Aerial Dance Chicago kicks off its 20th anniversary season with "Road to the Sky" -- a new works program that allows Chicago choreographers the unique opportunity to create work on the artists at ADC using aerial apparatus. Here's what Artistic Director Chloe Jensen told us about how the program was created and more on the dance makers experience in the ADC studios:
On Friday and Saturday July 26th and 27th, Aerial Dance Chicago brings their latest production, "Higher Ground" to Chicago's Ruth Page Center for the Arts. We asked Company Dancer Hannah Rosenfeld to give us an inside look at what we'll see. Here's what she told us:
It's great to be bold and imaginative, but it's never easy to keep being bold and imaginative, at least not for long. Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival --- the bold and imaginative two-weekend festival that Nicole Gifford and Melissa Mallinson produce -- has managed to be imaginative, bold and successful every year for eight full years. On September 21, 2018 when HCCDF 2018 opens at The Ruth Page Center for the Arts in Chicago, that will make it nine. It sounds like quite an accomplishment, and it certainly is, and when you find out more about it, about the many dance artists who get the chance to present their own imaginative visions, about the audiences who get to share in them, it starts sounding like even more of an accomplishment. Naturally, we wanted to find out more about it, so we reached out to Nicole Gifford. Here's what she told us:
Dancers have the unique ability to take a piece of music and really show it to you. You may be thinking, how is that possible? Sound is a wave invisible to the naked eye, and even if you were to see that piece of music performed live, you would see the action that creates the sound, but not the sound itself. Here's where the dancer comes in. If a dancer were to create movement to your favorite song, chances are that dancer would pick up on the nuances in rhythm, accents in instrumentation, the subtle meaning behind the lyrics, and
Ask a dancer to jump, and they'll ask, "How high?" Chances are you will get a graceful, elegant leap. Ask a dancer to turn, and they'll ask, "How many times?" Ah, look at those lovely, effortless pirouettes. Now, ask that dancer to climb up a twenty-foot piece of fabric with the same grace and poise, and the most likely outcome is that dancer will say nothing, and all you will be staring at is one very, very skeptical and confused face. Unless, that is, that dancer happens to be one of the artists at Aerial Dance Chicago. These gravity defying
