The Seldoms’ Postponed “Floe” About Climate Change Premieres in a Hotter World
NNew City Stage’s Sharon Hoyer highlights The Seldoms’s upcoming premiere of FLOE at the Dance Center:
Back when I first wrote about the impending premiere of “Floe,” The Seldoms evening-length dance theater piece about climate change, I referred to the subject—as did many back then—as the existential crisis of our time. That was in April of 2020, when “Floe” was slated to premiere in the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room at the Art Institute. The elegant, wood-paneled palace to capitalism promised to be a fitting milieu for tales of catastrophic weather events buffeting the less fortunate and ice caps shrinking in the crucible of human greed.
The COVID pandemic postponed the production—longer than one might imagine. “Floe” will make its Chicago premiere this spring, running March 12 and 13 at the Dance Center of Columbia College. In the ensuing six years since its making, our national attention has become considerably strained: By the rise of authoritarianism and far right movements in the United States and abroad, pulled from the imminent climate crisis to regime overthrow in oil-rich Venezuela. Distracted from the repeal of the endangerment finding—rendering the EPA helpless to regulate tailpipe emissions—to renaming the Kennedy Center or the latest on the absurd rebuilding of the East Wing, or whatever the headline is by the time you read this. “It’s a kind of delusion,” says Carrie Hanson, founder and artistic director of The Seldoms. “This current administration is performing distractions. There’s a daily dose of some outrageous thing that goes viral. If we don’t have a livable planet, the rest doesn’t matter.”
And so, the time for “Floe” is, as it has been for decades, now. Hanson developed the piece in part through a residency with Houston-based arts nonprofit DiverseWorks and Rothko Chapel…
