Bras, broomsticks, and triple time steps sweep across the Chicago dance landscape in the merry month of May! Chicago Dance Month continues into the coming month with a bursting bouquet of exciting dance events you won’t want to miss.
MAY HIGHLIGHTS:
Emily Stein’s latest installment of her Secret Experiments in Ballet, running for three performances last weekend at Dovetail Studios, integrates her depth of knowledge about classical ballet with post-modern choreographic sensibilities. As with her other “experiments,” Stein, a master ballet teacher and former Associate Artistic Director of Zephyr Dance, has made a long-term commitment to peeling back layers of the ballet onion in order to uncover new movement possibilities from within the form.
THRUST! is a one of a kind double feature of tap and modern dance showcasing the work of long-time Tapman collaborators Tristan Bruns (tap) and Kate O’Hanlon (modern) and special guest choreographer Ian Berg (tap). The pieces performed are created specifically for this thrust (three-sided) stage with elaborate props and set design, original music by Trainwreck Symphony and composer Carolyn O’Brien, and new arrangements of popular music.
Visceral Dance Chicago is a fledgling company, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. The company’s latest spring series, a one-nighter April 9 at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, was certainly no exception. At times, Visceral is a company that presents with multiple personalities, ping ponging between styles and voices over its three seasons to see where the pendulum rests.
The north side’s Atheneaum Theatre is a place most of Chicago’s dancers know and, for better or worse, love. A stalwart of Chicago dance, the eccentricities and opulence of the place are still there, but the Atheneaum shows signs of its age. The house creaks and groans as its audiences hunker down to view a performance. Trip hazards are abundant, sight lines are poor, but somehow I forgive everything when watching shows at “The Ath,” because it has always been there, it has always delivered, it is part of our history, and hopefully part our future.
For 5 years, Audible Odyssey has commissioned and presented original, diverse, and thrilling choreographic works from Chicago’s best and brightest tap dancers. TAKE FIVE celebrates this milestone, presenting the restaging of three crowd-favorite works from past seasons including Zada Cheeks’ critically-acclaimed Diabolus, alongside three world premieres from this year’s Artists in Resonance incubator artists, Starinah Dixon, Rich Ashworth and Matt Pospeshil.
Giordano Dance Chicago once again dazzled the Harris Theater stage with its unique brand of dancing joy. Drawing from recent and past repertoire and premiering Brock Clawson’s “Sneaky Pete,” the well-balanced program of six works spread the glory across a pleasing variety of contrasting moods and styles.
East coast Hip-Hop meets west coast Butoh in Rennie Harris and Michael Sakamoto’s multidisciplinary dance dialog, “Flash,” performed this past weekend at The Dance Center of Columbia College. The two forms, according to program notes, arise out of “the body in crisis,” and a physical manifestation of that crisis that radiates outward from the center of the body, less concerned with external form than with internal impulse.
Tap Dance and tragedy don’t usually find themselves in the same room, but Chicago Tap Theatre’s new tap drama, “Time Steps” (opening tonight and running through April 10 at Stage 773), locates the two at the tricky intersection of entertainment and serious theatre.
If you had a chance to go back in time and re-live your most defining moment over again as often as you wished, what would you change? What could you change, and what would it cost you? Heady questions for a tap dance show.
Fasten your seat belts! April takes off with Chicago Dance Month, jam-packed with site-specific happenings and performances in public venues and neighborhoods throughout the city.
Chicago Dance Month offers many ways to discover our city’s energetic and varied dance scene with more than 50 performances, events, and classes,