Erin Kilmurray Archives - Chicago Reader

A group of performers in lingerie stand center stage. The singer in the center has a rainbow heart on their chest.

Shaking your ass for the revolution

by JT Newman August 31, 2023August 31, 2023

It was a gorgeously sunny and breezy Sunday afternoon, and I was tucked into a corner at Fort Knox Studios on the far northwest side. As I settled into my plastic folding chair, the lighting crew —helmed by veteran Fly Honey lighting director Slick Jorgensen, recording the show onto their phone—assembled around me. As it […]

Two performers in body suits covered in netting walk side by side down a catwalk. Silver "arms" wrap around their torsos. Behind them we see a guitarist and vocalist wearing black clothing with white diagonal stripes

Theater Review

Floor Show keeps swinging

by Kerry Reid February 22, 2023February 22, 2023

Alex Grelle and Jesse Morgan Young’s Floor Show premiered in a brief electric run in February 2020 at the Chopin. The plan was to bring it back later that spring. But then . . . you know. Blessedly, this compelling exploration/channeling of the chameleonic (and always self-aware) spirit of David Bowie—to call it a “tribute […]

Dance

Don’t wait for the knock on the door

by Irene Hsiao December 21, 2022December 21, 2022

The year 2022 was designated the “Year of Chicago Dance” by the city of Chicago, drawing a commitment from the mayor and several partner institutions to increase investment, collaboration, participation, and focus on dance in all its forms in Chicago. But if institutions are “humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain […]

A group of dancers in lingerie perform onstage. A Black woman stands center. The stage is lit with purple lights.

Arts & Culture

‘Huge, very loud, and with a lot of glitter’

by Irene Hsiao June 10, 2022June 16, 2022

For the first time since a pandemic hiatus, The Fly Honey Show is live for three days only of sparkle, sweat, and shimmy. Begun in 2010 with about 30 performers in the living room of the DIY venue The Inconvenience, The Fly Honey Show has since manifested through the bodies of hundreds of dancers, musicians, […]

Theater Review

Less is Moor in Court Theatre’s stripped-down Othello

by Sheri Flanders October 21, 2021October 21, 2021

Othello is usually viewed as “Shakespeare’s Race Play” and somewhat rightfully so—after all, the Bard almost never wrote Black characters. In our society race overshadows everything, so much so that much discourse around Othello tends to obstinately revolve around whether or not the play is “racist”—as if an inanimate object were able to take offense […]

Erin Kilmurray, wearing a white shirt and jeans, stands with arms outstretched to the left of the page in front of a blue backdrop.

Theater Preview

Moving through the violence in Othello

by Irene Hsiao October 13, 2021October 13, 2021

A year and a half after the stage went dark, Court Theatre presents its first live performance since the world was plagued with pandemic and the country with civil unrest. The chosen play is Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, which places racial discrimination, misogyny, toxic masculinity, and all the ills not […]