Cerqua Rivera artistic director Wilfredo Rivera’s Recuerdos - Para Mi Familia (premiere) captures the essence of what this collaboration of dancers, musicians, and visual artists does best, but not nearly enough as yet. With a versatile ensemble of eight outstanding musicians on stage and savvy projection design technicians, the company is poised to pioneer something very special.
Follow the evolution of music and movement from the dawn of time to humanity's future told through tap dance, body percussion, and live musical accompaniment.
26 cast and crew members, 3 weddings, 42 blackouts, 16 fouette turns, and one Elvis.
Matt Lyle’s The Boxer, presented by Kacie Smith and Ahmad Simmons’ Pursuit Productions over the last four weekends in the Athenaeum’s studio theater, is a great many things. It’s theater presented like a live silent film. It’s side-splitting physical comedy set to brilliant musical accompaniment. It’s a journey into the past, with subtle hints of the present mixed in. Yes, The Boxer is a great many things, but it is NOT a dance show.
Stories are making a comeback on the dance scene, or reinventing themselves as post-post-modernism, take your pick. Throughout September and October, Chicago dance lovers have an absolutely tantalizing array of dance styles and companies to choose from, with a rip-roaring line-up that ranges from conventional story ballets to innovative collaborations, abstract dance tone-poems to jazz rhythms and tap dance narratives. Here are a just few of the many wonderful stories in dance coming our way this fall:
It’s not often audiences get to experience a single concert with the scope of choreography and superb performing that The Chicago Dancing Festival brings to the city each summer. And it’s free!
Wednesday night’s opening, the first of three concerts that took place through Saturday, gave us an evolution of dance in America.
The excitement swept across Michigan Avenue for blocks in both directions as streams of festive concert-goers flocked to the Auditorium Theater for “Dance For Life,” the single most important Chicago dance event of the year.
Now in its 23rd year of raising funds for The AIDS Foundation of Chicago, The Dancers’ Fund, Making A Daily Effort, and Agape Missions, NFP, “Dance For Life,” like no other performing arts event in the city, demonstrates the extraordinary spirit and solidarity of Chicago’s dance community.
Take a houseful of virtuoso tappers from across the city, set them loose on six tap choreographers, and you get “Noteworthy,” Audible Odyssey’s intimate, inviting, all-inclusive pep rally for the art of tap dance held last weekend at Stage 773.
Silvita Diaz Brown y Compañía
Join The Cliff Dwellers Arts Foundation in welcoming Silvita Diaz Brown, as she presents the first section of her new work Encuentros. Encuentros is a movement research that utilizes contemporary dance, acroyoga (partner acrobatics) and spoken text to meditate on the moments of personal encounters and relationship building. – a journey of encounters that changes and redirects our destinies.
You can’t beat JUBA! MASTERS OF TAP AND PERCUSSIVE DANCE for sheer scope and variety of performance styles, techniques, aesthetics, and, well, people on stage in Wednesday’s opening night, sponsored by The Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). That very diversity beats any effort to nail it down with a definition, and maybe that’s just the point.