Erin Kilmurray's THE FUNCTION Comes to Icebox Project Space Next Month

Programmed within Cannonball, choreographer Erin Kilmurray’s electrifying, genre-bending dance work, the Function, will be presented at Icebox Project Space on Saturday, September 16 at 9pm and Sunday, September 17 at 5pm. Tickets will be released on August 8, 2023 through Cannonball’s website. 

the Function is a femme-powered dance work that asks and imagines what is possible when empowered to rebuild our environments, atmospheres, futures, and realities. With a playground of choreography and objects, four dancers actively create, operate, and destroy their own performance worlds through genre-bending DIY stage craft, iterative, athletic movement, bass driven, sonic storytelling, and house party energy. 

Made within Chicago’s fringe performance scenes, choreographer Erin Kilmurray’s the Function premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2022. Hailed as a ‘groundbreaking performance maker,’ one reviewer wrote of Kilmurray’s work, "you don’t so much watch her choreography with your eyes as feel it pulsate through flesh, tendon and bone" (Newcity Magazine). She was recently one of only two artists recognized by the state of Illinois for Choreography, receiving a prestigious Illinois Arts Council Fellowship.

Staged in a runway environment, audiences will be up close to the action and seated on multiple sides of the performance, where they are quite literally at the edge of being right inside the work. Using clip lights, extensions cords, various kinds of hardware store detritus, an onstage laptop, the dancers perform and run their own show through a messy and wild demonstration of agency, authorship and envisioning that is driven by risk and desire where reality is in the eye of the beholder and squares of light gels make it rain; a disco ball or the moon? Extension cords or a ceiling held up by the audience? Devised from cross-trainings between director, dancers, DJ, and designers, it is a relational practice towards artistic skill-sharing as creative mutual aid, modeling the kind of collective effort that proposes a world that is tended in community.