CHICAGO — Producer/choreographer Rachel Katz packed us in tightly for the one-night-only Delve at Menomonee Club’s Drucker Center in Lincoln Park. The fourth of its kind, Katz’s mission is to present a variety of up-and-coming choreographers, and indeed, this bento box of dance contained small bites in a great many flavors with a wide spectrum of jazz and contemporary offerings…

I’ve been associating shiny colored swishy pants with choreographer Hope Goldman for a really long time. Her first ever evening length concert, Birds in Paradise, has gone through many iterations, but a few things have remained constant: the cast, the concept, and those fabulous swishy pants. Goldman’s cast of four women (Jessica Cornish, Alana Parekh, Cheryl Cornacchione Nowlin, and Megan Klein)…

Meeting Thodos Dance Chicago (TDC) company member Diana Winfree in the art room at the Menomonee Club for Boys and Girls, she apologized about the noisy kids in the hallway as we settled down for a chat. “I’m pretty familiar with noisy kids,” I said. It’s hard to separate a studio visit to TDC from the nostalgia of visiting the…

CHICAGO — There are plenty of dance companies who fuse Western and non-Western dance. Ballet is blended with modern, modern with African Diaspora, but rare is the dance company who creates such a delicious salad of dance forms as Deeply Rooted Dance Theater (DRDT). The influence of Horton, Graham, Classical Ballet and African dance are so clearly demonstrated in everything Deeply Rooted…

  Emerging choreographer showcases have been trending for awhile now, and Mordine & Company Dance Theater‘s long running Choreographic Mentoring Program is quickly approaching as a part of NEXT, 2013 at Hamlin Park Fieldhouse. As one of Chicago’s Modern Dance matriarchs, Shirley Mordine has been creating work with her company of dancers for 44 years.  So it’s not a bad deal to…