Chicago Dance Breezes Into June

May 30, 2018 | By Lynn Colburn Shapiro

Chicago Dance breezes into June with summer fare for everyone, with lots of don’t miss events, from the avant garde  Pivot Arts Festival (June 3-10) to a free performance of Chicago’s top percussive dance companies in The Grand Finale of Stomping Grounds at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavillion (June 7). Hubbard Street’s Season 40 concludes with a full-length evening of Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16” at the Harris (June 7-10). Giordano Dance Chicago blasts into the Auditorium Theatre for one night of explosive jazz dance (June 9); Hyde Park School of Dance’s “Amira: A Chicago Cinderella Story,” highlights the modern immigrant experience at the Reva and David Logan Center (June 15-17), and Ensemble Español celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jose Greco at Skokie’s North Shore Center for the Performing Arts (June 15-17). The Seldoms’ acclaimed “Marchland” returns to Chicago with performances at Links Hall (June 21-30), and Chicago Tap Theatre caps off Gay Pride month with a tap extravaganza at the Athenaeum Theatre (June 29). Check out these and other exciting performances below.

 

DANCEWORKS CHICAGO is excited to partner with the Lou Conte Dance Studio on DanceChance, (7 PM, JUNE 1 and June 29, LOU CONTE STUDIO) a one-hour event designed to offer opportunities for choreographers to show their work informally, create a forum for dialogue among artists, and build audience for dance. Inspired by the concept of open-mic night, DanceChance is held once a month and features 3 choreographers chosen by chance, each of whom has a 15-minute time slot to share their work. To round out the hour, the final 15-minute segment is a moderated meet-the-artist session providing an opportunity for choreographers to discuss their work and process as well as time for the audience to ask questions. At the end of each DanceChance, the next trio of participants is chosen from names submitted by choreographers in attendance.

 

Celebrate the opening of the 2018 PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL (8 PM, JUNE 1, FLATSstudio) at a night that pops with food, drink + eclectic pop up performances throughout the evening. We’re bringing you a little bit of everything in the arts: live music, eclectic performance, dance and a DJ, and a visual art exhibition curated by FLATSstudio, too! Pop-up performances curated by Katy Collins, Olivia Lilley, and yours truly, Pivot Arts include: Chicago Fringe Opera with BraveSoul Movement (One of Newcity’s 50 People Who Really Perform for Chicago) performing part of their hip hop dance concert The Rossini Project, Cassie Bowers offering one-on-one tarot card readings in Arcana Obscura, song artist Nire Nah‘s live music, Nico Rubio and more to be announced!

 

SOUTH PACIFIC (JUNE 1-17, DRURY LANE THEATRE), more timely than ever, this Rodgers & Hammerstein landmark musical proves that even the backdrop of a tropical paradise cannot shelter its residents from the prejudices of World War II. South Pacific is the winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

 

Trifecta Dance Collective TRIFECTA DANCE COLLECTIVE presents “Solstice,” (6 PM, JUNE 2, VITTUM THEATER) with Nomi Dance Company and VADCO/Valerie Alpert Dance Company.

 

ALMA DANCE THEATER will present its 3rd annual Simply Classic Series (McANINCH ARTS CENTER (MAC) in Glen Ellyn, Saturday, June 2, 7:00 p.m.)  This production includes excerpts from Majisimo, Peasant Pas de Quatre from Giselle and a Suite of Le Corsaire and will feature internationally renowned guest artists. This year, Alma Dance Theater is happy to partner with DuPage Children’s Museum to give local children the opportunity to participate in its professional production. Featured guest artists include Amaya Rodriguez, Humberto Rivera Blanco, and Javier Omar Morales Barrios, former principal dancers with the Cuban National Ballet and currently dancing with the Kansas City Ballet; Dayneliz Muñoz, and Jose Lozada, both are former principal dancers with the Cuban National Ballet; and Elivelton Tomazi currently dancing with The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Students from the prestigious Alma Dance School will make appearances in the production and share the stage with professionals.

