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.”
“With wonderful presentations about the tradition and history of rhythm from different experiences, personal understandings, and cultures, I was able to unlock new ideas and grow my previous ideas of what embodying rhythm can mean.” - Sophie Daker
“The exceptional line up of guests offered in depth presentations or physicalized practices for participants to embody.”
“Being presented with perspectives and context I wouldn’t otherwise have on topics that are important to the evolution and roots of dance helped me to expand my personal scope of interest and exploration. “
For Spectrum Dance Theater’s dancers, each isolated movement and phrase is fully inhabited, demonstrating a respect for the authenticity of all dance forms as well as a rabid curiosity for what happens when they’re all collapsed in on each other, when one category interrupts another. Chicago and New York-based dancer and writer Maddie Kodat reflects on Spectrum’s recent engagement in Chicago.
“Think in a different way.” This is the first of many instructional Tere O’Connor quotes you will find in the response below. O’Connor is widely respected as one of the most articulate, sharp, and inquisitive choreographers working in the field today. While most dance makers (myself included) struggle to adequately describe their creative process and conceptual understandings of the form—Dance— in a way that doesn’t diminish the vast spectrum of its nature (if I may use a term that implies such universality), O’Connor is brilliant at it…
Joanna Furnans follows Tere O’Connor Dance through their residency at the Dance Center, sharing her reflections on it all with us.
In a new initiative called On The Ground, the Dance Presenting Series engaged five Chicago-based dance writers to be present for the week-long residencies that happen at the Dance Center. To start this series, Columbia College Chicago alum Brianna Heath participated in the activities during Ephrat Asherie Dance’s residency, October 15-20, 2019.
Critic Lauren Warnecke of The Chicago Tribune highlights the changes afoot at the Dance Center in her conversation with our director, Ellen Chenoweth.
