The McCallum Theatre's influential annual dance program, The Choreography Festival, will return for its twentieth edition this weekend. One of the performances on Saturday's program is an intensely thoughtful duet choreographed by French choreographer Manuel Vignoulle. The work is entitled Black & White, and Vignoulle performs in the work alongside Rena Butler. Here, Vignoulle shares with DancerMusic a whole range of thought provoking and often inspiring perspectives on the work. **** PHOTO DISCLAIMER: Please note that this article has images that contain nudity. Dancers featured in these photographs appear topless, as it is integral to the presentation of the work's choreographic vision. ***
Chicago Dance Crash has only been tearing up stages, expectations, and entrenched ideas of what a dance company can be for fifteen years? Seems like longer, or at least it seems like more. More than what you could have expected anybody else to do in fifteen short years, but then again, this is Chicago Dance Crash.
The very heart of what a dance company has to share with its audience is the choreography and its performance. Here we've reached out to Amy Sanderson, Ballet 5:8's Executive Director, and along with several of the performers in Ballet 5:8's "Compass", she shares with us some more of what Ballet 5:8's audience at Chicago's Athenaeum Theatre will see.
Ballet 5:8 is an imaginative, hard-working group of artists with some very carefully thought out ideas. On Friday, November 10, they bring their new evening length program Compass, a collection of four works, to Chicago's Auditorium Theatre. As we've learned more about this company, and about Compass, we've become more and more aware of how intricately and carefully imagined the choreography, the construction, and the performance of these four works is, and we asked Artistic Director Juianna Slager to tell us more about it.
Now in its fourth production, Evanston Dance Ensemble's Young Choreographers Project provides young dancers the unique opportunity to have an original choreographic work fully produced in a professional venue while providing mentorship from professionals in the Chicago Dance Community. DancerMusic's Kristi Licera sat down with four of the eight young choreographers in Part 1 of 2 of this 4PHOTOS series. See what these bright young minds have in store, and save the date for their upcoming debut, November 17-19 at Studio5 at Dance Center Evanston.
DancerMusic was at the Hamlin Park Field House Theater this past weekend for Project Bound Dance's premiere of 'Imprint'. Check out Kristi's RE-View and join her as we take another look at this collaborative evening of voice, dance, and theater.
Inaside Chicago Dance begins their fifteenth season with their Fall Concert on Saturday, October 28. Performing for the first time at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, the Company presents an evening of dance that combines ballet, ballroom and jazz, under the direction of artistic director Robert McKee.
Giordano Dance Chicago's story may one of amazing accomplishment, but unlike other stories that you can only read about, you can actually go and see this one. You'll be seeing the accomplishments of fifty-five years of imagination and determination, and more than that, you'll be seeing the accomplishment and excitement of the choreographers and performers that keep making this company move like they were just getting started. They're at the Harris Theater on Friday, October 27th at 7:30pm and on Saturday, October 28th at 7:30pm.
Illuminate. That's the title of the program that Nomi Dance and Chicago Repertory Ballet will present at Chicago's Athenaeum Theatre (Saturday, October 28th at 8pm), and it's a title that's likely to be a good synopsis of the kind of experience that their audience can be looking forward to. These are two very accomplished dance companies -- both of them bright, both of them bold, and each of them likely to shed more than a little light on the artistry of the other.
It would be difficult to exaggerate how good the Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre performance at Studio5 was. On the 13th of October, they performed their beautifully constructed fall concert Alone / Together in front of a sold out Studio5 house. Cerqua Rivera still has one more performance in their cross-city tour for Alone / Together, and this time they're at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. We asked Cerqua Rivera's Executive Director Catherine Painter to tell us some more about the program based on four photos from Alone / Together. Here's an inside look at where just four of the moments in a superb evening come from.