Chicago Dance Crash's "Lil Pine Nut", uses a breathtaking variety of musical styles. But in order to tell the story Jessica Deahr had built, she also brought in four of the Crash performers to add important vocal recordings. Here are four photos of where you see Crash in very different roles from the ones you see on stage.
Chicago Dance Crash performs in "Lil Pine Nut" at Chicago's Ruth Page Center for the Arts, adding to they're rich history of telling evening-length stories with a brilliant fusion of styles from hip-hop to contemporary. We asked Crash Rehearsal Director KC Bevis all about, and here's what she told us:
In the background, quiet and mostly unseen, there's an art that makes all of the other arts that we see in dance concerts possible. Dance concerts don't just happen; somebody has to present them, and doing so well is very much an art. But it's a complicated one, and it's even more complicated when you present dance and theater and music and fine art at the same venue. Moraine Valley Community College's Fine and Performing Arts Center has been doing that so well for so long that they're not only celebrating their 25th Anniversary this year, they're doing it with an even more imaginative and engaging series of presentations. One of the most imaginative is the Chicago Dance Crash performance on Saturday, November 17th at 7:30pm, and because of who Crash is, and how this all came together, it promises to be one of the most engaging as well. Tommy Hensel is the Managing Director of the Moraine Valley Fine and Performing Arts Center, and he's seen the last eleven years of the Center's accomplishments first hand. We asked Tommy to share with us some more of the impressive backstage story behind the front-of-house performance we'll be seeing on November 17th. Here's what he told us:
Among the many arts of the Art of Dance, freestyling is its own special world, but it includes just about every part of what makes dance an art. Great freestyle starts with having such a range of motion and technique and inspiration that you can present any of it at any moment. Although the creative decisions are made faster than even the fastest of movement, those are the same decisions and the same creativity that are always the essence of making a dance. So it's quite remarkable that at Dance For Life 2018, Chicago Dance Crash is there to freestyle -- which is almost unheard of for such a monumental production. Crash Artistic Director Jessica Deahr took some time to give us a little closer look at four moments from Chicago Dance Crash's very rich freestyle history in 4PHOTOS from Crash. Here we go:
Charlie Cutler is emblematic of many of the secret ingredients in the Crash recipe. Like the Company he cofounded, he knows the art from the inside, but can always see it clearly from the outside. That way, the road stays open in both directions. A fifteen year progression of careful, thoughtful artists have found a place to imagine in detail, and create in multi-dimensions. For those same fifteen years, audiences have found a place to see what those artists created in a context that never forgets what it looks like and feels like from the audience. Here are 4PHOTOS from the past and future story of Chicago Dance Crash ---
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.
Chicago Dance Crash is a company as unique as its artists, with a history of bending the rules of concert dance. In its 15th anniversary season, this band of professional misfits took on the task of creating an original full length production, 'The Bricklayers of Oz' - currently in the running for 'Most Inventive New Work' in Dance Magazine's Readers' Choice Awards 2017. Company Dancer Kristi Licera tells us why this show deserves your vote!
If you've never seen Chicago Dance Crash, now is a good time to find out that you always wanted to. Bricklayers promises to be another rowdy and riveting product of the rich imagination of Jessica Deahr, who directed and choreographed the work with an inspired team of co-conspirators ...
Duets for My Valentine is an evening length composition in the diversity of dance, with eleven different dance companies and independent artists each presenting a duet somehow related to that very broad, promising, and potentially difficult subject, romance.
Opposites attract, and not just in the ways that you've probably heard about. Beyond the stereotypes of romance and the science of electromagnetism, there's a thread that runs through some of the most innovative kinds of creativity and reflects much the same idea.