"They dance to give voice to the voiceless," said education director Nicole Clarke-Springer at the top of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater's 20th anniversary season finale, a weekend of performan…
Twyla Tharp views her career as a linear one, starting at the beginning and following a path up to now. That path includes more than 160 credits in dance, film, writing and Broadway " more, …
On tap through Friday at Hamlin Park, "In the Presence of Chasms" presents five dance tidbits by choreographers Megan Rhyme and Tanniqua-Kay Buchanan. Producer Rhyme's original spark for the…
In 2002, an actor, a dancer and a martial artist started a fusion hip-hop contemporary dance company. It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke, but one's got to wonder if Illinois State Univ…
Halloween night of 1967 was a special day in Chicago, the highly anticipated grand reopening of the Auditorium Theatre after a 26-year absence from public programming. The theater closed at …
I first interviewed Milwaukee Ballet artistic director Michael Pink in 2014, and he said, "If we can get you through the doors, we can a have lasting impact." Pink has kept that promise so f…
Virago is a term typically used to describe women " heroic, strong and courageous to some; shrewd and overbearing to others. In either interpretation, the word implies a transgression of gen…
Giordano Dance Chicago's two-night fall series at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance opened over the weekend with the 2005 "Giordano Moves." Created just three years before founder Gus G…
It's a classic, but not classical. "Giselle" premiered in Paris in 1841, created for the ballerina Carlotta Grisi by choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot and set to a magnificent sco…
This weekend, Chicago dance artists and venues are opening their doors and inviting the public to stages all over the city to witness excerpts, works-in-progress and studio processes from ou…
In Eric Barry's now infamous "Goodbye Chicago" manifesto published in the Huffington Post, the aspiring comic aired all of Chicago's dirty laundry " laying out the idiosyncrasies of a place …
"We are what we repeatedly do," said writer Will Durant, describing Aristotle's observations on the effects of practice. We now understand this as the principle of specificity. If you want t…
The marriage of music and dance is what Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre is all about. And though it's a dance company, this group's fall series "Alone/Together" relies as heavily on the creative…
"Reimagining classical Indian dance for modern times." I must have written that description a dozen times, about a dozen different works over the past few years. But pulling apart a thousand…
Links Hall, a well-known incubator and performance venue for dance and performance artists, spent its first 30 years in a raggedy old space above a Wrigleyville pub near the confluence of Cl…
If audiences turned out to the Auditorium Theatre over the weekend expecting to see an Olympic-style spectacle, they surely left disappointed. While Shen Wei, the MacArthur "genius"-award wi…
It's been more than 10 years since the Chicago Human Rhythm Project, one of Chicago's top tap dance companies, last performed at the Dance Center of Columbia College. As the venue's 2017-18 …
A small but enthusiastic crowd assembled at Skokie's North Shore Center for the Performing Arts for Visceral Dance Chicago's fall offering, the official season opener for the fledgling compa…
The first of two programs in this year's Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival (through Sept. 16 at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts) begins with Alicia Diaz's "Deep Listening," a due…
Conversations about a Hip Hop Studies minor at Columbia College Chicago began about three years ago, as choreographer and educator Onye Ozuzu was transitioning from chair of the dance depart…
While some excellent tours are rolling into town this season, the fall months are primarily reserved for homegrown dance. Especially exciting are two unique, not-to-be-repeated events highli…
Marie Casimir was still the associate director of Links Hall when she and Steve Marquette conceived the first Instigation Festival in 2016, a joint venture to create a cultural exchange betw…
When Victor Alexander was preparing for the next phase of his career, gradually reducing his stage time as a performer in Hedwig Dances and dabbling with choreography, he never imagined he w…
In its second year, Collaboraction's Peacebook Festival shares some commonalities with the now-defunct Sketchbook Festival, presenting an exhaustive display of short, multidisciplinary piece…
When a play premieres, it feels fresh and crisp, like a new pair of jeans. But living in those "jeans" for a while sometimes yields an entirely different production by the end of the run. Ac…