This Friday and Saturday at Links Hall might be our last chance to see a Mordine & Company Dance Theater performance, at least for a little while. Celebrating their 50th anniversary season, this contemporary company founded and directed by the legendary Shirley Mordine, has put together an evening of performance featuring six works. Three pieces are remounts or “re-imaginings” of repertory that find new relevance in today’s socio-political climate, while the other three are new creations by company members mentored by Mordine.

Seven years have passed since Ballet Hispanico last performed in Chicago. The company toured to the Dance Center in 2012; it was the same weekend Luna Negra Dance Theater premiered “CARMEN.maquia” at the Harris Theater – a terrific project that, unknowingly, was the beginning of the end for Luna Negra, the company Eduardo Vilaro founded in 1999. Vilaro had since left Chicago to helm Ballet Hispanico, a company he once danced for under direction by founder Tina Ramirez. He's been artistic director and CEO since 2009.

The true test of any new company is not the first season, but the second. It’s easy to rally friends and family and garner support for new dance in this city; staying power is a much harder thing to develop. Formed in 2017, Hot Crowd is a company of seven dancers now faced with the uphill battle of finding its niche in Chicago’s dance landscape. And with “Internal Truce,” a two-act, mixed-repertory evening of dance through Saturday at Stage 773, I’m fairly confident they’ll find it.

Chicago dance sizzles with rising talent in a number of distinguished studio companies grooming the next generation of dancers for professional careers. Ballet Chicago, founded in 1987 by husband and wife team Daniel Duell and Patricia Blair, is a shining example of the impressive technical accomplishment and artistic integrity such companies can bring to the staging of established repertoire and the development of new works.

It’s an intimate setting, with around 25 of us collected Saturday into the black box theater at Washington Park to see professional contemporary dance in a new arts space.

With a mission to bring contemporary concert dance to Chicago’s south side, Banks Performance Project nods to traditional work through the lens of an independent dance company in A Candid Introduction. Celebrating the company’s second season, the final performance premieres tonight, May 5 at 7:30 p.m. at the Green Line Performing Arts Center.

Sara Zalek moved to Chicago in 2004, but the first time I remember seeing her perform was in 2014. She was swaddled in Saran wrap, laying horizontally, like a wake, atop a vinyl air mattress. We all patiently waited for her platform to inflate, then Zalek danced a topsy-turvy, hilarious balance exercise as she rose to her feet on that airbed.