Visceral turns ten

A Harris Theater showcase highlights a decade of progress.

By JT NEWMAN

Entering Visceral Dance’s new venue, a visitor is struck by its size and the care taken to design a space that suits the company that built it. Tucked away on Rockwell Avenue and nestled up against the North Branch of the Chicago River, the performance space is painted a stark black, with soaring ceilings and hip, classically industrial design touches like frosted-glass garage doors, leather chesterfield sofas and chairs, marble counters, and warmly polished brown cement floors. It looks comfy and elegant.

As you enter the long hallway of studios, you realize that this is not a classic Chicago black box, nor is it an intimidating palace of dance. Every detail was carefully curated to feature artistic space in the industrial building that brings warmth, natural light, and the beauty of the river (through the use of multiple skylights and long walls of glass windows) to this Avondale spot. And it was made to light the human body as it moves through space in dance. It’s a fitting home for Visceral Dance Chicago—which is celebrating ten years this year—and its dance school, now 15 years old. It was an intrepid goal to build out a new space in the middle of the pandemic. But for artistic director Nick Pupillo, dance and community are a higher calling. During an intense period of the pandemic, he reopened his studio and worked the front desk by himself while teaching seven days a week. As he told Reader contributor Irene Hsiao in 2020, “People were pretty hesitant when we reopened in July. . . . I saw everyone come in and everyone leaving, and I saw the di erence, people smiling again, crying because of what it felt like to be part of this again. It revitalized why Visceral exists, why I’ve created it and worked hard for it.”

Visceral Dance celebrates its tenth anniversary with SPRINGTEN at the Harris Theater on April 28. The program will feature Lotus, a world premiere by Pupillo. It will also include

Impetere, Pupillo’s first work for the company, in a return to the Harris stage, where it premiered ten years ago, and Keep (2018), a duet with music by Trent Reznor and Sigur Rós. Rounding out the program are a mainstage premiere of Name It by Israeli choreographer and Ate9 Dance Company artistic director Danielle Agami (with music by Puerto Muerto, Glenn Kotche, Emily Manzo and David Friend, and Elvis Presley) and longtime fan favorite Marguerite Donlon’s Ruff Celts (created for Visceral in 2016 with music by Sam Auinger, De Dannan Luke Kelly, Kíla, Sinead O’Connor, and Claas Willeke). Celts melds the choreographer’s Irish heritage with insights into the dancers’ own relationships with heritage and tribe.

I sat down with Pupillo at the studio and saw rehearsals of sections of Lotus and Keep. As the dancers started to move in the section of Lotus I previewed, I was struck by the natural beauty outside the row of windows overlooking the water, the natural light in the room, as well as Pupillo’s visually interesting original choreography and the rhythmic attention to detail of the dancers as they combined and recombined in solos, duets, and group sections. Slow and lengthy arm extensions in cambre backbends mixed with the complex pretzeling and contrapposto of hips and shoulders, while the dancers simultaneously and effortlessly rolled out of fixed positions. Contrasted with the more adagio and rhythmic sections, it created interesting and fresh movements.

When asked about the origins of the piece, Pupillo explained, “I didn’t want to do something directly about the pandemic, but I was interested in the idea that the lotus comes out of mud.” “No mud, no lotus” being, of course, an essential tenet of Buddhist belief: something beautiful and intricate can grow in what is essentially muck, and our sorrows can transform into joy through acceptance. Essentially, it says that without pain and su ering, people can find no joy. That feels like a very apt message for a company that, at the height of the pandemic lockdown, built its beautiful new space.

Keep was made expressly for the dancer Braeden Barnes, who is leaving the company after six seasons. It is a connected duet with long extensions, falls and catches, effortless lifts, and a sweet but melancholic feeling. Featuring the interplay of two bodies rolling together, combining, separating, and recombining, it felt deeply wistful and tender. The moments where the dancers embraced each other’s faces gingerly and a floor combination where one dancer rolled their head along the other dancer’s stretched-out body were at once relentlessly original and completely fresh.

It is interesting to revisit the history of Visceral. Pupillo says he started his company with

Ruff Celts is part of Visceral Dance Chicago’s SPRINGTEN program. TODD ROSENBERG education in mind first. While many dance companies take the reverse approach (building a company for performance and then using dance education classes to financially support the work), Pupillo had a vision of community from the very start. He built the classes in his studio as the foundation of fostering a community for his work and the work of his company.

He envisioned his new space as a top training facility in the country while holding strong to the idea that a dance center can be known for both positivity and excellence. When he talks about his work, Pupillo is quick to mention that he builds it in collaboration with his dancers. And he’s not shy to tell you that he’s interested in audiences knowing his dancers well and being able to pick out their work in the company’s pieces. His company is committed to diversity and being representative and respectful of other viewpoints.

The concept clearly works. In one short decade, Visceral has become a national and global force in contemporary dance. With challenging but accessible choreography, technical prowess and athleticism, and a relentless focus on presenting new artists, Visceral is an important artistic voice that has provided an incredibly vital space for Chicago’s dance community. v

OPENING R Star turn

Galileo’s Daughter at Remy Bumppo is smart and poignant.

