The Seldoms: Dance Performance
@ The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603
Opening Saturday, December 30th, from 1PM - 2:30PM
Join local dance company the Seldoms in the galleries to experience the interpretive and sensorial potential of dance among some of the most powerful artwork in the world. These four mesmerizing performances will be held across the museum, each piece uniquely corresponding to the gallery in which it takes place.
Performances
Common Senses
1:00–1:20
Gallery 215
Choreographer Deandra Alaba asks, “What does it mean to truly rest and how are our senses integrated in the moment?” The duet about the correlation between rest and the basic human senses was built with dancers Haley Marcin and Maggie Vannucci, who explore their individual experiences of comfort, relief, and pleasure and interlace them with sight, hear, smell, taste, touch, and also proprioception, the sense of our body’s relationship to space. (about 15 minutes)
Chameleon Degradation
1:30–1:45
Gallery 201
A deeply-felt, resolute duet choreographed by Damon D. Green, Chameleon Degradation is a reflection on the experience of “code-switching.” Green describes, “in code-switching, you make accommodations for the environment you are in. You have to show up for yourself and present company, even as you’re vulnerable to biases and degradation of character.”
Reroute en Route
2:00–2:10
Gallery 398
Created and performed by Maggie Vannucci, this piece was made within the Seldoms’ Toolbox project, a translation process between visual and dance artists. Maggie was paired with painter Jackie Kazarian, and through their dialogue, she forged a new dancemaking tool called “masking,” in which a performer will “play with diverting flow and cutting pathways by shifting quality and direction often and quickly.”
Her Geometry
2:15–2:25
Gallery 394
In the second solo in a series of studies about cubism by the Seldoms’ artistic director Carrie Hanson, the dancer is tasked with trying to reveal multiple facings and perspectives at once. This solo particularly draws from Picasso’s 1907 painting, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon and works to deny the painter’s gaze and recover the agency of the figure.
about the seldoms
The Seldoms creates multimedia performance charged by bold, exacting physicality and the belief that dance can inspire thinking about critical social issues. Each project is fueled by an appetite for research and incubated with partners from fields such as history and science. Under the direction of choreographer Carrie Hanson, the company designs expansive productions with practitioners of visual arts, architecture, theater, sound, and fashion. Making works on topics such as the 2008 recession, plastic in landfills, climate change, and power and powerlessness in America, they have built a reputation for “well-crafted and researched works that don’t hold forth a political agenda, but look instead at how these towering issues reflect back on our own humanity” (New City).
In its 21st season, the Seldoms has performed in twenty US cities and developed international connections, touring in Russia, Canada, Taiwan, and Scotland, where they worked with Glasgow visual artists to create “Toolbox,” a sourcebook for makers. Their 2015 work, Power Goes, about the legacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, received a NEFA National Dance Project Award, and toured to nine US venues, engaging a community cast in each city. Locally, the company has performed at a range of venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art and Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater. The Seldoms has designed performance works for sites including a truck garage, an outdoor pool, the Morton Arboretum, and a Chicago landmark park fieldhouse. In 2022, their stage work, Floe, about the rising sea levels and warming oceans of our changing climate was commissioned by ART on THE MART. The company is dedicated to using performance as a platform for dialogue and collective inspiration.
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