Event Type
Talk/Discussion
Event Description
Choreographer Carrie Hanson’s multidisciplinary project Power Goes invites public discussion about how power works, what it is, and, as President Lyndon B Johnson remarked, where it goes. Hanson convenes Director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library Mark Updegrove, playwright Stuart Flack, and others to talk about power's place in one body the Presidency and in the bodies of many who sometimes block progress, move society forward, or recover something that has gone missing since the LBJ era.
About the Speakers
Since founding the Seldoms in 2001, dance artist and educator Carrie Hanson has created over 25 works for the company and designed multidisciplinary projects with artists working in visual arts, music/sound design, fashion design, and architecture. Under Hanson’s direction, the Seldoms have gained a reputation for bold, innovative performances in unusual spaces such as cargo containers and truck depots. Time Out Chicago called their work in a drained Olympic-sized outdoor pool, Giant Fix, one of the best dance moments of the past decade. Marchland, their collaboration with visual artist Fraser Taylor, received its world premiere at MCA Stage in 2010. More recently, Hanson’s creative work has involved research and embodiment of social, political, environmental issues, and history as a mode of pressing dance and performance to speak to larger public issues. Hanson’s work has received National Performance Network Creation Fund and NEFA National Dance Project Production Award, and she is the recipient of a Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artists award, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships and a Ruth Page Award for performance. She was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012.
The plays of Stuart Flak have been produced at leading theatres in the US including: Southcoast Rep (Costa Mesa, CA), Culture Project (New York), Interact (Philadelphia), Victory Gardens (Chicago), and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival (Washington, DC). His plays include Sydney Bechet Killed a Man, Jonathan Wild, Homeland Security, For Eddie, and Floaters. He is currently creating a new play based on Black Like Me, which will premiere as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s 2015 season. He is the former executive director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, the largest festival of arts arts and ideas in the US and the former editor and publisher of the McKinsey Quarterly, a journal of business, economics, and policy. He is also a guitarist with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra.
For more than two decades, Steve Edwards has covered politics and public policy as a journalist and program host. His work has appeared on the BBC, Bloomberg News, PBS, and on numerous public radio stations around the United States. Most recently, he spent nearly 14 years at WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR member station, where he served as host of the acclaimed daily shows The Afternoon Shift and Eight Forty-Eight. Edwards has moderated numerous candidate debates, hosted the weekly political show The Best Game in Town, and was the correspondent for a BBC documentary on Chicago’s political culture. A native of Kansas City, he was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan and earned his BA in political science from Amherst College.
Dance Styles
Musical Theater
Modern / Contemporary
