive their money on time this year), makes fostering new choreographic talent part of her company’s mission, on equal footing with performance and education. This weekend, Thodos Dance’s tenth annual “New Dances” program will premiere works by ten company members—four of whom are making their choreographic debut—along with a stunning new piece by guest choreographers Francisco Avina and Stephanie Martinez Bennitt. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is the press release from the Dance Center:

DANCE CENTER MARKS 10 YEARS AT 1306 S. MICHIGAN WITH FREE CELEBRATION

2010–11 Season Features Emily Johnson, Yasuko Yokoshi, Joe Goode, Robert Moses, Reggie Wilson and Sankai Juku Presented with the Harris Theater and MCA Stage
CHICAGO—Having pioneered what is now a thriving South Loop culture and entertainment destination, The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago marks 10 years at its current location, 1306 S. Michigan Avenue, with its 2010–11 season. Opening the season is a free, daylong celebration of the 10th anniversary, followed by Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance, Yasuko Yokoshi, Joe Goode Performance Group, Robert Moses’ Kin, Same Planet Different World and Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group. In addition, The Dance Center, the Harris Theater and MCA Stage present Sankai Juku, marking the first collaboration between these three leading Chicago dance presenters, taking place at the Harris Theater. Single tickets go on sale July 1 at The Dance Center, 1306 S. Michigan Avenue, 312-369-8330 and online at colum.edu/dancecenter. Read the rest of this entry »

Narratives—we human beings eat them up, seek them out, quite frequently imagine them where they don’t exist. They entertain, they educate, they frame our understanding of the world and ourselves. Jan Bartoszek, director of Hedwig Dances, has been thinking a lot about personal narratives during the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary year. Even the title of her new piece—”Dance of Forgotten Steps”—evokes images of myth and legend, like the title of a young-adult fantasy novel. Bartoszek found inspiration in the personal experiences of Hedwig’s six company members, plus seven additional dancers from the community, who recalled formative moments of their lives on tape for the show.

“The piece is about how important memories form our personal narratives and our identity and, in the subtext, the transitory nature of our lives,” Bartoszek says. “A lot of stories have to do with childhood experiences. My personal remembrances have to do with being out in nature in Northern Michigan with my father. Out in the woods…being it looking for mushrooms or just walking around trees and rivers and lakes—those memories are part of my relationship with him and part of who I am.” Read the rest of this entry »

The transformation of cognition into physical grace is an alchemy practiced by every dancer, but choreographer Wayne McGregor has spent more than ten years with his company Random Dance putting the machine under the microscope to better understand the technicalities of the art. With consultation from neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists and experts in robotics, McGregor probes the elusive divide between mind and body—and what better close to the Dance Center’s “Science, Technology and Dance” series than McGregor’s “Entity,” a work inspired by the place where the intangible and mechanical meet: within the human body.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.