The Seldoms Celebrate Their 20th Anniversary With SUPERBLOOM

The Seldoms, a Chicago-based dance company celebrating 20 years of multidisciplinary performances exploring complex issues, presents the world premiere of Superbloom, an evening-length work combining movement, live music, animation, and costume and lighting design. The one-night-only performance takes place Thursday, June 1 at 7:30 p.m. at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph, Chicago. Tickets go on sale March 27.

Founding Artistic Director and choreographer Carrie Hanson describes Superbloom, a work for five dancers, as "a multimedia performance about radical beauty, wildness and wildflowers, and the resilience and fragility of the natural world. The work aims for splendor as a mirror of the sublime beauty of the natural world and an antidote to grief felt in the Anthropocene epoch (our current geological age, in which human activity has been the dominant influence on the environment). A hyperkinetic and hyper-visual experience, Superbloom conveys the fantastic beauty and color of a rare wildflower event and invokes the human experience of awe as a way to reconnect to the natural world."

Collaborating with Hanson are two visual artists: painter Jackie Kazarian and video artist Liviu Pasare, who are building video animation within Kazarian's abstract landscapes. The set also involves long textile trains, designed by Kazarian, which are activated by the dancers. Finom, the musical duo of Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, performs an original score live, and Julie E. Ballard, technical director, resident lighting designer, and stage manager for The Seldoms, creates the lighting design.

Superbloom continues The Seldoms' interest in the environment, with a body of performance work that conceives a relationship to Earth and to all life on Earth based in stewardship and sustainability, pluralism and justice. Said Hanson, "We use dance to ignite thinking about critical social issues, and we believe nothing is more critical and urgent than our environmental crises. Superbloom is intended to operate as both cultural resistance and cultural vision. Now is a time for healing, hope, respite, and beauty-this is the kind of inspiration audiences need now, as we recover from the pandemic and face multiple environmental crises."

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