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL: THE NEW PRAIRIE SCHOOL AT THE COLVIN HOUSE (7 PM, JUNE 2 AND 3, CREATIVE CO-WORKING/COLVIN HOUSE) is equal parts architectural tour, immersive theater, and musical performance, inviting audience members on a fantastical journey through an historic Sheridan Road Mansion. Guides sing, speak, gesticulate, and gyrate their way through the Colvin House. Along the way, their strange and beautiful performance becomes a reclaiming of Midwestern radicalism, a love song to the people and the buildings of Chicago.

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL: You’re His Child (9 PM, JUNE 2; 7 PM, JUNE 3, CHICAGO FILMMAKERS)is a heartfelt exploration of religion, family, and song. Through live music, sound, and her performative interaction with archival recordings, actor Emmy Bean engages the history of her great-grandfather—a kitchen-table hymn singer from rural Missouri—telling stories about family and music through his voice and her own.

Opening for Emmy Bean’s You’re His Child, Vanessa Valliere performs The Life and Times of Terry, a multimedia journey through romance, parenthood, and success. Valliere tells the tale of one woman’s search for love, and the hilarity that ensues, through clowning, puppetry, audience participation, drawings, photos, and projections.

Bean’s performance begins immediately following Valliere’s 15 minute opener.

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL:BROAD NIGHT-DEMYSTIFYING WOMEN’S HEALTH (7:30 PM, JUNE 4, CHICAGO FILMMAKERS) kicks off with a showing from This Boat Called My Body, a play inspired by stories from adolescents seeking abortions, and a preview of the web series The Doula Is In. Following, there will be a discussion about abortion access for youth and the impact of parental consent laws in Illinois with the artists and Melissa Widen, Board Chair of Personal PAC. Katy Collins, both doula and performer, will field questions about pregnancy and women’s health.

This Boat Called My Body draws on stories the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health has collected from youth across the state about their abortion experiences. A full-length, site-specific piece replete with spectacle, movement, opera, and interaction with water, the play asks tough questions. What are the troubled waters that young women navigate when seeking abortions? And, conversely, who and what helps sail them to safety?

 

Moving Dialogs Culture In Motion The third installment of Moving Dialogs: Culture in Motion is a collaboration between the Indo-American Heritage Museum and Synapse Arts. (6 PM, JUNE 5, THE FIELD MUSEUM). This closing event for Moving Dialogs features Rachel Damon choreography. Attendees will experience a live performance taking place in front of the museum’s Maori Meeting House, with choreography rooted in Damon’s OpenWork technique, where landscapes are formed by dancers using their limbs as knitting needles to create floor-to-ceiling textiles. The technique reimagines knitting and crochet as kinetic art forms that create concrete traces of the body's motion, exploring how movement and needlecraft can influence each other. For this event, Damon and the Synapse Arts dancers use historical and contemporary textiles from the Indo-American Heritage Museum as a source for the movement and patterns, creating a new context for interpretation and space for cultural dialogue.

 

 

STOMPING GROUNDS GRAND FINALE (7 PM, JUNE 7, PRITZKER PAVILLION AT MILLENNIUM PARK) features all seven percussive dance companies in a free performance. Sponsored by the Chicago Human Rhythm Project.Stomping grounds Completing its fourth year, STOMPING GROUNDS GRAND FINALE (7 PM, JUNE 7, PRITZKER PAVILLION AT MILLENNIUM PARK) is the culmination of a free, two-month citywide celebration of authentic, rhythmic dance companies from a variety of world cultures, including American tap, Spanish, Mexican, African, Indian, Native American, Urban Hip Hop, and Irish dance. The Grand Finale will feature ALL the dance companies that have appeared in the various neighborhood performances:

