SHIFTING LIMITS is about exploring and breaking free of limitations, and Aerial Dance Chicago artists and guest artists employ daring creativity, sometimes attacking these limits with explosive physicality and other times exploring these limits with meticulous care. In this 90-minute program, the dancers are not bound to the traditional dance stage. Seamlessly incorporating the use of suspended ropes, fabrics, hoops and metal rings, they are quite literally super human beings of three dimensional dance space, exploring powerful and meaningful expression along the entire air-ground continuum.
The concert will open with a new work by ADC Creative Director Chloe Jensen titled Within Reach, a physical and emotional introspection of individual limits and the power of human synergy in striving for common dreams. Opening the work as a soloist, and then with 3 company dancers joining, Jensen has created an aerial dance piece that uses no rigging, only 6-foot long wooden bars to break out of the traditional dance floor. The dancers launch themselves upward and all around, literally and physically leveraging on the expressive potential this free bar presents.
ADC’s Artistic Director Karen Fisher Doyle has three premieres on the program. Deeply Rooted is a sensual duet on ropes and harnesses, cleverly depicts the tension and passion of a troubled relationship. Her new solo dance Breathe is performed on two hammocks, rocking and swaying to the meditative music of Maya Beiser. And, the finale of the concert Machine Inside pushes the limits of dance to its most intense extreme as four highly athletic dancers literally fly across the stage on small metal rings, sometimes gliding into the floor to connect in dynamic and inventive dance partnering.
Featured on the program is the world premiere of Song of the Great Lakes by guest choreographer Sandra Kaufman. Sandra Kaufmann is internationally recognized as a leading authority on classical modern dance technique and repertory with extensive experience as a dancer, director and educator. She performed throughout the world as a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Her new work dramatically incorporates suspended aerial fabrics as it adapts Lorado Taft's sublime "Fountain of the Great Lakes" (Chicago sculpture) into choreography for the stage. The Fountain of the Great Lakes depicts five female figures grouped together so as though water flows from their shells in the same way it passes through the Great Lake system. Superior, at the top, and Michigan empty their water into the basin held by Huron, who sends her stream on to Erie. Ontario receives water and gazes off as it flows into the ocean. Completed in 1913, the fountain sits in the south wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The program also includes world premieres Touch-Grab-Hold, an inventive group work with aerial fabrics by relative newcomer Taylor Quintero, Breaking Free, an intense and high-speed solo on aerial hoop by company dancer Dalton Burr, From Nowhere to Now Here, a emotionally charged, moving duet on aerial hoopby longtime ADC dancer and choreographic powerhouse Sarah Milosch, and two celebrated pieces of company repertoire, including award winning Proteus Burpby ADC Resident Choreographer and Artistic Associate Tracy Von Kaenel, staring company dancer Lauren Reed, also featuring company dancers Angela Loiacono, Caitlyn Haitaian, Taylor Quintero, Maiana Sena and Kate Kislingbury, and The Universe, an upbeat and rhythmic quintet on ropes by ADC artistic alumni Melissa Bartz.
