Author Archives: Cerinda Survant

BILLBOARDS Joffrey Ballet at the Civic Opera House, March 16-21 When MTV meets pointe shoes, look out. Brash, fast, and fashionable, Billboards is probably the sexiest work ever performed on the Civic Opera House stage. The Joffrey’s new evening-length ballet set to music by Prince stands conventional thinking on its head. Not the idea that […]

ARIE BURSZTYN and SINAPSA DANCE GROUP at the Dance Center of Columbia College, March 9 and 10 Some dances are human, others suprahuman. Human dances are unmistakably enmeshed in social and cultural currents, explicitly testing the dancers’ and viewers’ shared world. The suprahuman ones explore the essential materials of dance–movement, space, time–for their own sake, […]

MORDINE & COMPANY DANCE THEATRE at the Dance Center of Columbia College May 14-16 and 21-23 Choreographer Shirley Mordine long ago established her reputation as one of the most accomplished craftsmen in Chicago. Her canny manipulation of the raw material of dance–sheer movement, space, and time–knows no peer. And in the course of its 24-year […]

JOFFREY BALLET at the Auditorium Theatre April 29-May3 Ballet tends to reduce women to one of two images: the ballerina as a cool, active, independent force, the agent of her own destiny and dancing, or as the object of male fantasy and desire, hurled, hauled around, and deprived of volition. The most interesting dances present […]

ABOUT MEN . . . ABOUT WOMEN Jan Erkert & Dancers at the Dance Center of Columbia College March 5-7 Jan Erkert makes dances for mind and eye alike. Strong, appealing dancers perform expressive movement with absolute authority and without affectation; shifting spatial patterns and dynamic configurations of dancers occupy every inch of performance space; […]

BALLET CHICAGO at the Dance Center of Columbia College October 23-November 2 By performing in Uptown, in the city’s preeminent modern-dance performance space, Ballet Chicago has undertaken its biggest gamble yet. Daring to show ballet up close and personal is a lot like daring to attend a costume gala in a G-string. Strip away the […]

DAVID PUSZH DANCE COMPANY AND HEARSAY at the Weinstein Center for the Performing Arts June 21 and 22 Whether you believe musical theater is entirely moribund or the most vital and accessible performance form in America, your position is supported by The Ballad of Etta Blue, an original one-act musical by Cheri Coons and Eric […]

TWO WOMEN’S TALES Jan Bartoszek/Hedwig Dances and Amy Osgood at the Dance Center of Columbia College March 14-16 Jan Bartoszek and Amy Osgood make fine dances–musical, well crafted, and thoughtfully produced. Both choreographers choose interesting scores and create shifting, complex relationships between the images, phrases, and structures of the movement and those of the music. […]

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE at the Civic Center for Performing Arts February 12-14 Beautiful dancing is seductive. Watching American Ballet Theatre perform Jiri Kylian’s Sinfonietta is a pleasure: the dancers’ lightness and ease in Sinfonietta’s lightning-fast leaps and changes of direction inspire a sense of wonder. Joop Caboort’s warm lighting and Walter Nobbe’s idyllic costumes and […]

DISASTER SERIES Joe Goode Performance Group at the Dance Center of Columbia College February 14-16 You just can’t help laughing when you first see Joe Goode onstage in the Disaster Series. Goode solicits that response with placid exaggeration–a porkpie hat, big eyes, wide mouth, and drawn-out vowels. The work’s ten sections treat disasters large and […]