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL: WHAT’S NEXT-ANNA MARTINE WHITEHEAD/SHANNON STEWART AND AURORA NEALAND preview of works-in-progress from their Performing Arts Incubator Program (7 PM, JUNE 7, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY). The Incubator Program provides artists with the necessary time and space to develop work that blurs the boundaries between music, dance, theater, and other arts. Choreographer and dancer Anna Martine Whitehead premieres Notes On Territory, a transdisciplinary movement piece framed in the guise of a PowerPoint presentation on the history of containment architecture—prison, fort, public housing, and cathedral architecture. Beyond movement, her work uses video, sound, and lighting to create a 4D installation space housing the lectern of the dancing body. Central to Territory is a sense of language-play and translation. Transposing gothic cathedral and colonial fort architecture onto heartland American modernist buildings and prisons, it endeavors to expose the global, colonial, and imperial nature of these structures through intended and unintended mistranslation.

New Orleans-based artists Shannon Stewart (choreographer/dancer) and Aurora Nealand (composer/musician) present Hysteria and the Body Electric. A movement opera, Hysteria focuses thematically on the concepts (and realities) of gendered movement, gendered sound, and media messaging in contemporary American culture. Together, they explore how popular media (television, news, social media) portray and affect our ideas of intimacy, vulnerability and identities.  An established bandleader, composer, performer and improviser, Aurora Nealand is a prominent force in the New Orleans music scene. She is most recognized for her performance on saxophones, clarinet and vocals and has been at the forefront of the revival of New Orleans Traditional Jazz amongst the younger generation of the city’s musicians. Nealand was voted one of Downbeat Magazine’s top ten rising stars for soprano saxophone in 2010.

Shannon Stewart has for many years focused her work on the performativity of race and gender, mingling queer theory and sexuality studies with modes of training that make the physical body a site of research and possible intervention. Both Stewart and Nealand are interested in the intersections of sound and movement to create familiar gendered images and gestures that can be subverted, examined, and recontextualized.Shannon Stewart

 

HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO presents Season 40 Summer Season (JUNE 7, 7:30 PM; JUNE 8, 6 PM; JUNE 9, 8 PM; JUNE 10, 3 PM; HARRIS THEATER). Hubbard Street concludes Season 40 with a full evening-length work reimagining Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16, one of his most popular and most celebrated pieces, choreographed in 1999 and first performed in the U.S. by Hubbard Street in 2000.Hubbard Street

 

CONCERT DANCE INC (7:30 PM, June 7-8, Ravinia). Regularly commissioned by Ravinia to present new works, the CDI performance marks the return of the 2015 commissioned piece Fly Me to the Moon. As well as, the return of last year’s world premiere: Artistic Director Venetia Stifler’s critically-acclaimed full-length work originally created in 1985 but reimagined for the 21st century, The Chicago Project: Future Present. This year’s audience will be privy to the development of Stifler’s newest work in progress, Words with Music & Dance, commissioned by the Poetry Foundation. 

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL: RUDE MECHS PRESENT NOT EVERY MOUNTAIN (7:30 PM, JUNE 8-9, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY’S MUNDELEIN CENTER). (Austin, TX) has performed in major venues throughout the country. This is their Chicago premiere. Since 1996, the Rude Mechs theatre collective has created a genre-averse slate of 26 theatrical productions that represent a cocktail of big ideas, cheap laughs, and dizzying spectacle. What these works hold in common is the use of play to make performance, the use of theaters as meeting places for audiences and artists, and the use of humor as tool for intellectual investigation.

Not Every Mountain is a mellow meditation on change, permanence, and our place in the natural world. In this piece, Rude Mechs gathers to build a mountain using pulleys, cranks, magnets and string. With original landscapes designed by Thomas Graves, original soundscapes and music by Peter Stopschinski, and a meditative litany by Kirk Lynn, Not Every Mountain is a presentation of the life cycle of mountains and the processes by which they are born and eventually laid to rest, an invocation of tectonic force and geologic time.

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL: THE?UNICORN? HOUR? (9 PM, JUNE 8-9, BAR 63) is inspired by childhood favorites Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Pee-wee’s Playhouse, The? Unicorn? Hour? is a creative experiment in which Team Awesome—creators Leah Urzendowski and Anthony Courser —invite you into a magical atmosphere of unrestrained joy and playfulness. Delight in absurd choices and pass through the looking glass to a world in which we choose to eliminate self-doubt and say “yes” to an unbridled uplifting of the spirit.The? Unicorn? Hour?

