Fall Dance Preview The Seldoms' Carrie Hanson Looks Forward to Companies That Explore What Dance Can Do

Dorrance Dance/Photo: Jamie Kraus

By Carrie Hanson

Chicago is a wonderful home in which to be a dance artist, and not a small part of that includes the chance to see and be inspired by extraordinary performance from local and visiting dance groups at venues, intimate or grand, across the city. The dance programs I plan to attend this fall, and have shared below, promise to advance beyond what the dancer can do; they also put forward what dance, as a medium, can do. I get excited about the possibility that these dance works, whether overtly political and personal such as Nora Chipaumire’s “portrait of myself as my father,” or more cool and psychological such as Jirí Kylián’s “Sarabande,” can tell us about ourselves and the present moment in ways that no other form can. We witness the facility and flexibility of the Hubbard Street dancers moving in “Sarabande” and can transfer that beyond the theater to an agile thinking and flexible engagement with others. Both as a choreographer and dance-goer, I like to interpret the working, dancing body as a problem-solving body and I propose that dance is a place where we might glimpse our capacity to move fluently and generously through the world. From the dance stages of Chicago to the streets of Chicago, move the intentional gestures of bodies activating and sharing space.

“portrait of myself as my father” by Nora Chipaumire
Chipaumire is a formidable contemporary artist who sets out to challenge and embrace stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body. In “portrait of myself as my father,” a dance set in a boxing ring, I anticipate we’ll see explosive physicality, and then also a muscularity grown weary of a fight. Her dance, focusing on perceptions of male blackness, is timely and needed in this charged moment across the country. It is crucially needed in Chicago, where occurrences of violence and injustice happen with devastating frequency and where the vulnerability of the body becomes more clear, on a daily basis, to ever more people. October 20-22 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago

SpinOff
All three programs in this innovative, annual, city-sponsored festival featuring artists from the Midwest are free! BodyCartography Project from Minneapolis will perform sited work all over the city as well as at Links Hall. Locals Ayako Kato and MegLouise Dance play at the stunning Pritzker Pavilion. Barak adé Soleil premieres his project, “what the body knows” at Stony Island Arts Bank. The 2016 SpinOff lineup ranges wide in terms of sensibility and approach, but these dancemakers are all serious about innovating and deepening the art form, and their working ideas are evident and readable in the dance itself—not something easy to achieve. October 28-November 5 presented by the city of Chicago’s DCASE (Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events)

“Undersweet” and new work by Tere O’Connor Dance
O’Connor’s intriguing premise in “Undersweet”—that formalism is a product of repressed sexual desire—seems perfect territory to explore in duet form. O’Connor is a brilliant artist, teacher and thinker—don’t pass up the opportunity to hear him illuminate dance and his ideas at either a Thursday post-performance or a Friday pre-performance talk. November 3-5 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago

“ETM: Double Down” by Dorrance Dance
Michelle Dorrance, a 2015 MacArthur Genius Fellow and former cast member of STOMP, has assembled a team of eight tap dancers and three musicians. Together they constructed an elaborate, rhythmic sonic work. With an electronic tap floor to not only boost, but also alter the foot percussion, the expanded range of sound textures along with the total staging add up to a big, rousing show. November 4-6 at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

“The Retreat” by Khecari
Co-choreographed by directors Jonathan Meyer and Julia Antonick, The Retreat continues their project of reconfiguring the concert dance experience. Meyer and Antonick have given us their big, ambitious undertakings for several years now, variously in small or large or raw spaces. They always transcend the standard mode of viewing performance by redesigning the placement, size or action of the audience itself. With Retreat, they play with our endurance, offering three options for length of stay: an evening, a long-form performance, or—for the most committed or adventurous—an overnight experience. With Meyer’s meticulous attention to every production detail, the “sleeping nests” for guests will likely be of a piece with the fantastic sculptural costuming by Jeff Hancock, and the post-coffee performance will sustain the other-worldly quality of Khecari’s dances, even in 8am morning light. November 10 and 19 at Indian Boundary Cultural Center

“Past, Past, Present” with Bob Eisen, Kristina Isabelle, Charlie Vernon
Any time Bob Eisen (with Charlie Vernon, co-founder of Links Hall) returns to Chicago to perform, the dance community turns out to see this venerable artist. His idiosyncratic movement continues to evolve and innovate into his seventieth year. Eisen’s visits back to Chicago (he now splits time between Russia and New York) are occasions to celebrate his enduring stage career and the longevity of an organization he helped to start: Links Hall—a small but mighty center for experimental performance where countless local and national artists have risked, tested, debuted or come home. The one-night-only program (and seventieth birthday party for Bob!) is steeped in Chicago dance history, as Isabelle presents a reconstruction of a 1969 work by local modern dance master Sybil Shearer, and Vernon discusses and shares video of his 1981 work, “That Fall.” November 14 at Links Hall

“Fall Series,” Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
Hubbard rolls out two world premieres—one by the Harris Theater’s first resident choreographer, Brian Brooks, and the other by Hubbard Street’s own Alejandro Cerrudo. I’m eager to see what Brooks builds in his new role, and hopeful it’s as beautifully crafted as “Fall Falls,” his duet for himself and Wendy Whelan. Fall Series also brings us two classic works by choreographer Jirí Kylián, including the powerful “Sarabande,” whose taut psychological space is in part created by a sound score that includes urgent vocalization by the six male dancers. November 17-20 at Harris Theater for Music and Dance

“Love With/out Trembling,” Molly Shanahan and Jeff Hancock
As you may glean from the program’s title, Chicago choreographer Molly Shanahan’s innate poetry figures in her writing, her subject matter and most certainly her dancing, which is at once contemplative and inward, generous and quietly joyful. Her dances draw attention to spaces—interior spaces, shared spaces, and the immediate space around the curves of a body. Shanahan achieves what I encourage my students to do—she invites-to-be-seen—really because she expresses deep curiosity in motion, and wishes to share that exploration. That she is performing with Jeff Hancock, another veteran performer, makes me curious as the two are quite different in their energies and impulses, but it seems their pairing is an extension of curiosity too; they ask how do we move together when we combine our familiarity, our similarity, our difference? December 16-18 at Links Hall

Tsukasa Taiko. Photo: Ken Carl

“Reduction,” Tatsu Aoki
This multimedia event boasts an impressive lineup of musicians including Tatsu Aoki himself, Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang and Nicole Mitchell. It involves performance by local dancer Ayako Kato and Japanese masters in Kabuki and nihonbuyo (Kimono dance). I’m interested in Aoki’s goal in “Reduction”—the recovery of a nuanced sensibility, musicality and simplicity within taiko drumming performance, which is more typically understood as loud, thundering and forceful. He locates that recovery in taiko’s rich intersection with other Japanese art forms; I anticipate that “Reduction,” true to its name, operates with restraint and reverence, but will deliver a vivid and surprising sonic and kinetic experience. December 16-17 at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Since founding The Seldoms in 2001, dance artist and educator Carrie Hanson has designed over twenty-five multidisciplinary projects with artists working in visual arts, music/sound design, fashion design and architecture. She was named the Chicago Tribune’s 2015 “Chicagoan of the Year in Dance.” Hanson’s recent creative work has involved research and embodiment of social, political, environmental issues and history, as a mode of pressing dance and performance to speak to larger public issues. The company is currently touring her 2014 dance theater, “Power Goes,” about the workings of power to make or stop social change as seen through the figure of Lyndon Baines Johnson. She teaches at the Dance Center of Columbia College. theseldoms.org