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.
Walking into the Mayne Stage late night for a KTF (Keeper of the Floor) dance battle between company members and friends of Chicago Dance Crash (CDC), a number of realizations come to mind: 1) KTF is not a typical dance show, 2) Chicago Dance Crash is not a typical dance company, and 3) it’s possible to make people go crazy for dance. Host, judge, moderator, and lubricator Mattrick Swayze (with his darling Swayzettes) are a large part of what make the quarterly hootenanny work.
When Chicago tap dancer Jay Fagan first entered The American Rhythm Center, home of the Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) and its resident tap company, BAM!, he was blown away by the vibe “of all these amazing dancers!” And they were all wearing tap shoes.
Audience Architects celebrates its sixth anniversary at its annual benefit, “Rhythm & Brews.” Kick off the fall dance season and mingle with dancers, artistic directors, and arts managers from more than 50 different Chicago area dance organizations.
Movingly meditative . . . enchantingly beautiful.
—The New York TimesIntense, richly complicated . . . exhilarating.
—Los Angeles Times
The Joffrey Academy of Dance, Official School of the Joffrey Ballet, performs its fifth annual program of world premieres by ascendant choreographers of color. The winners, Stephanie Martinez (Chicago), Jennifer Archibald (New York), and Abdul Latif (New York) showcase the powerful and innovative works they have created in three exhilarating performances, along withWindy Sand, a new work from Joffrey Academy Artistic Director Alexei Kremnev, featuring original music by Karen LeFrak.
A landmark dance/theatre collaboration from The Seldoms, Power Goes is choreographer Carrie Hanson’s astute study of power, using dance to investigate how it is wielded to make or stop social change.
Turning to the legacy of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the tumultuous era of the 1960s, The Seldoms and their multimedia collaborators offer explosive, muscular physicality, keen wit, and total-environment staging in this exhilarating inquiry into the forces that cause – or block – progress toward a better world.
Phenomenal dancer Sònia Sánchez channels the subconscious depth of flamenco, raw and unadorned, in Le Ça, her solo dance propelled by electric guitarist David Soler and vocalist Miguel Angel (“el Londro”). A magnetic presence with an extraordinary command of body and rhythm, Sánchez creates a flamenco language all her own with her prodigious music collaborators.