Preview: Dance Improvisation Festival/Dance Center of Columbia College and Links Hall

Nancy Stark Smith: "Exactness of Weights of Feeling Kuva"/Photo Raisa Kyllikki Karjalainen

RECOMMENDED

A new week-long festival celebrating the creation of art in the moment firmly establishes Chicago as a thriving center of vital, groundbreaking dance. Presented jointly by the Dance Center of Columbia College and Links Hall, the fest pulls national and local artists together to teach, perform, lecture and discuss in venues across the city. Highlights include contact improvisation workshops with veteran Nancy Stark Smith, a performance and a workshop by Bebe Miller, an artist talk and performance inspired by the sculptural installations in Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at IIT, and a free improv jam in Grant Park, timed to get the city amped for SummerDance. The fest also quite rightly takes ongoing musicians-meet-dancers improv series “Collision Theory” under the umbrella. Individual tickets to events are available; fest passes get you in to three, four or five performances and discounts on workshops. (Sharon Hoyer)

June 12-June 19. For information, call (773)281-0824 or visit linkshall.org/DanceImprovFest.shtml. To register for workshops or purchase tickets, call (312)369-8330.

Opening Doors: A Preview of "Somewhere Between" at the Dance Center of Columbia College "What would it feel like if we did this every day, working with your best friend, laughing and having fun and seeing it as a joy?"
Ease, Freedom and Joy: A Preview of An Untitled Love by A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham at the Dance Center of Columbia College "There’s a bit of nostalgia, a bit of pride, a lot of love,” Kyle Abraham says of his new piece, set to the music of D’Angelo.
Critical Community: The Dance Center of Columbia College’s “Dance Buffet” Series Finds Collective Connection in Quarantine A smorgasbord of workshops, residencies and online performances dispatched Chicago-based dance artists to the Dance Center’s national and international audience while deepening the connections within Chicago's arts community.
Fall Arts Preview 2020: With Experimental Spirit, The Dance Center of Columbia College Reinvents the Fall Season Ellen Chenoweth, director of the Dance Presenting Series at Columbia College, talks about how she and the entire Dance Center faculty and staff reimagined the Fall season, looking for abundance in lean times, and the power of small changes.
Lightness and Longevity: A Preview of "ON GO ING" at Links Hall “I want people to not be sitting there thinking ‘I could have stayed home and read this book or watched this movie.’ I just want people to have a good time. It always been sort of tongue in cheek and absurdist in its way. It’s just who I am.”
Always Look: A Preview of Beyond the Box 4.3—Black Hair E{m}urge at Links Hall Yoshinojo Fujima and puppeteers Tom Lee and Ryugyoku Nishikawa each developed separate performances based on a popular classic Kabuki scene of young heartache, focusing on what Fujima calls the “but actually” aspects of the story.

Related Stories