Great Small Works' "Marcovaldo Planets"

By Monica Westin

It’s a big weekend for Seth Bockley. In addition to his highly-anticipated performance promenade “The Twins Would Like to Say” with Dog & Pony opening at Steppenwolf Garage on Sunday, Bockley has curated the impressive lineup of artists at Links Hall’s Toy Theater Festival this weekend.

Bockley champions toy theater for its populist roots in nineteenth-century paper theater, which could be made in anyone’s living room as a precursor to television. The form has morphed from living-room entertainment to a cheap, DIY way of making performance that Bockley loves because it’s “not rarefied art.” We spoke to Bockley about this form he wants to be reclaimed as an everyday act.

Toy theater seems to be an exciting and increasingly popular form lately—I’m thinking of companies like Great Small Works, who I know are going to be part of this show. Why do you think there is such a strong interest in toy theater today? When did you personally become interested in the medium?

I became interested in toy theater, and puppetry more generally, through work with Redmoon back in 2004 during my mentorship with Frank Maugeri, now the artistic director there. I originally was more interested in writing and had no intention, really, of getting involved with puppetry, but through seeing what Frank was able to do with the medium, I became extremely excited and interested in this form of storytelling. So oddly, I had become involved as a writer for puppet theater, which was a strange thing to be, and our collaboration allowed me to see the potential of this form. I see it as a form that can both be in dialogue with and in competition with cinema—working with puppetry is closer to the work of a filmmaker rather than a theater director. One of the many cool things it allows is a way of performing animation—performing film really—by other means. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Doug Henderson

RECOMMENDED

In this premiere concert of the new-formed partnership between Michael Estanich and Lucy Riner, a triad of portraits explore the psychology of relationships on several fronts—with the self, with the creative imagination and with others. The first piece, a solo inspired by the final moments of Joan of Arc, presents the charged sensuality of an isolated woman. In a duet entitled “Abbot & Viv,” Estanich and Riner probe the claustrophobia, tunnel vision and euphoria that come bundled with passionate love, danced out in the confines of an intimate living room. The final piece, a trio with San Francisco dancer Robin Anderson entitled “The Mysterious Disappearance of the Second Youngest Sister,” delves into the mind of an artist (a Victorian-era female author to be precise) to unearth how the solitary act of fabricating fictional characters springs from a desire to connect with the living. (Sharon Hoyer)

At Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield, January 15-January 17, 8pm. $15, $10 students. Advance tickets at brownpapertickets.com/event/92157.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's "Extremely Close"/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

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 Monica Westin

Links Hall’s new director, Roell Schmidt, is as diverse as the programming at Links; a playwright, producer and successful head of development and marketing at Lookingglass Theatre and the Chicago Chamber Musicians. We spoke with Schmidt, who started at Links in July, to get a sense of her plans.

Given your background in development, it seems that one of your focuses is going to be bringing in audiences?

That’s absolutely one of my most important missions. Performers don’t perform for themselves. I feel strongly that one of my major efforts has to be to ensure that the audience attendance is first at the scene, the way it was for Poonie’s this fall. We’ve been able to hit capacity a few times, and that’s our continued goal…. One method I found effective at other places has been the mighty power of the creative college student. There’s a great granting program that allows us to hire undergraduates to come and work on staff, and they’re tapping into all of their social-networking knowledge and creativity, thinking about who would be the right groups or individuals to know about an event, and how to get them that information. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Rebecca Kling’s solo performance employs storytelling, video and theatrical movement to relate her experiences as a transgender woman. Supported by the Critical Fierceness grant—a microgrant offered by Chances Dances to queer artists in Chicago—and developed during Kling’s tenure in the Links Hall Charged Bodies mentorship program, Trans Form peels back the trans label and its mystique to probe the complications of human identity. In a rehearsal clip, Kling tells a story about the hassles and minor indignities of legally changing her name and switching the gender marker on her drivers license from male to female. With good nature and gentle humor the five-minute monologue not only riffs on the frustrations of living in a bureaucratic system, but also gives one pause to consider the blurred line between private life and public identity. It plays out like a Kafka short story that ends in triumph. (Sharon Hoyer)

At Links Hall, 3435 North Sheffield, (800)838-3006. Dec 11-13. Fri-Sat at 8pm, Sun at 7pm. $15.

