Adeline Else, Jeff Hancock and Rigo Saura in “between” by Ginger Farley/Photo: William Frederking
Ginger Farley is something of a legend in the Chicago dance community. As longstanding executive director of the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, she has touched the lives of hundreds of artists through mentorship and sizable, no-strings grants: a coveted rarity in the field. Farley stepped down from CDF a few years ago to attend to personal matters but is now returning to the work that marked the first decades of her career: creating dances.
Inspiration was sparked by a move and the attendant shuffle through old boxes. Farley says she came across an archive of material from a solo she created for Jeff Hancock back in 2005, a commission from Joanna Read of Same Planet Performance Project. Farley figured she should check in with Hancock before culling the contents. “Jeff and I exchanged notes and decided to spend time in the studio revisiting ideas,” Farley says. “As we started to dig in, I realized I had imagined I’d create a larger work for the Same Planet company, but it didn’t happen. In this moment I felt more ready to do that. And other serendipitous things happened.”
By coincidence or kismet Carrie Hanson, founder of The Seldoms, had also created a piece for Read nineteen years ago and had picked it up again in the same moment. A shared bill was all but inevitable. Hanson and Farley invited two younger artists—Rigo Saura and Gabriela Chavez—to join a program at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. The title, “Cycles,” is taken from through lines of the passage of time and the varying career stages of the presenting artists.
Farley’s piece uses the 2005 solo as a springboard but the resulting dance, entitled “between,” evolved into something entirely new. Farley reconnected with composer Ryan Ingebritsen, who created the music for the 2005 solo, for the score. Hancock, who is fifty-seven, is joined by Saura, thirty-five, and Adeline Else, twenty-two, in a piece that Farley says has one foot in the Bardo. “I’d been reading a lot about adult developmental psychology and the idea of the self as object and the journey of that object out of an embedded state to another one repeatedly through a lifetime,” she says. “And I was thinking about the space between those two embedded senses of self and what it feels like.
“At the same time, I was reading the first draft of a book by a friend of mine about Tibetan Buddhist dance and started reading ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead,’ and I realized this is what we’re working on. This is a ritual that occurs in an unknowable space, between two coalescences: death and birth. But it could be as uncomplicated as your mind going somewhere else when you’re in the midst of doing something familiar. It has both this meta-possibility but is also in the minute.”
I ask Farley how her fifteen-plus years of supporting dance artists through the creative process has influenced her return to the studio. “After years and years of talking with people in the studio about their work, now I’m out there,” she says. “I’ve taken in so much work in development, which is my favorite thing, I’ve learned from everybody. So thanks to everybody.”
“Cycles” at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 North Dearborn. Friday and Saturday, July 12 and 13 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $15-$50, available at eventbrite.com.
