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…

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Love was in the air at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts Friday, which had big pink hearts projected onto the Illinois Symphony’s white bandshell set onstage. Indeed, many couples braved frigid temperatures and icy roads for this Valentine’s Day engagement called Love Notes, with the ISO offering a smattering of compositions from the Romantic period….

OAKBROOK TERRACE, IL—The band was inconsistent. So was some of the tap dancing, and a couple actors’ French accents sounded, well, more like German. If that sounds harsh, it’s because I wanted to get those things out of the way; they’re the only negative things I can say about “An American in Paris,” playing through March 29 at the Drury…

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…

BLOOMINGTON, IL–As Maestro Ken Lam announced what he called the “main dish” of a three-course musical meal Saturday at Bloomington’s Second Presbyterian Church, musicians adjusted their chairs to make way for their colleagues near Lam’s podium. As the evening’s soloists, Illinois Symphony Orchestra (ISO) concertmaster Roy Meyer and principal viola Nicholas Jeffery took their places at the front of a…

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…

WINNETKA, Ill. — These days, going to high school can be a complicated and tumultuous experience. Far beyond the age-old ups and downs of adolescence, the issues that occupy students today stretch the notion of growing pains in ways that can break down rather than build up the spirit and one’s faith in humanity. In times like these, it is…