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
We’re really honored that New City highlighted our Artistic and Producing Directors as part of its Players 2024: The Fifty People Who Really Perform for Chicago. Meredith Sutton and Roell Schmidt, in collaboration with dance department chair Lisa Gonzales, are experimenting with ways to erase that “and” by “moving away from the ‘gatekeeper’ model of dance presenting.”
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….
The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago announces its 2022 Fall Season, which includes two performance series—Elevate Dance Chicago and B-Series B-All-Access: Celebrating Accessibility and Inclusion in Hip-Hop and Street Dance Culture featuring guest artist Bill Shannon. “At the Dance Center, we are honored to be able to hold the space for this work to take place, and for the coming together of community in celebration of the dancing body,” says Lisa Gonzales, Associate Professor and Chair of Dance at Columbia.
Critic Lauren Warnecke of The Chicago Tribune highlights the changes afoot at the Dance Center in her conversation with our director, Ellen Chenoweth.