 

GIORDANO DANCE CHICAGO (7:30 PM, JUNE 9TH, AUDITORIUM THEATRE) closes out its 55th season with its fourth full-evening appearance at the Auditorium Theatre. Led by Nan Giordano, celebrating 33 years of leadership and her 25th year as Artistic Director, the company brings its “high-octane energy” (Chicago Sun-Times) to the stage with pieces including company founder Gus Giordano’s Giordano Moves and Wings (which features live music by the Bournés), Ray Mercer's Tossed Around, Ray Leeper’s Feelin’ Good Sweet, Christopher Huggins’ Pyrokinesis, and Joshua Blake Carter’s new work Take A Gambol.Giordano Dance Chicago

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL: ICE CREAM AND IMPROV 2018 (11 AM, JUNE 10, LICKITY SPLIT CUSTARD AND SWEETS). Start your day off on the right foot with Ice Cream and Improv! Bring the kids! Marking the final day of the Pivot Arts Festival, Storytown Improv—asks kids to design the setting and help shape the story—with delicious custard and sweets for purchase at Lickity Split.

 

PIVOT ARTS FESTIVAL: WHAT’S NEXT-GINGER KREBS/CHICAGO FRINGE OPERA (7:30 PM, JUNE 10, PARISH HOUSE, 1244 THORNDALE AVE., CHICAGO) closes with two additional showings from its Performing Arts Incubator Program at Loyola University: Ginger Krebs Performance Project and Chicago Fringe Opera. The Incubator Program provides artists with the necessary time and space to develop work that blurs the boundaries between music, dance, theater, and other arts.

Chicago Fringe Opera with BraveSoul Movement presents The Rossini Project Chicago Fringe Opera—called “the city’s alt-opera company” by the Chicago Tribune—is dedicated to producing artistically excellent and innovative productions of operatic works written in English that stimulate, engage, and empower a diverse community of artists and audiences alike. CFO is developing a new show, The Rossini Project, adapting the music and story of Gioachino Rossini’s classic opera The Barber of Seville and transforming it into a hip hop dance party. The project features live opera singers, MCs, DJs, and breakdancers. Ginger Krebs Performance Project presents Escapes and Reversals. Escapes and Reversals revels in the heroic efforts people make each day just to keep going. It considers exertion by tangible, striving bodies, compared to the apparent ease of digital bodies moving on screens and in advertisements.Ginger Krebs

 

Hyde Park School of Dance marks its 25th anniversary this year with the world premiere of AMIRA: A CHICAGO CINDERELLA STORY (7 PM, JUNE 15; 1 PM AND 6 PM, JUNE 16; 2 PM, JUNE 17; REVA AND DAVID LOGAN CENTER FOR THE ARTS). A magical, modern twist on the classic Cinderella story-ballet with Prokofiev's beloved score, this adaptation, set in the neighborhood of Hyde Park, tells the tale of a teenage immigrant coming of age as she comes to terms with life in a new country, sampling all it has to offer even as she grapples with all she has left behind. Join Amira as she adjusts to her new school, explores the city, and discovers for herself that for all our differences, some human experiences are shared the world over. This 75-minute-long family-friendly production, choreographed and directed by Lyric Opera ballet mistress August Tye, features a cast of predominantly youth dancers aged 7 to 18. A Chicago Cinderella Story

 

