Dancing with the Chicago skyline as my backdrop

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As a first year Chicagoan, I still get excited every day when I ride the train downtown and see the breathtaking beauty of the skyline. When I’m downtown, I feel dwarfed by the towering buildings. The architecture can be overwhelmingly powerful. I  love the feeling of being part of something so much bigger than myself.  

So it is a thrill for me that The Dance COLEctive’s spring concert will use the city’s actual skyline as our backdrop. When we perform at Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion stage in April, the audience will face the opposite way from its usual summer perspective when concertgoers gather on the lawn of the park. Instead, the unconventional orientation will have the audience facing the lawn and the back “wall” of the space will be a large glass panel that looks out onto Millennium Park, with the city skyline as our backdrop. The space itself will be intimate, but with the glass wall, it has the capacity to seem endless. This perspective should add an interesting layer for the audience as well as for the dancers.  

The chance to perform “Moving Stories” in this space is especially powerful for me. Moving to Chicago has been the biggest move of my life and was a huge leap of faith for me. Dancing with the city as my backdrop is the perfect metaphor. The audience will see the dancers in the foreground, framed by the architecture. Our movement and bodies will be enclosed by shapes and lights outside the stage. We will be the focus, dancing within the city’s overwhelming mass and power. This encompasses my moving story. 

The Dance COLEctive’s spring performances at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion are April 12 – 14 are part of the official flight of FlySpace.  FlySpace is a resource-sharing consortium, conceived and launched by Jan Bartoszek (Hedwig Dances), Margi Cole (The Dance COLEctive), Michelle Kranicke (Zephyr Dance) and Joanna Rosenthal (Same Planet Different World).  The venture supports creative independence and institutional growth by combining and coordinating offstage work and cutting-edge technology to grow audiences.  FlySpace’s commitment to new forms of cooperation shares each director’s passion for content-driven contemporary dance, discovering fresh aesthetics in live performance, and engaging its audiences. Working together on new tools for audience development, all four organizations ascend together.  You can find out more about FlySpace by reading this article http://www.dancecolective.com/crain.html.

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For tickets visit http://flyspacechicago.brownpapertickets.com/.

Submitted by TDC Apprentice Molly Kirkpatrick on Monday, February 25, 2013. 

           

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