Sixty Inches from Center’s Rachel Lindsay examines the empowering culture and tension emerging from the long developing collaborative dance piece, Knockout, by Erin Killmurray and Kara Brody, which premiered as part of our Chicago Artist Spotlight Festival in the Spring of 2024.
In my renaissance, my unveiling, my redefining, taking-back, coming-out, self-discovery, mid-life crisis (if I only live to 70), who-knows-what-this-is era—I showed up one Friday to a dance piece that I didn’t know would leave me spinning for months after. There was a connection in the feeling I had leaving the theater to a feeling I had after a recent gynecology appointment: one of agency, autonomy over my body, my personhood, my voice, my health, and my pleasure. I left the theater wide-eyed, head full, empowered, and hot at hell. Why was the piece so hot, why was it so empowering, why did I walk the long way to the train after—I know why: it was the continued pulse of Erin Kilmurray and Kara Brody’s Knockout. I felt too alive, breathing in the night air of downtown, feeling the shoreline pulling me, the breeze of the lake, and the tall buildings that made my short body grow with confidence. I felt so alive I wanted to celebrate, so I bought a large sparkly water. The money-green San Pellegrino bottle in my hand: I could drop it in an instant, its glass would shatter on the cement like the teetering between two impulses: further investigate my draw to Knockout or to brush it off and return to the monotony of the everyday. I swung the bottle, bounced my steps to the beat in my body and walked to the train.
Knockout began in 2020 as a 12-minute version and, over the next four years, developed into the 45-minute dance piece presented April 26 and 27th, 2024 at Columbia College Chicago as part of the Chicago Artist Spotlight Festival. Before it’s 2023 in-progress showing at Watershed Center for Arts and Ecology, Kilmurray and collaborator Brody—with the grant support of Lucky Plush Productions—were able to bring in Commission Collaborators: playwright and writer Morgan McNaught, collage artist and dancer Ali Lorenz, dramaturg Katrina Dion, and sound master Corey Smith. Each maker was invited to engage with Knockout, all of its associated research, and develop their own work to be in conversation. Those collaborator pieces then functioned as new layers to inform and be absorbed into the evolution of Knockout.
photo by Sarah Larson.
banner image: photo by Sarah Larson.
