Back in the Saddle is a split bill between Alix Schillaci and Darvin Dances. Starting off with Inclined to Decline (Darvin Dances), a piece inspired by rejection letters and ending with Sunset’s That Way (Alix Schillaci) a glamour-filled, surreal Wild West dance extravaganza!
Inclined to Decline
“I reject your rejection!” shouts one as they flip another dancer over their shoulder, then take a fighting stance. Collectively they form a robotic phalanx that marches forward, stopping to spin furiously from one side to the other like a possessed washing machine.” writes Tristan Bruns of See Chicago Dance after viewing an excerpt of “Inclined to Decline” in First Draft last March. “Inclined to Decline” is a dance piece that repurposes rejection letters and uses them for inspiration rather than dejection. This work will explore the resilience and perseverance needed to move forward past rejection. Frolicking throughout the space, dancers will throw the letters into the air as they leap and fall to the ground. They will pull other dancers up from the ground and support each other through as each dancer finds their way to deal with the rejection letter. Some will tear the letter up and stomp on it while others will delicately lay it on the ground and leave it behind.
Dancers in Inclined to Decline include: Blake Campbell, Peyton Jones, Madison Meade and Mandy Milligan
Sunset's That Way
Back after a soldout premiere in 2022, Sunset's That Way is a narrative driven dance work taking place in a Western dreamscape built by a collaborative team of movers and designers. Using worldbuilding and play as tools for storytelling and choreography the work explores fate, desire for control, the glamorized self/aspirational self, and the search for safety. This work follows six queer dancers as they move in and out of three different versions of themselves within the performance space- them as dancers, them as actors on a Hollywood movie set for a Western, and them as idealized, Western characters uninhibited my the limits of reality on a journey across an imagined Western landscape on the outskirts of a town called Dance City. They are trying to get home- whatever that means. It's a dance extravangza that might make you cry.
Sunset's That Way feaures: Sarah Ellen Miller, Maria Blanco, Leana Welker, Maddy McCarthy, Ashaand Simone, Emily Loar, Reign Drop and Katie Cook Baker
