The Dance Center Presents
What Is Contemporary? Symposium
Wednesday, October 15, 2025 - MOMENT + MOVEMENT Performance Showcase at 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, October 16, 2025 - Sessions from 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Symposium Pass is $40 and includes access to the performance and all sessions.
Tickets: MOMENT + MOVEMENT Performance Showcase ticket is $15.
Symposium Session registration is $10.
Co-curated by Keesha Beckford and Dardi McGinley Gallivan
Dance technique, a foundational specificity that is able to be repeated, is a form of entrainment - making something part of a flow and carrying it along. It is the source of all codified dances and how all codified dances are created and embodied. Anything that flows or carries forward is naturally susceptible to adaptation, alteration, evolution. Contemporary is the continuously adapting, altering, evolving expression of dance’s codified forms…or is it?
Is contemporary dance more of a how than a what? Is it open and available to more styles, techniques and points of view, to visual, aural, aesthetic conflation? Is it about being relevant in the moment and the movement? Is contemporary synonymous with innovative or radical? Should it be?
Through performances by acclaimed Chicago companies and artists and sessions selected from an international call, let’s discover and uncover together what is contemporary in dance.
Learn more about the background of the symposium.
View the full symposium program.
MOMENT + MOVEMENT Performance Showcase
Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater
Visceral Dance Chicago
Zachary Nicol
Wednesday, October 15, 7:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Evening Showcase Tickets ($15 General Admission)
Full Symposium Pass (Sessions and Showcase, both Thursday and Friday, $40)
Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater, celebrating its 50th anniversary, presents three works: No Me Olvides / Do Not Forget Me (Romeras) and Viva Sevilla (Sevillanas) both by Irma Suarez Ruiz and performed by Katrina Bartels, Catherine Beza, Maria Lujan, Jocelyn Leving, Juan Carlos Castellon, and Matt Jalac as well as Volverme Raíz (Tientos por Tangos) choreographed and performed by María Lujan.
Visceral Dance Chicago presents Pearl choreographed by Nick Pupillo and performed by Justin Bisnauthsing, Nia Davis, Alessandra De Paolantonio, Minylan Echols, Diego Gonzales, Aden Hurst, Da’Rius Malone, Kaliana Medlock, Laura Mendes, Luella Nandra, and Erika Shi.
Zach Nicol premieres his solo in counter.
Ensemble Español.
SYMPOSIUM SESSIONS
Thursday, October 16, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Sessions held in the Dance Center Theater unless otherwise noted.
Full Symposium Pass (Sessions and Showcase, $40)
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The opening session pairs Nejla Yatkin’s embodied workshop drawing upon patterns in nature and Middle Eastern dance traditions to explore contemporary movement creation alongside Michael Landez’s research into the rehearsal process as a re-viving technology that suggests any dance can be contemporary, including the re-staging of historical ballets.
What is Contemporary Dance, and How Might It Guide Us Back to Nature? | Nejla Yatkin – embodied workshop
Rehearsing the contemporary: from history to now and back again | Michael Landez (Northwestern University) – paper presentation
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This session explores contemporary modes of embodied research. Timothy Tsang’s participatory approach invites movers of all backgrounds to explore waves, circles, and spirals as both technical pathways and cultural metaphors through his porous, transnational practice shaped by cultural lineage, adaptation, and exchange. At the intersection of lens media and performance, bree gant shares their inquiries and methodology rooted in American Modern Dance pioneer Katherine Dunham technique and pedagogy, to articulate how filmmaking is a uniquely suited methodology for researching embodied knowledge.
Spirals of Cultural Mobility: Contemporary Dance as Cultural Exchange | Timothy Tsang (University of Michigan) – embodied workshop
Negotiation: Theorizing Embodied Knowledge Through a Black Feminist Lens | bree gant – screening and discussion
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Giulia Cristofoli presents her research on how a mentality of accessibility and creative access opens new doors to think of choreography differently through the concept of “crip time.” As described by scholar Ellen Samuels, crip time “requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world” from “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017).
Contemporary dance aesthetics within crip time framework: a dramaturge’s perspective | Giulia Cristofoli – paper presentation
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(note: Session 4 and Session 5 are concurrent
Interdisciplinary artists Maya Odim and Jasmine Hearn’s paired session combines writing with dancing and connecting sensorial experience to memory and imagination. For Odim, dance is a language and the body is the context. For Hearn, dance is a map of the people, places, recipes, and patterns that her multi-year project references.
Body Language | Maya Odim - workshop
Memory Fleet: All of them | Jasmine Hearn – lecture/demonstration
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note: Session 5 is concurrent with Session 4.
This session centers dance and movement experiences that are rooted in one’s own unique environment. Elizabeth Shea’s approach readies the bodymind to receive information, awaken feeling and kinetic empathy, to explore the wide range of movement possibilities available to 21st Century movers. Maggie Bridger and Deborah Goodman’s research on 20th Century American Modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, reframes Humphrey’s experiences of pain as essential to the development of her technique.
Centering Lived Experiences: A Somatic Approach to Contemporary Dance and Movement Practice | Elizabeth Shea (University of Indiana) – embodied workshop
Recovering Doris Humphrey: Disability as Method in Dance History & Technique | Maggie Bridger (University of Illinois-Chicago) + Deborah Goodman (Loyola University) – paper presentation
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Dr. Ayo Walker’s paper delves into common misconceptions about contemporary dance styles that loosely imitate street dance and the mindful necessity of properly crediting contemporary dance. Oftentimes acting as a “catch all” category, contemporary dance assumes ownership of any/all styles of dance rather than as an approach to making something new by repurposing what already exists. Marquita De Jesus investigates how movement practices outside of codified technique function as vital spaces of resistance, cultural transmission, and choreographic innovation within contemporary dance. Her embodied inquiry invites us to reconsider contemporary dance not as a fixed genre, but as an evolving space where difference, vulnerability, and disruption can generate new movement languages and possibilities for the future.
Understanding the Misinterpretation of Contemporary Dance Styles as Street Dance | Dr. Ayo Walker (Columbia College Chicago + Rennie Harris University) – paper presentation
Non-Technical Movement Vocabularies, Innovation, and Embodied Resistance | Marquita De Jesus (University of Texas at Dallas) – embodied workshop
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The closing session examines evolving and emerging dance ecosystems. Kate Mattingly shares her research on the 20th Century interdependencies of universities and modern and postmodern dance companies and how might the term “contemporary” in university settings today signal a desire to move toward nuanced approaches to dance as a site of knowledge production? Reflecting how many artists choose to work today by creating space to connect across disciplines, share lived experiences, and imagine new possibilities together in real-time, dance artists Marie Casimir and Cristal Sabbagh, in collaboration with musician Joyce Lindsey, invite participants into the embodied, improvisational practices that have fueled their work curating and sustaining community-centered platforms for contemporary improvisation, including the Instigation Festival (Chicago/New Orleans) and Freedom From and Freedom To (Chicago).
Why labels matter: Interdependencies of universities and dance companies | Kate Mattingly (Old Dominion University)
Improvising Community: Building Ecosystems for Contemporary, Multidisciplinary Collaboration | Marie Casimir + Cristal Sabbagh + Joyce Lindsey – embodied workshop and lecture/demonstration
Support
Banner image from When They See Us by Dr. Ayo Walker, pictured: Tiffany Parkerson, Breslin Webb, and Danetra Thomas, photo by Julie Lucas for Columbia College Chicago
