Sharon Hoyer of New City features the Dance Center’s inclusion in this year’s Physical Theater Festival, an edition with a dance focus. The annual festival brings many performance types under its umbrella. New City also picked the Festival for its Stage Top 5 for June.
Marc Frost, co-founder and executive director of the Physical Theater Festival, says he learned something from last year’s presentation of “Un Poyo Rojo,” a virtuosic performance from Argentina in which two men in a locker room take the audience through a preening, strutting, flirtatious, riotous journey of a relationship that is at turns competitive and tender, all without uttering a word. “A lot of dance folks came to that show. Word got out, however it does, and I met a lot of people from the dance world there.”
The lesson was the crossover between dance—inherently a form of physical theater—and the broad umbrella of performance Frost and co-founder and artistic director Alice da Cunha curate and present each year. In its thirteenth season (June 1-7), the Physical Theater Festival will present a piece at the Dance Center of Columbia College. It’s a new partnership for the festival and a step up in house size from Theater Wit, where most of the festival takes place. Frost says he is finding fresh opportunities to connect with Chicago’s dance community. “It’s storytelling through movement. This is a more dance-centric year in many ways.”
The Dance Center debut is “Los Regalos” by Compañia de Teatro Físico from Peru. Teatro Físico specializes in mask theater, another first for the festival. “Physical theater is this umbrella term that can include mime and puppetry and circus, but we’ve never had a mask theater,” Frost says. “This show tells the story of a family, and it’s all wordless. We’ve seen a number of submissions from mask theaters over the years and it’s so hard to translate on video. We’re not at a scale where we can travel the world to view works so it’s all video submission for us. This one just cut through.”
