In part two of our coverage of Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, we asked Co-Founder and Producer Melissa Mallinson about the community of artists that the festival has brought together over the last ten years. Here's what she told us:
This year Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival celebrates its tenth anniversary season. With so much to share and celebrate in this monumental season, we talked to co-founders Nicole Gifford and Melissa Mallinson in a special two part interview. Here's part one, featuring Nicole Gifford. Here's what she told us:
Taylor Mitchell has a brand new work, and naturally, we wanted to hear all about it. It's called Out of Pocket, and its performance by MitchellMovement is part of Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival's second weekend of performances (Friday September 28 and Saturday September 29, both at 8PM). It's an ideal pairing; Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival brings together a rich spectrum of imaginative independent choreography each year, and Mitchell epitomizes the kind of engaging and impactful dance that HCCDF was founded to present. We asked Taylor to let us in on more of what we'll get to see when Out of Pocket takes the stage at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, and here's what he 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:
