Watching Beijing Dance Theater perform Wild Grass, a Chicago debut that premiered at the Harris Theater on Tuesday, it’s easy to find yourself feeling ambivalent between the inspiration and the ensuing interpretation.
Join us for the November installment of Moving Dialogs as we focus on the evolution of European based and classical dance forms with luminary artists who are redefining and pushing traditional boundaries. Shifting Identity panelists will explore the changing landscape of American Ballet and Contemporary Dance in the Post- Balanchine era, and discuss how these shifts are a reflection of larger societal change.
Nejla Yatkin’s workshop begins with a thorough warm-up focused on strengthening, lengthening, and preparing the body for an investigation of movement possibilities. With a weighted approach, we explore exercises that redirect momentum in and out of the floor and up into the air. This cultivates a sense of ease that allows for an alert dancer, conscious of the body's architecture in off-balance, explosive and suspended three-dimensional situations.
Long before the aroma of roast turkey tantalizes our taste buds, Nutcrackers across the world begin flexing their jaws for the holiday season. As countless holiday productions can attest, there’s more than one way to crack a nut.
There’s much to celebrate and appreciate about Jump Rhythm Jazz Project’s 25th anniversary season (through November 2nd at Stage 773), most of all its founding director, Billy Siegenfeld.
Billy is the heart and soul of Jump Rhythm--everything about him. His delightfully incisive mind, his sense of humor, endearing personality, uniquely energized dance style and quirky imagination, his humanity, the passion he has for life and for art, and his multifarious talents as consummate dancer, musician, poet, actor and storyteller all conspire to make him irresistible on stage.
Laughing never felt so good, and all the more fun for the surprise of it. You don’t expect to bust a gut at a contemporary dance concert, or to see sketch comedy expand into physical humor on the scale of concert dance. But that was before the wild and crazy creative teams of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and The Second City joined forces to invent a unique comedy cocktail for their combined hometown audiences. Their fusion of forms, “The Art of Falling,” runs through Sunday at the Harris Theater.
The tagline for River North Dance Chicago’s (RNDC) 25th anniversary season was never more appropriate than onstage at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance last weekend. A delightfully understated RNDC stripped away some of the usual glitz and glamor to reveal purity, vulnerability, and simplicity in its Fall Engagement. That is, until the men and women of “RivNo” jazz walked out in unitards, high ponytails and high-topped jazz boots for the electric revival of Sherry Zunker’s 1992 “Reality of a Dreamer.” Appropriately dated, everything from Todd L.
Simple, deliberate, meditative--these are the qualities that dominated “River-Mouth-Ocean: Explorations in Afro-Asian Futurism,” presented this past weekend at Links Hall by choreographers Peggy Choy and Onye Ozuzu. The theme of water united the two halves of the program, one flowing into the other with an intermission separating the works of each choreographer. Themes ranging from ecology and Caribbean ocean mythology to bioluminescence and female solidarity lent a heady tone to the evening that was sometimes elucidating, sometimes mystifying.