South Chicago Dance Theatre (SCDT) presents its ninth annual home season performance, An
Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre, featuring three electric world premieres by award-winning
choreographers Natasha Adorlee, David Dorfman, and SCDT Founder
and Director of Vision and Strategy and Resident Choreographer Kia S. Smith.
The four-part mixed repertory program opens with a powerful work by renowned choreographer Donald Byrd. An
Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre takes place for one night only at
the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 East Randolph, on Friday, May 1,
2026.

 

An Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre is paired with SCDT’s Inaugural Legacy Builders Benefit. Legacy
Builder ticket holders are invited to attend an exclusive intermission
reception and an after-party and silent disco with the artists following the
performance. Tickets for the performance and benefit are available at southchicagodancetheatre.com.

  

The evening begins with It Begins,
a creative fusion between the renowned choreographer behind the Broadway
production of The Color Purple, Donald Byrd, and sound designer Rob
Whitmer. First commissioned for South Chicago Dance Theatre in 2024, It
Begins returns triumphantly to Chicago as an audience favorite.

 

The program continues with Smith’s Suite
On The Sahara, a new work conceived during SCDT’s January 2026
residency at LAKE Studios in Berlin, Germany. Scaffolded by the genius of
artists from the Silk Road Ensemble, the piece weaves sounds from Argentina,
Morocco, Spain, and Italy, immersing audiences in a landscape flowing with
light, color, passion, and a range of movement vocabularies. For this work, Smith
steps away from the cerebral work of narrative building to allow her first
love, music, to be at the helm of the choreographic process.

 

Next is the world premiere of Adorlee’s Slip
Force, a work that questions what structures we continue to uphold, and
what becomes possible when a body no longer consents to be read, controlled, or
contained. Throughout the work, Adorlee builds structures out of movement—a
skeletal house, a circling train, a fragile house of cards—nodding to monuments
of power and imposed systems of control. The structures are built, maintained,
and repeated, despite their instability and cost. At the center, a woman
appears framed within a window, suspended between artifact and entrapment. As
pressure accumulates, her stillness gives way to release and acceleration,
while another figure becomes newly confined. Slip Force moves between
precision and unraveling, humor and severity, ultimately revealing the power of
women reclaiming their voice and agency.

 

The evening concludes with Dorfman’s Subject(s)? 
  Verb   Object!, a snapshot of group fervor,
independence, solidarity, and joy. Addressing a moment in which we need each
other more than ever, the performers embody hope and pain to fend off stasis
and deceit. Kinetic and textual poetics connect the audience to an experience
of feeling as alive as humanly possible, set to music ranging from spiritual
and moving to a driven club frenzy. Subject(s)?    Verb  
Object! is an electric celebration for people of all walks of
life.