It’s too easy to get lost in the grind. Day after day, deadline after deadline, we just keep going. We look for the next weekend, and then the next, often not recognizing when it gets unsustainable, or when something needs to change. A retreat is not a vacation, but a scaling back – a turning away from the front lines of a battle to regroup and start again.

You would certainly not hesitate to call The Seldoms a dance company, but it has carved a unique identity for its bold use of dance to dive headlong into global issues that typically transcend dance and go well beyond the range of conventional choreographic exploits. Often intertwining choreographed passages with spoken text, theater, video, and original live music, recent works have addressed the 2008 recession, power and powerlessness in America, and the social phenomenon of “The Sixties.” 

Ensemble Español soared into its 42nd year this past weekend at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, paying tribute to the memory of famed Flamenco dancer and choreographer José Greco, and honoring company founder Dame Libby Komaiko. 

The story of Cinderella warms the hearts of children and their parents in just about every culture across the globe, with its tale of oppression and triumphant reward gratifying our hope that goodness, and true love, can overcome adversity.

There’s something magical that happens to dancers at the end of a season, when their bodies and minds are on the brink of exhaustion and summer vacations are just around the corner. It’s a magic I witnessed while taking in Giordano Dance Chicago’s last performance of the season Saturday night at the Auditorium Theatre, but I’ll get to that later. 

Ohad Naharin’s evening-length “Decadance/Chicago” brought Hubbard Street’s 40th  anniversary season to a spectacular finish in a custom-tooled re-imagining of Naharin’s best known works.  HS company director Glenn Edgerton’s hope was to extend “Minus 16”  (1999), which made its US premiere in 2000 with Hubbard Street, into a full length work for the company. Naharin obliged, splicing beginnings, middles, and endings from various other works into the mix.

The Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park, downtown Chicago’s stunning public lakefront showplace, is much more than a terrific outdoor concert venue for free summer performances of all kinds. It’s a magnet that draws thousands of people together from all corners of Chicago and the world, which is exactly what happened last Thursday night when “Stomping Grounds” wrapped up its two-month-long tour of neighborhood venues with a Grand Finale that celebrated both the universality and cultural specificity of percussive dance and rhythmic arts.

Corey Smith’s “The New Prairie School” is a trio – featuring Smith, Clare Saxe, and Ethan T. Parcell. But it’s also a duet. The performance, which took place June 2 and 3 at one of few remaining north side mansions on Sheridan Rd. in the Edgewater neighborhood, is a pas de deux between a house and the humans within it. So much of the “The New Prairie School’s” setting was pivotal to the performance, and sometimes, vice-versa, which made for a compelling couple of hours on a beautiful evening near the lake.