Photo: Analia Alegre Femenias

RECOMMENDED

One of Chicago’s most eclectic and crowd-pleasing contemporary dance companies presents a collection of works by five different choreographers for—as you may have guessed—one, two, three, four and five dancers. The program features revivals of pieces by Ashleigh Leite, Eduardo Vilaro (former artistic director of Luna Negra Dance Theater) and Same Planet Different World artistic director Joanna Rosenthal, along with world premieres by Liz Burritt and Paige Cunningham. The program is a short anthology of gems by Chicago’s current masters, presented in the friendly intimacy of Links Hall—a not-to-be-missed sampling of the new and innovative in contemporary choreography. (Sharon Hoyer)

At Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield, (773)281-0824. November 19-November 21, 8pm. $15 advance, $20 at the door.

Indie rock and improvised dance meet in a three-part series that unites some of Chicago’s most innovative young artists who, in their customary environments, draw pretty separate crowds. Curators Rachel Damon and Dan Mohr, who recently collaborated in “Stridulate,” a year-in-the-making exploration of the body as an instrument of both voice and movement, designed “Collision Theory” to be a forum for musicians and movement artists to get together and jam, disrupting the old dance-and-accompaniment hierarchy and allowing the disciplines to interact on equal footing. Part one threw hypnotic, transcendent droners Pillars and Tongues into the creative stew with Asimina Chremos—a recipe for happy fluidity and a free-flowing exchange of energies. This week’s installment teams modern dance masters Darrell Jones and Kirstie Simson with the experimental noise piano and groove percussion of the duo Technical Drawing—a formula that may well challenge and excite the palate. Prepared piano maven Melissa St. Pierre and electro-percussionist Jesse Stiles will compose on the spot, in conversation with the physical virtuosity and responsiveness of Jones and Simson who promise to deliver a “transatlantic chest bump.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from The Dance COLEctive:

THE DANCE COLECTIVE COLLABORATES DURING 2009–10 SEASON

Partnerships Include Choreographer Jeff Hancock, Friends of Chicago River, Other Dance Fest

CHICAGO—In the spirit of partnership, The Dance COLEctive (TDC), under the direction of award-winning choreographer and teacher Margi Cole, will create work and perform through a series of collaborations throughout its 2009–10 season.

TDC opens the fall season by participating in The Other Dance Festival September 24 and 25 at Hamlin Park Fieldhouse, 3035 N. Hoyne. Joining other local companies, TDC will preview an excerpt from a new collaborative piece by Margi Cole and choreographer Jeff Hancock, which will have its official premiere in January. For information on The Other Dance Festival, visit brownpapertickets.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Julia Rhodes

By Sharon Hoyer

In their tenth-anniversary year, Lucky Plush is working to unravel the tangential and emotionally charged knot of issues tied up with intellectual property. Artistic director Julia Rhodes and company use YouTube—that trove of choreography, ripe for appropriation or plunder—as a departure point, poking at conceptions of influence, memory, theft and the monetary value placed on art via their new website StealThisDance.com (a nod to Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 guide to rebellion, “Steal This Book”). I spoke with Rhodes about their upcoming show at Links Hall, “In the Middle, Somewhat Replicated”—a collaborative effort with San Francisco-based Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts.

How does this performance fit into the larger project?

When I was thinking about our tenth-anniversary season and how so many companies do retrospectives I thought, I don’t do repertory pieces…maybe I’ll sample bits and pieces to fit into an evening-length work. Then I thought why stop there? Let’s really talk about sampling in dance; it’s a hot topic and needs to be discussed, with the vast amounts of appropriation happening on the web. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

If you’re into performance and Poonie’s Cabaret isn’t on your radar, it should be. A quarterly event curated by Jyl Fehrenkamp, the cabaret features works from the realms of dance, performance art, clowning, burlesque and improvization. Fehrenkamp both scouts some artists and is personally approached by others after shows to become involved. “I’m loosely a curator,” she says, noting that her job, to showcase a strong mix of performance and dance, is easy to do in a city with so much talent. Read the rest of this entry »