I’m proud of all the work we presented as part of the Dance Presenting Series in 2019: Plexus Polaire with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Spectrum Dance Theater, Ananya Dance Theatre, Urban Bush Women, our 45th Anniversary Performance Celebration, Emily Johnson / Catalyst, d. Sabela grimes, Pol Pi and Noe Soulier as part of the Between Gestures festival, and Natya Dance Theater. I’m also proud and impressed with the student work that unfolds on the Dance Center stage. It’s remarkable to work in a place that hosts such a wide variety of dance work, from students making their first piece to established artists who have been celebrated for decades.

Members of our Dance Center community also see and support dance all over Chicago and beyond, and we wanted to highlight some of the performances from 2019 that have stayed with us.

When I think about the performances that are still resonating in my own internal landscape, I find a common thread of repair. Jenn Freeman’s The People’s Church of the G.H.E.T.T.O., Joanna Furnans’ Doing Fine, Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal, and Miguel Gutierrez’ Sadonna, all brought up a strong desire to yell YES! These performances put something into alignment for me, fixed something that was broken, and I’m grateful to the artists for their work and grateful that I got to see it.

We hope that you’ll join us for memorable, moving, remarkable dance performances in 2020!

--Ellen Chenoweth, Dance Presenting Series director

Aaliyah Christina, On the Ground writer:

1. Keyierra Collins + Jovan Landry — Clara Lucille: In Crossing
2. The Fly Honey Show X (!!!!!!!!!)
3. J’Sun Howard — A moratorium
4. HaitiDansCo
5. The Era Footwork Crew — In the Wurkz

Margi Cole, Dance Presenting Series staff:

Joffrey Ballet’s Jane Eyre, choreography by Jane Marston
It simply surprised me. It pushed the general norms of ballet in its characters, structure and movement vocabulary. It really stretched the dancers out of their comfort zone and they really rose to the occasion.

Mary Coyne, On the Ground writer:

Stephen Petronio Company
Tread (Merce Cunningham, 1970)
Performed at the NYU Skirball Center April 12, 2019
Originally choreographed at arguably the height of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s creative output (1946-2008), Tread has long been on my wish list to see live. Humorous, dynamic, athletic, and remarkably contemporary, the dance for 10 company members is performed upstage of a row of violently whirring commercial fans, a stage décor contribution by artist Bruce Nauman. Attended only a few weeks after seeing Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts exhibition at MoMA, the artist’s unique ability to create physical discomfort was delightfully on display.

Jyl Fehrenkamp, Dance Presenting Series staff:

My favorite performance of 2019 was the Grelle DuVall Show, performed both at the Hideout and Theater on the Lake. Written and created by Alex Grelle, directed by Mary Williamson and musical direction by John Cicora, with choreography by Zac Whittenburg, Kasey Alfonso and me! Alex has a uniquely brilliant way of mashing up and remixing iconic moments in cinema to create an absurd and awesome theatrical journey through dance, disco and fake blood. Grelle both hosts and stars in the show as an arc of unforgettable characters and belts out a soundtrack of power ballads and punk anthems. Grelle is supported throughout by an ensemble of wonderfully talented weirdos, video interludes, and an occasional creepy puppet.

Joanna Furnans, On the Ground writer:

Search Party by Erin Kilmurray and collaborators
and also these:
STATE by Ingri Fiksdal & Jonas Corell Peterson
By Way of Taps: A J Dilla Tribute by Nico Rubio
Chississippi Mixtape by Ayesha Jaco / Move Me Soul

Brianna Heath, On the Ground writer:

PoChop/Jenn Freeman’s The People’s Church of the G.H.E.T.T.O.
d. Sabela grimes Electrogynous

Alyssa Gregory, Dance Presenting Series staff:

Urban Bush Women – Hair and Other Stories @ The Dance Center
Michelle Boule solo work @ Links Hall
Lucky Plush - Rink Life @ Steppenwolf Theatre
The Era- In The Wurkz
Freeway Dance – Ayaka Nakama—Bridge Dance Festival @ Links Hall

Jane Jerardi, Dance Center staff:

Precious Jennings in Approach 9 (Echo Project) by Nana Shineflug, March 2019
Precious made simple things seem so elegant and authentic - and there was an extra poignance to remembering this amazing figure in the Chicago dance scene and a mentor/mentee dancing a past work being transmitted.
J’Sun Howard’s aMoratorium: At the Altar, May Not Be My Time - with Orlando de Leon, Jr. and Solomon Bowser and lighting design by Jacob Snodgrass at the Dance Center - just beautiful and haunting.
Mitsu Salmon at Hairpin Art Center
Chicago Obihiro Exchange with Asian Arts Improv Midwest, June 2019
Is it dance, is it theater, is it stand-up, is it improv? do we care? - so funny and amazing. Made me think of Laurie Anderson how she’s able to take you along and make sense of nonsensical things paired together…but maybe even better? plus - singing!
Anna Martine Whitehead’s Notes on Territory at the Green Line Performing Arts Center
an incredible meditation on the uneasy and constant tension between fugitive and freed for African-Americans
and then three festivals:
Goat Island’s whole festival/exhibition/retrospective: “We have discovered the performance by making it” especially performances by BADCo. (and their in progress version at Links Hall - even better!), Jefferson Pinder, and Robert Walton
Between Gestures festival
Alexandra Bachzetsis at the Art Institute
Made me think of the differences between the pornographic and the erotic and how often we confuse the two.
Pol Pi at the Dance Center
Took appropriation to the next level - appropriating a modern German expressionist dancer, who clearly appropriated, and appropriating a different gender in multiple ways - maybe we’re all just appropriating all of the time - in the best possible way.
In Time Festival
Ingri Fiksdal at the Cloud Gate sculpture
Snowy and beautiful – plus it was for everyone and anyone that stumbled onto it!

