CHICAGO — The two pieces which make up Hedwig Dances’s spring series are positioned as opposites. The evening, called Sea Level: Above and Below, boasts world premieres by company members Taimy Ramos and Rigoberto Saura. It’s an apt juxtaposition: the murky groundedness of Ramos’s “A Flor de Piel” gives a sense of the dark abyss beneath the ocean’s surface, while Saura’s…

CHICAGO — It’s been a while since I’ve seen a dance concert. Truthfully, I can’t remember the last time I saw a single company perform eight different pieces in an hour-long evening. Until Friday night, when I attended Coddiwomple, the Spring performance of Cattywampus Dance at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. The all-female company of five twenty-somethings is…

CHICAGO — “You are really going to love this show,” said Winifred Haun onstage at the Ruth Page Center for the Performing Arts, “especially if you love chairs.” Indeed, chairs or some form thereof were coincidentally a part of all the dances on the program in First Draft, Haun’s two-day engagement featuring new-ish dances from five Chicago companies. Aside from the…

Most Chicagoans familiar with dance know the names Robert Joffrey and Ruth Page, but before the Joffrey Ballet relocated to Chicago in 1995, Ruth Page was one of the only professional gigs in town for a ballet dancer. Despite her name being most closely associated today with superior pre-professional dance training, during her lifetime Ruth Page was more interested in choreography,…

The 6th installment of the Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival (HCCDF) is trying a new format, with two programs rather than three, spread out over two weekends. The result is fewer artists, more tech time for each artist, and an overall heightened sophistication to one of the few remaining small-scale festivals. The evening opened with a bang in the edge of it,…

If you’re friends with Lucy Riner on Facebook, then you’ve heard about this show. With Riner and co-Artistic Director Michael Estanich at the helm, RE|Dance is taking an “all-in” approach in preparing for its five-year anniversary next weekend at the Ruth Page Center for the Performing Arts.  With the help of a MetLife New Stages for Dance grant, The Long and Forgotten…

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…

Lots of auditions. Lots and lots of auditions. Ok, so it’s possible that my choice for waiting out the Chiberia polar vortex was to watch old reruns of the X-Files on Hulu…. but whether or not you picked up on the reference from Paper Clip, the beginning of every new year generally brings with it a plethora of auditions for…

Happy National Dance Week! I have a big week planned on the blog in celebration of National Dance Week and the close of Chicago Dance Month.  A few weeks ago I asked readers to tell me who your favorite dancer teachers are and why, and I was awesomely surprised to receive nearly 150 nominations!  Of those, the seven teachers who…