Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago Releases Schedule for 42nd Season

CHICAGO-The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago announces its 42nd season of presenting diverse international, national and regional contemporary dance. All performances take place at The Dance Center, 1306 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago. Subscriptions and single tickets go on sale July 7at The Dance Center, 312-369-8330 and online at colum.edu/dancecenterpresents.

Showcasing American artists with international reputations, the season opens in October 2015 with Stephen Petronio Company paying homage to American postmodern masters and concludes in April 2016 with a butoh-hip hop duet by Michael Sakamoto and Rennie Harris. In between, performance series include Camille A. Brown & Dancers and Urban Bush Women, both New York-based, the San Francisco Bay Area's Joe Goode Performance Group and Chicago's Natya Dance Theatre and Giordano Dance Chicago.

Audience and Community Engagement
Discussions with the artists will follow most Thursday performances, and some programs will feature pre-performance talks with artists and Dance Center personnel or guest lecturers. All out-of-town artists will provide learning opportunities for Dance Center students and conduct community-based residency and educational activities, which might include master classes, lecture/demonstrations, in-school and community-based workshops, professional development workshops for educators and service providers and panel discussions.

Stephen Petronio Company
October 1-3
Petronio's most recent project is BLOODLINES, "an initiative to honor an incomparable lineage of American postmodern masters." During the next five years, SPC will perform iconic choreography from a family tree that straddles the 20th and 21st centuries alongside new creations by Petronio. In each case, SPC will be the first contemporary American company to perform these works outside the original choreographers' companies. For its Chicago performances, SPC performs the post-New York City premiere of a program including Glacial Decoy by Trisha Brown, with visual design by Robert Rauschenberg; Rainforest by Merce Cunningham, with music by David Tudor and visual design by Andy Warhol; and Petronio's Nonlocomotor with music by Clams Casino and the Young People's Chorus of New York City.

Natya Dance Theatre
October 22-24
Rooted in the Indian dance-theatre technique of Bharatanatyam, Natya returns to The Dance Center to celebrate 40 years of performing and creating dance art with the world premiere of Varna - Colors of White, an exploration of universal emotions with its diverse colors of moods and sentiments that find expression through words, music, dance and drama. Conceived by Founder and Artistic Director Hema Rajagopalan, the narratives bring together the secular and the divine, the manifest and the unmanifest as part of the integrated whole. Eminent musicians from India accompany principal dancer Krithika Rajagopalan and the Natya dancers. Based on ancient texts and poems of Sage poets and set to original musical scores, Varna - Colors of White brings to life feelings of love, desire, compassion, sorrow, greed and jealousy along with humor.

Camille A. Brown & Dancers
November 5-7
BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play reveals the complexity of carving out a self-defined identity as a black female in urban American culture. In a society that often portrays black women only in terms of their strength, resiliency or trauma, this work seeks to interrogate these narratives by representing a nuanced spectrum of black womanhood in a racially and politically charged world. With original music compositions, performed live by pianist Scott Patterson and electric bassist Tracy Wormworth, Brown uses the rhythmic play of African-American dance vernacular, including social dancing, double dutch, steppin', tap, Juba, ring shout and gesture, as the black woman's domain to evoke childhood memories of self-discovery. From play to protest, the performers come into their identities, from childhood innocence to girlhood awareness to maturity-all the while shaped by their environments, the bonds of sisterhood and society at large.

Giordano Dance Chicago
February 4-6
FamilyDance February 6
Returning to The Dance Center for the first time in 37 years, Giordano Dance Chicago, which will celebrate its 53rd season, offers an intimate program filled with its trademark passion, artistry and athleticism. The program includes the aggressive Exit4 choreographed by internationally renowned Roni Koresh and the whirlwind Shirt Off My Back from Broadway performer Ray Mercer. The company also offers a FamilyDance performance, featuring a free workshop for parents and children with the artists followed by a family-oriented performance.

Urban Bush Women
February 18-20
Under the direction of African-American choreographer Jawole Zollar, Urban Bush Women returns, following its 30th season performances at The Dance Center in spring 2015, with Walking with 'Trane, a suite of works based on the life and artistic imprint of jazz pioneer John Coltrane. Grammy Award-winning pianist George Caldwell provides live accompaniment with a reinterpretation of John Coltrane's album A Love Supreme.

Joe Goode Performance Group
March 10-12
Joe Goode's evening-length Hush, which dance writer Carla Escoda describes as "an electrifying new work," pushes the boundaries of dance theater, with narrative, drama, music and dance playing equally strong roles. The dancers' voices, a driving musical score and the unique presence of a Foley (sound effects) artist create a provocative soundscape for the story of six interlocking characters in a rundown bar troubled by their hushed secrets.

Michael Sakamoto and Rennie Harris
March 31-April 2
A dance-theater duet written, choreographed and performed by Rennie Harris and Michael Sakamoto, Flash combines their dual approaches to manifesting a body in crisis. The work is conceived as a "conversation" between the artists' respective aesthetics (butoh and hip hop), cultural backgrounds (Japanese-American and African-American) and personalities. Hip hop and butoh were born from marginalized, postwar urban subcultures, and each embodies a philosophical approach to the creation of cultural identity through dance. Flash is an interdisciplinary performance project combining butoh and hip-hop dance, multimedia and other theatrical elements to address the intersection of urban and environmental crisis, social resistance and corporeal identity.

The Dance Center
The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago is the city's leading presenter of contemporary dance, showcasing artists of regional, national and international significance. The Dance Center has been named "Chicago's Best Dance Theatre" by Chicago magazine, "Best Dance Venue" by the Chicago Reader and Chicago's top dance venue in 2014 by Newcity, and Time Out Chicago cited it as "...consistently offering one of Chicago's strongest lineups of contemporary and experimental touring dance companies." Programs of The Dance Center are supported, in part, by Alphawood Foundation, Dance/USA's Engaging Dance Audiences with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The MacArthur Fund for Arts and Culture at Prince, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, The Irving Harris Foundation and the Arts Midwest Touring Fund. Additional funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Special thanks to Friends of The Dance Center. For information, call 312-369-8330 or visit colum.edu/dancecenterpresents

Subscriptions and single tickets go on sale July 7 at The Dance Center, 1306 S. Michigan Avenue, 312-369-8330 and online at colum.edu/dancecenterpresents. All performances take place at The Dance Center. All programming is subject to change. The theatre is accessible to people with disabilities.

To post a comment, you must register and login.