“Both performers bring whip-smart wits and vulnerability to their work; come to laugh, cry, and laugh until you cry. ”
The Chicago Reader picks the Dance Center’s Chicago Solo Spotlight Festival in its Winter season theater preview highlighting “brilliant Chicago-based artists Jenn ‘Po’Chop’ Freeman and Nora Sharp.”
Irene Hsiao continues: “In THICK: a crumbling freak show, Freeman uses movement, spoken word, and projections to consider the embodied lives of Black women in show business. ‘The piece started with myself and my relationship to my body,’ says Freeman, who has worked for 15 years in burlesque and drag performance. ‘I began trying to track the history of other Black women and femmes who navigated the realm of entertainment, whose bodies were a source of livelihood, and thinking about how they found agency.’
Sharp’s Cosmic Docks uses a sci-fi lens to explore queerness, transness, and personal history. ‘On one level, Cosmic Docks is a piece about the slow unraveling of queer and trans identity formation. But it’s also about the fundamental heartache of trying to make sense of ourselves and our purpose in a deeply flawed world and the alternating disappointment and hope offered by our connection to each other,’ says Sharp, whose work spans dance, comedy, film, and community facilitation. Both performers bring whip-smart wits and vulnerability to their work; come to laugh, cry, and laugh until you cry.”
Read all of Hsaio and her colleague’s picks for the Chicago Reader, including the premiere of Erin Kilmurray and Kara Brody’s Knockout (which appeared in last year’s Chicago Spotlight Festival!) as part of Steppenwolf’s Lookout Series.
