The absurdity of waiting in line at airport security checkpoints is the departure gate for Lucky Plush’s Queue, at Links Hall through May 18. Co-directed and conceived by Lucky Plush artistic director Julia Rhoads and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, founding director of 500 Clowns, the ninety-minute descent into a world of random encounters snares both performers and audience with the insatiable human need to make a story out of anything, even if it’s nothing at all. 

The Joffrey Ballet’s U.S. premiere of Krzysztof Pastor’s Romeo and Juliet (2008), through May 11 at the Auditorium Theater, integrates ballet and historic film footage with the lush Prokofiev score to set the story against a backdrop of fascism and world conflagration. 

Family feuds have stoked the fires of human conflict since the beginning of recorded history. Pastor’s leap from family feud to world war makes its point repeatedly as the young lovers time- travel across the 20th century, but Shakespeare’s story remains intact and as poignant as ever. 

Hold onto your hats! If Ron De Jesus Dance’s first full-length Chicago concert is any indication of what’s to come, we’re in store for a wild ride inside the kinetically-charged imagination and artistry of this talented dancer-turned-choreographer. De Jesus and his splendidly versatile collection of dancers and collaborators lit up the intimate Ruth Page Theater this past weekend with an eclectic program.

For this next Moving Dialogs: Global Exchange event onThursday, May 1st at Soham Dance Space, Dr. Ananya Chatterjea offers some thoughts to inform the conversation:

Moving In/Out of “Tradition”

Fairy tales are much more than stories for children, says Angelin Preljocaj, Artistic Director of Ballet Preljocaj, in a brief phone conversation with SeeChicagoDance. Preljocaj brings his Blanche Neige (Snow White) to the Harris Theater for Music and Dance May 2-4. The work is a modern take on the traditional grand story ballet after the classic Brothers Grimm tale of the beautiful girl with ebony skin and dark black hair.

If you showed up for Monday morning ballet class mid-July with a lobster-red face and sunburned arms, Walter Camryn thought it was the height of humor to ask if you got “burned on your weak end.” 

Ah, the summer intensive!  It was a special time, when dancing all day long every day for six-weeks, and the blissful absence of distractions like school, often resulted in markedly accelerated progress, sometimes with extraordinary breakthroughs for serious dance students.