While 2015 still looks like a shiny new coin just waiting to be spent, SeeChicagoDance thought it might be fun to explore a few new projects coming up in the new year. You can, too, and there’s no better time than now to resolve to see something new and different!
NEW COMPANY: The Cambrians
Benjamin Holliday Wardell launched The Nexus Project in November, 2013 to explore new avenues for developing the art of the male duet. He recruited fellow dancer and former gymnast Michel Rodriquez Cintra, and the two literally took flight. Enlisting the choreographic talents of a dozen Chicago choreographers, they gave each twelve hours to create work on them, for them, which the dancers then had carte blanche to reconfigure, juxtaposing and integrating set movement material in a variety of different sequences and performance settings. Compelled by the potential for interactive performance, enhanced audience/artist involvement, and community development through dance, Wardell’s experiences with The Nexus Project over the past year awakened an expanding vision for growing projects on a larger scale than the duet.
The Cambrians grew out of that vision as a production company that serves as an umbrella organization for a variety of process-based dance works, including The Nexus Project. Expanding to five dance artists, Autumn Eckman, Jamy Meek, and Mindy Myers joined forces with Wardell and Cintra to form The Cambrians. While Wardell serves as the Creative Director, the network structure of the company challenges traditional organizational hierarchies by playing with the many different roles each participant can assume, blurring distinction between roles from producer-presenter to performer-choreographer, with no single artistic director dictating company policy or artistic decisions. In the highly collaborative spirit of The Cambrians, this goes for the audience as well, who are engaged with the performers to interact in a variety of ways throughout any given performance.
Slated for 2015 are three upcoming concerts. Under the auspices of The Cambrians, Wardell and Cintra will mount the next installment of The Nexus Project January 9 through February 1, with choreographic resources from Adam Rose, in an evening-length work of episodic story pieces. Performed in the warehouse space of Dovetail Studios, an intimate setting, there will be five primary stories to choose from, two performed on any given evening, inspired by “The Velveteen Rabbit,” by Margery Williams, and “The History of Everything Including You,” by Jenny Hollowell. The audience, only feet away from the performers, is encouraged to “enter the conversation,” sometimes moving, sometimes talking. The exact content of each performance will be unique in that the audience will collaborate with the performers in determining which two stories are danced/told and which of several different outcomes resolve each story. Each performance is structured around three goals: the audience getting to know the performers; the performers getting to know the audience; and the audience getting to know each other.
A joint program with Same Planet Different World at Links Hall/Constellation the last week in February will present the duet section from "Clover," a trio for Mindy Meyers, Wardell and Cintra. In June, Meek and Eckman will premiere their collaboration, and in 2016, The Cambrians plan their largest work to date, incorporating the resource material of six different choreographers, set on six dancers.
NEW CHOREOGRAPHY: Lucky Plush Productions
Lucky Plush Productions celebrates its 15th anniversary year in 2015 with development of Julia Rhoads’ "Trip The Light Fantastic: The Making of Superstrip," which unfolds in a series of episodic scenes, featuring LPP’s signature blend of high-level dancing, acting, and off-the-cuff improvisation. Loosely inspired by the sensational stories and larger-than-life characters in classic pulp magazines, the work follows a group of washed up superheroes attempting to reinvent themselves by starting a non-profit think-tank for do-gooders. Unable to agree on their mission, they they begin a strategic planning process to determine their brand, create a manifesto, and codify their powers (real and imagined) into specialized movement techniques. A real videographer, who becomes a character himself, is hired by the seven protagonists to create a documentary of their process. The resulting video is experienced as an animated graphic novel--part comic strip, part silent film.
Though Rhoads draws inspiration from classic pulp superheroes, the content is personal and relevant to her experience as a mid-career artist coping with organizational burn-out. Superstrip also addresses the hyper individual branding complex spurred on by social media platforms. She is struck by the increasing necessity to “show up online,” for an individual to remain relevant and to build a personal brand. Superstrip looks at the ways in which branding is useful, but also increasingly less meaningful. Ultimately, the characters in Superstrip are challenged to uphold their importance within contemporary platforms that support empty self-promotion and flavor-of-the-day innovation.
NEW CHOREOGRAPHERS: “Giordano on Giordano”
Five men from Giordano Dance Chicago are creating new work on the seven dancers of Giordano 2. “What’s great about ‘Giordano on Giordano’ is that company dancers get to workshop ideas on professional dancers. There’s creative richness in the choreographic process,” says Joshua Blake Carter, director of Giordano 2. Unlike the kind of competition choreography for teens that many company members take on to make extra income, this is a win-win situation for both the dancers and dance-makers. Giordano 2 dancers typically learn all the choreography set on the first company, but rarely have a chance to have new choreography developed expressly for them. In addition to Carter, choreographers include Ceasar Solinas, Sean Rozanski, Martin Ortiz Tapia, and senior performing associate Fernando Rodriguez.
“Giordano on Giordano” will take place February 25th, 6-8 PM at Roosevelt University’s Katten/Landau performance space, and is hosted by the Giordano Young Professional Associate Board.
You can find more performances and events coming up in 2015 HERE.
--Lynn Colburn Shapiro, editor.