Red Clay Dance Company is gearing up for its concert series at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago and has been featured in New City, on See Chicago Dance, and several TV interviews - including WGN 9’s Midday Fix, Fox 32, and Chicago’s ABC 7.
Red Clay Dance Company’s upcoming program pairs two works created in collaboration with the dancers: Bebe Miller’s Field: New Ground and Vershawn Sanders-Ward’s Written on the Flesh. Asked about how it has been for the company to work with Bebe, for Vershawn it’s something of a full circle moment: “I’m still in awe. I don’t want to get all sentimental – it just reminds me of the specialness of the Dance Center.” Read about the two works and the collaboration between these two artists.
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
It’s LaTasha Barnes’ “The Jazz Continuum,” a communal celebration of Black American dance and music running March 7-9 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago. Timelines collide as different eras of jazz dance and adjacent forms—tap dance, footwork, popping, break dance, line dance and more—blend together in a seamless juxtaposition of styles.
In the audio series portion of “The 1619 Project,” New York Times cultural critic Wesley Morris says that when he hears American pop music—jazz, R&B, soul, funk, disco, even yacht rock—he hears Blackness. Likewise (and inseparably) is American social Black dance, emerging and evolving alongside these genres: bodies unstoppably moved by syncopation and harmony, shot through with ripples of delight only a perfectly landed improvisation can provide. But improvisation lives in the new. And as Black artists push forms and culture forward, older styles can get left behind….
Recent praise for FLOCK & Artists’ Somewhere Between calls the Dance Center -- “arguably the best venue to see dance in Chicago!”:
Sometimes in duets, and most often as a six-dancer ensemble, Flock’s Somewhere Between continues to mesmerize with seamless transitions. We lose track of time. It’s not unlike the hypnotizing effect of a lava lamp. All is fluid. Transitions are so seamless we only realize they have happened in retrospect….
CHICAGO—The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago announces their fall programming season, which includes classes, discussion groups, virtual residencies for local artists, and more.
With travel curtailed out of public health concerns, the Dance Center is highlighting Chicago dancers and choreographers with its fall season. Season highlights will include the following production residencies, virtual residencies, and programmatic course offerings…
Chicago-based artist and scholar Lizzie Leopold reflects on Same Planet Performance Project’s recent performance of work by Ivy Baldwin and Joanna Read and how it does or doesn’t resonate with the current political moment. In a continuation of our On the Ground series of reviews, she asks what dance can do.
Our On the Ground series continues with a reflection on Kimberly Bartosik’s I hunger for you. Mary Coyne, a Merce Cunningham scholar, finds connections between this Cunningham’s dancers work and this lineage, but here emotions come to the fore: “Desire hinged on addiction, craving, finally arriving to a place where the beautiful falls into ugliness, sensuality towards violence.”
