CHICAGO—Leaving Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Friday, tannins of RE | Dance’s “A Delicate Hand” still swirled in my brain. Its grape and oaky hues on costumes clothing dancers of a certain age reveling in bodies honed by decades in motion as they bob and weave among glowing cubes which cast an ethereal radiance on these hallowed grounds. I’m getting ahead of…

CHICAGO—So far, Eighth Blackbird’s attempts at live-streaming a virtual concert series from their production house in Horner Park have not gone well. The series—called Chicago Artists Workshop, or CAW for short (get it? CAW? Like a bird?)—was set to open Oct. 20 with the ensemble’s Grammy Award-winning co-founders Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall accompanying tenor Karim Sulayman in a rangy program…

CHICAGO—Ten minutes before the scheduled virtual opening of Theatre Y’s “We’re Gonna Die,” I heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. I didn’t want to go, even though all that it required of me was to click a Zoom link and log-in. No shoes, no parking, no awkward lobby mingling. These are the luxuries of digitized theatre, with Theatre Y among…

CHICAGO — This post is part of a series of conversations with trans/genderqueer dancers to give you a broader idea of where we come from, what we’re up to, and how we navigate the dance community. With that said, meet Dee Alaba! Dee is a dancer, teacher and aspiring academic working in Chicago. Dee (she/her) identifies as transfemme, but only…

CHICAGO—This post is part of a series of conversations with trans/genderqueer dancers to give you a broader idea of where we come from, what we’re up to, and how we navigate the dance community. With that said, meet Jess Martin! Jess Martin, who previously went by Jessica, dances with Momenta in Oak Park, IL, and also produced and choreographs Exploration, an…

CHICAGO—A triptych of films screened Thursday to Sunday, collectively marketed under the header In Focus: Dance, forms an anchor point of the 2019 Chicago International Film Festival, North America’s longest-running competitive film festival. The films—director Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced, Isadora’s Children, directed by Damien Manivel, and Cunningham, a documentary on Merce Cunningham directed by Alla Kovgan—run concurrent to…

This post is part of a series cataloging and responding to interviews I’m having with people across Chicago (artists, non artists, art enthusiasts, art un-enthusiasts) about their experiences and perspectives on dance. The project, “Speak! Through The Body, Uninhibited,” will use various artistic mediums to explore dance’s significance as a First Amendment right to freedom of expression. “I’m a dance…

This post is the first in a series cataloging and responding to interviews I’m having with people across Chicago (artists, non artists, art enthusiasts, art un-enthusiasts) about their experiences and perspectives on dance. The project, “Speak! Through The Body, Uninhibited,” will use various artistic mediums to explore dance’s significance as a First Amendment right to freedom of expression.   “I…

CHICAGO — This post is part of a series of conversations with trans/genderqueer dancers to give you a broader idea of where we come from, what we’re up to, and how we navigate the dance community. With that said, meet A. Raheim White! Raheim began dancing when they were fourteen years old as an alternative to gym class and it…

CHICAGO — Two festivals which ran simultaneously this month — the Pivot Arts Festival in Uptown and Edgewater and the Physical Theater Festival in Lakeview — have more in common than their North side roots. Each is a veritable grab bag of contemporary performances from Chicago and beyond, many of which defy categorization. The Physical Theater Festival umbrellas a wide…