The elegance and passion of Spain’s dance, music and culture is showcased by ENSEMBLE ESPAÑOL SPANISH DANCE THEATER’S  annual American Spanish Dance & Music Festival (7:30 PM, JUNE 15-16; 3 PM, JUNE 17, NORTH SHORE CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, SKOKIE). The Festival kicks off with three crowd-pleasing “Flamenco Passion” live music and dance performances which include a tribute to Jose Greco’s 100th birthday anniversary with performances by Mr. Greco’s children, Carmela, Jose and Lola Greco. This tribute is directed by Juan Mata, founding member of the National Ballet of Spain and former dancer with the Jose Greco Spanish Dance Company. Mr. Jose Greco was Dame Libby’s first Spanish dance teacher, director and mentor. The concerts will open with the world premiere ballet by Carlos Rodriguez, “Mar de Fuego (Sea of Fire)” honoring Dame Libby in the Flamenco contemporary style. The Ensemble Español’s critically acclaimed “Bolero” will close each concert.  The New York Times observed how Bolero, choreographed by Dame Libby  “wowed the audience…amazing,” in its review of Ensemble Español’s January 2018 performances at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan . “Bolero” marks its 25th anniversary this year. Guest musicians for this year’s festival include Flamenco singer Paco Fonta, guitarists, Antonio Gabarri Jimenez and Marija Temo and percussionist, Javier Saume Mazzei.Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater

 

KHEKARI’S THE RETREAT: ONE WEEK (JUNE 18-24, THE GLASS FACTORY, PILSEN) will run continuously for 168 hours, fostering a  quality of attention like wilderness wandering: expansive and still, full of unexpected discovery, engendering retrospection. Like the wilderness, The Retreat is ongoing, preexisting your visit and remaining after you leave. You can visit for the evening, linger for a day, or camp out for the week.

The Retreat is a world of fabric and light, sound and movement. It is dance performance and music concert. It is shared meals and participatory meditative movement practice. It is art sleep-overs and curated conversation. Sprawling and minute, mesmerizingly repetitive and chaotically unpredictable, it functions as a retreat, offering deep engagement and a state of beneficial boredom, positioning this often-suppressed form of attention as radical engagement with time and self.

 

THE SELDOMS’ MARCHLAND (7 PM, JUNE 21-30, LINKS HALL) Enter the border zones of Marchland, a full-length dance where bodies and images vie for contested territory. In this dense terrain - formed by a kinetic film and live, percussive soundscore - highly charged action bursts forward. Featuring performance by ensemble members Sarah Gonsiorowski, Damon Green, Matthew McMunn, Cara Sabin, Hannah Santistevan and guest artist Paige Caldarella, and Chicago musicians Tim Daisy, Phillip Sudderberg, and Alex Inglizian.Marchland

 

TANGO 21 DANCE THEATER’S EL TANGO CAFE (8 PM JUNE 22-24, THE EDGE THEATER) tells the story of one man’s love affair with tango after stumbling into a beautiful tango café filled with friendship, love and heartbreak. The show is based on real-life events at Ritz Tango Café – the tango café run by our founder, Jorge Niedas, from 2006 to 2010. For audiences new to tango, this is a fantastic ‘gateway’ show, providing a unique opportunity to learn about authentic Argentine tango.El Tango Café

 

NEW DANCES 2018 (6 and 7:30 PM, June 29; 5 PM, JULY 1, RUTH PAGE CNTER FOR THE ARTS) is the first ever collaboration between Thodos Dance Chicago and DanceWorks Chicago. The NEW Dances 2018 selected company performs works by Shannon Alvis, Braeden Barnes, Katlin Michael Bourgeois, Chris Johnson, J'Sun Howard, and Anna Long.

 

CHICAGO TAP THEATRE’s “TAPPED FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME,” (7:30 PM, JUNE 29, ATHENAEUM THEATRE) coincides with the end of Pride month and is a celebration of divas and their music that have inspired all of us to dance for decades, including Patti Labelle, Whitney Houston, Madonna and others. Tapped for the Very First Time is hosted by the incomparable Mattrick Swayze and has performances with all new arrangements and live music by the JC Brooks Band and features special appearances by  the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus. Doors will open at 7 p.m., and the running time is two hours with one fifteen minute intermission.Mattrick Swayze with Chicago Tap Theatre

 

For further details, directions, and to purchase tickets, go to SeeChicagoDance.com, and click on “See Dance.”