South Chicago Dance Theatre Will Host Three World Premieres in One Evening
The performances will feature new works by choreographers Natasha Adorlee, David Dorfman, and Kia S. Smith.
South Chicago Dance Theatre will present its ninth annual home season performance, An Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre, featuring three electric world premieres by award-winning choreographers Natasha Adorlee, David Dorfman, and SCDT Founder and Director of Vision and Strategy and Resident Choreographer Kia S. Smith. The four-part mixed repertory program opens with a powerful work by renowned choreographer Donald Byrd. An Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre takes place for one night only at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 East Randolph, on Friday, May 1, 2026.
An Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre is paired with SCDT's Inaugural Legacy Builders Benefit. Legacy Builder ticket holders are invited to attend an exclusive intermission reception and an after-party and silent disco with the artists following the performance.
“Donald, Natasha, and David Are choreographers that I have admired for years. Presenting their works on the Harris stage will foster a sense of hope, connectivity, joy, light, and faith for the future as we dream together of a more equitable tomorrow. This celebratory evening advances SCDT's role as a platform for emerging and established choreographers in Chicago and beyond,” says Smith.
The evening begins with It Begins, a creative fusion between the renowned choreographer behind the Broadway production of The Color Purple, Donald Byrd, and sound designer Rob Whitmer. First commissioned for South Chicago Dance Theatre in 2024, It Begins returns triumphantly to Chicago as an audience favorite.
The program continues with Smith's Suite On The Sahara, a new work conceived during SCDT's January 2026 residency at LAKE Studios in Berlin, Germany. Scaffolded by the genius of artists from the Silk Road Ensemble, the piece weaves sounds from Argentina, Morocco, Spain, and Italy, immersing audiences in a landscape flowing with light, color, passion, and a range of movement vocabularies. For this work, Smith steps away from the cerebral work of narrative building to allow her first love, music, to be at the helm of the choreographic process.
Next is the world premiere of Adorlee's Slip Force, a work that questions what structures we continue to uphold, and what becomes possible when a body no longer consents to be read, controlled, or contained. Throughout the work, Adorlee builds structures out of movement—a skeletal house, a circling train, a fragile house of cards—nodding to monuments of power and imposed systems of control. The structures are built, maintained, and repeated, despite their instability and cost. At the center, a woman appears framed within a window, suspended between artifact and entrapment. As pressure accumulates, her stillness gives way to release and acceleration, while another figure becomes newly confined. Slip Force moves between precision and unraveling, humor and severity, ultimately revealing the power of women reclaiming their voice and agency.
The evening concludes with Dorfman's Subject(s)? Verb Object!, a snapshot of group fervor, independence, solidarity, and joy. Addressing a moment in which we need each other more than ever, the performers embody hope and pain to fend off stasis and deceit. Kinetic and textual poetics connect the audience to an experience of feeling as alive as humanly possible, set to music ranging from spiritual and moving to a driven club frenzy. Subject(s)? Verb Object! is an electric celebration for people of all walks of life.
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