Darrell Jones, Dance Center faculty:

I would say Emily Johnson’s Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars. A once in a lifetime performance event.

Jordan Kunkel, On the Ground writer:

I picked Honey Pot Performance’s ways of knowing for its integration of movement, media, and an extended dialogue that involved communities across Chicago. Ending with a meal onstage was a meaningful way to continue this discourse of how we evaluate and value knowledge—particularly knowledge rooted in the body.

Raquel Monroe, Dance Center faculty and On the Ground writer:

Fly Honeys
Project Tool (Onye Ozuzu)
aMoratorium (J’Sun Howard)
Clara Lucille: a crossing (Keyierra Collins)

Nia Odum, Dance Center student:

I would like to offer Emily Johnson’s Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars.

photo by William Frederking of Ginger Krebs’ Escapes and Reversals

Zachary Whittenburg, On the Ground writer:

Ginger Krebs and collaborators, Escapes & Reversals
March 7–9, 2019 at Unity Lutheran Church
Part of the 2019 IN > TIME Performance Festival
Krebs is, full disclosure, a friend and neighbor of mine but still, trust me when I say that her work is unlike anything else happening in Chicago. A multidisciplinary artist who hops between choreography and visual art, Krebs brings tenderly human qualities to the small items she assembles — from a wild variety of everyday objects in disguise — and a sculptural density to her site-specific dances, typically performed by motley crews. Escapes & Reversals extended years-long threads of inquiry in her work, reflecting our half-virtual lives in ways that felt eerily familiar and hilariously sad.
Matty Davis, Eryka Dellenbach, Bryan Saner, and Sara Zalek, wood bone mill
July 13, 2019 at Saner’s home in Ravenswood
Following four initial iterations set during the four seasons of 2017–18, Chicagoans were treated to an expanded version of wood bone mill upon the release of a book chronicling the project. Perhaps the first contemporary performance set almost entirely within the branches of a mulberry tree, wood bone mill somehow unearths commonalities between poetic spirituality and feats of derring-do. Its multigenerational cast — including, this past summer, seasoned performers Dellenbach and Zalek — risked life and limb to execute the work, made even more complex by incorporating rope bridges and ladders made by Tokyo’s Atelier Bow-Wow for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Ida Cuttler and collaborators, Comfortable Shoes
October 7–November 16 at The Neo-Futurarium
Technically a theater piece, devised within parameters set by The Neo-Futurists, Comfortable Shoes was nonetheless fundamentally, relentlessly physical. The show’s creator-star Ida Cuttler, also a member of Barrel of Monkeys, mashed up source material including the story of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Wendy Davis’s 2013 filibuster of an abortion bill in the Texas state senate during a marathon monologue delivered while dancing and (literally) climbing the walls. Its feminist perspective notably didn’t rely on a binary understanding of gender, which felt quietly, nonchalantly miraculous.
avery r. young and Dorothée Munyaneza, Poetry Off the Shelf: neck | bone
October 30, 2019 at The Poetry Foundation
Part of the Between Gestures festival
Reworking a site-specific performance initially developed at Ragdale Foundation, I believe, Chicago-based musician-and-more young and British-Rwandan artist Munyaneza subverted all expectations in a movement-centered preamble to their conversation about young’s new book of “visual verses,” which explore the life and legend of jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. While pages from neck | bone — built up from layers of handwriting and collage, like geological samples — were projected onto a screen, the two artists appeared and disappeared among the margins, negative spaces, and double walls of architect John Ronan’s award-winning building.
Sasha Velour, Smoke & Mirrors
November 3, 2019 at the Vic Theatre
The winner of season nine of RuPaul’s Drag Race grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, making their drag debut years ago at its Chester Street Bar, a.k.a. “C-Street.” Now an innovative, international superstar, Sasha Velour spent this fall on a 24-city North American tour; a 17-city European tour kicks off in March 2020. Like many drag performers, Velour leans heavily on movement and gesture to cement their illusions but, unlike those who execute lightning-fast, arena-show choreography à la Ciara, Velour cuts more from the cloth of Old Hollywood sequences, taking sweet time to set up pins before knocking them down with knockout senses of humor and style.

photo by Joe Mazza / BraveLux Photography of the Neo-Futurists