On November 3, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater kicks off the Auditorium Theatre’s 2023-24 Made in Chicago dance series with a mixed bill featuring the premiere of artistic director Nicole Clarke-Springer’s Madonna Anno Domini, the company premiere of Keith Lee’s Mama Rose (performed by 2023 Princess Grace awardee Emani Drake), as well as the return of […]
Category: Dance
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Man meets monster at the Joffrey
Just before the lights dimmed and the Lyric Opera Orchestra signaled that the show was about to begin, two glamorous older women beside me kept repeating to each other, “We are blessed.” The characters in Frankenstein are not so lucky. In this Joffrey Ballet production, the story is condensed into three acts that use tension […]
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Dance for Life returns to the Auditorium
In 1991, as the dance community lost friends, family members, and colleagues to the AIDS epidemic, Keith Elliott, a member of the Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre (JHCDT), thought it was time for the Chicago dance community to do something about the disease. “[Keith] wanted to benefit those who were living with HIV-AIDS, and help […]
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From Skokie to Spain
Skokie is a suburb on the north side of Chicago with a cemetery on one side of the street and a cosmetic surgeon on the other, where a designated forest preserve is a square patch of land about one residential block in length and width. Signage abounds: “No Trespassing” in the parking lot by a […]
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Beauty in Superbloom
Superblooms, nature’s greatest masterpiece, have captivated the attention of the public in recent months. These arresting botanical marvels are found in the arid landscapes of California and Arizona and grow when an extraordinary number of dormant wildflower seeds awaken and burst into a vibrant bloom simultaneously. Superblooms unveil their mesmerizing splendor all at once, immediately […]
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Red Bull Dance Your Style brings the national spotlight to Chicago
Street dance enthusiasts crowded a stage at the Salt Shed on all four sides at Red Bull Dance Your Style’s national final on the evening of Saturday, May 20. Audience members judged 15 dance battles, using color-changing light-up bracelets to indicate whether they were pro blue or red side. Los Angeles-based Sean Lew’s moonwalk-fluid moves […]
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Drag for life
Drag, in all of its glorious forms, has been a locus of revolt throughout the decades. In 2023, we are in a time when the very concept of “dressing in the mode not of one’s essential sex’” is in the bull’s-eye of crypto-fascist Republican lawmakers in many states. That’s why it seems like winning when […]
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Malevolent enchantment
Through a wash of watercolor sea, as if glimpsed through a periscope, a lighted box appears, within which a poet writes lines in cursive script: “Far far out to sea, where the water is blue as a cornflower and clear as a crystal . . .” It isn’t once upon a time in Hans Christian […]
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Visceral Dance Chicago turns ten
Entering Visceral Dance’s new venue, a visitor is struck by its size and the care taken to design a space that suits the company that built it. Tucked away on Rockwell Avenue and nestled up against the North Branch of the Chicago River, the performance space is painted a stark black, with soaring ceilings and […]
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From classic to kitsch
In general, touring performances of dance companies strive to show the range of the company’s work. And the performance by American Ballet Theatre at the Auditorium Theatre Friday, April 14, fit that bill. With a quartet of works that showed the company’s technical expertise, it included a range of choreographic voices and seemed designed to […]
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Duels and duets
The lobby filled with the heat of many bodies on April 8 for closing night of Shamel Pitts|TRIBE’s Touch of Red, the first program of the MCA’s spring On Stage series on Blackness and movement, Frictions, curated by Tara Aisha Willis. By the spiral staircase, the short film Touch of Red: Overture plays on a […]
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Trilogy of terpsichore
In 2016, the Chicago Cultural Center presented the exhibition Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen. Built by the Dutch inventor since 1990 and described by their maker as “new forms of life,” strandbeests surpass their man-made material—PVC pipes—to become something animate and other, each with dozens of narrow yellow legs. Simultaneously archaic and advanced, […]
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So you think you know dance
The Chicago Cultural Center knows how to provide visceral and engaging Chicago-created content. Last year the city celebrated the Year of Chicago Dance, which highlighted our thriving and diverse dance community. During that time, the Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio installed a new dance floor and provided space, time, and funding for Chicago dancemakers to […]
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‘It’s about finding those visceral connections to dance’
On January 6, the dance department at Columbia College announced Meredith Sutton as the interim director of the Dance Presenting Series at its Dance Center. Sutton served as program manager for the Dance Presenting Series since February of the previous year. Before moving to Chicago, Sutton was associate professor of dance at the University of […]
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Building COMMON ground
During the second iteration of COMMON canvas, bodies circled around a center point: a pile of clothes in an upstage corner. For a moment, the pile of clothes moved, as if to take a breath, and the bodies around it held still. The performance, which Chicago dance artist and current Hubbard Street member Alysia L. […]