Jessica Dickey’s world premiere at Remy Bumppo (directed by Marti Lyons) has some echoes of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife: the playwright appears as a character, researching the life of a historical figure as a way to come to grips with her own personal narrative. But unlike the ethically complicated (but still remarkable) Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (an East German trans woman who survived the Nazis and the Stasi) at the center of Wright’s play, Dickey’s historical role model is a star who shines without a hint of tarnish.

Galileo’s Daughter puts Maria Celeste Galilei (played by Emily Bosco with soulful forthrightness) at the center of the dramatic firmament, where her father (Chiké Johnson) wrestles with his conscience over how to care for his illegitimate offspring while he’s facing his own impending meteoric collision with the church. Placed in a convent for safekeeping, Bosco’s Maria Celeste writes numerous letters to her father and, as Dickey de ly shows, inspired Galileo’s use of a play as a means of arguing heliocentrism vs. geocentrism.

In present time, Linda Gillum’s Writer has come to Florence to research those letters. (Johnson wittily plays various Italian clerks and bureaucrats.) But her own looming divorce adds a touch of personal anguish to her quest. She and Maria Celeste are looking at history through different ends of the telescope over centuries, but their mutual search for truth and connection centers this quietly moving drama about truth and faith. John Boesche’s stellar (pun intended) projections add a sense of grandeur and awe to frame this riveting story. —KERRY REID GALILEO’S DAUGHTER Through 5/14: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Thu 5/11 2:30 PM; no show Sat 5/13

2:30 PM; audio description/touch tour Sat 4/22 2:30 PM, open captions Sat 4/29 2:30 PM; Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, remybumppo.org, $32-$40 ($15 industry, $10 students)

RThe price of blood

Is God Is offers a vivid story of vengeance and trauma.

Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down, produced by Congo Square Theatre last year, provided a trenchant and sometimes anguished portrayal of how racialized violence affects Black Americans over generations through a series of vignettes, rituals, songs, and more.

In narrative form, Harris’s Is God Is, now in a local premiere at A Red Orchid Theatre under Marti Gobel’s direction, is more straightforward—but the generational effects of violence are still very much present. Twin sisters Racine (Aja Singletary) and Anaia (Ashli Rene Funches), burned as children when their estranged father broke into their apartment and set their mother on fire, find out years later that their mom is still alive— barely. When they visit her, she commands them to seek vengeance on her behalf. Karen Aldridge’s hypnotic performance as the mother (soon referred to as “God” by the twins) feels like butoh by way of horror film. With carefully calibrated jerking movements and rasping breath, she draws her offspring into her plans for vengeance. “Make your daddy dead, and everything around him you can destroy, too,” she tells them.

And that’s what they do in this disturbing but hypnotic 100-minute play that combines elements of spaghetti westerns, Greek tragedy, and Jacobean revenge dramas. The girls set out to find their father, now living a bougie life in Hollywood with twin sons (Donovan Session and Andrew Muwonge bring Kardashian-like vapid entitlement to their roles, providing some comic relief before the bloodbath). Jyreika Guest’s inspired fight choreography on Red Orchid’s small stage and Daniel Etti-Williams’s jarring and haunting sound design are also standouts. It’s a wild ride, but Harris roots it in painful questions about the legacy of violence in a society whose institutions too o en fail to protect women and children. —KERRY REID IS GOD IS Through 5/28: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312-943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $30-$40

RThe broken double helix of pain

Last Night and the Night Before examines the limits of love.

Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s play is about the limits of love—both in what it can accomplish, even when it feels infinite, and in what it can tolerate before it disappears.

Monique (the protean Ayanna Bria Bakari) shows up at her sister’s house with her 11-year-old daughter in tow and an undisclosed agenda. (Daughter Sam is played at alternate performances by Kylah Renee Jones, flawless on opening night, and the no doubt equally capable Aliyana Nicole.) In flashbacks, we see the start of Monique’s relationship with Sam’s father Reggie (Steppenwolf ensemble member Namir Smallwood, in a performance of great tenderness and power) as well as Monique’s deterioration from creative ingenue to irresponsible junkie. When she leaves Sam with her sister Rachel and Rachel’s wife, Nadima (Sydney Charles and Jessica Dean Turner, respectively), another couple comes under acute strain.

Nor is filial love a refuge, as Sam tries to please both parents, be unobtrusive to her aunts, and define herself independently all at once. So many currents and crosscurrents risk leaving the audience at sea, but Valerie Curtis-Newton’s sharp direction creates a through line, so the incidents and relationships are reinforcing rather than muddling. Every character receives a fully rounded and lived-in portrayal, and the motif of childhood handclap chants leavens what otherwise would be too dense an examination of how pain is passed down like a broken double helix.

And the best thing about the experience wasn’t even on the stage but in the audience, which was the most racially inclusive and age-diverse I’ve experienced in Chicago, demonstrating the power of well-chosen art to bring us together. —KELLY KLEIMAN LAST NIGHT AND THE NIGHT BEFORE Through 5/14: Tue-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; Wed 5/3, 2:30 PM only; no performance Sat 5/13; open captions Thu 4/27 8 PM and Sat 5/6 3 PM; audio description and touch tour Sun 5/7 (touch tour 1:30 PM); ASL interpretation Fri 5/12 8 PM; mask-required performances Wed 4/19 8 PM and Wed 5/3 2:30 PM; Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-3351650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$88

R Satirical Race Theory makes comedy look easy

An ensemble of Black performers keeps Saturday night lively at iO.

The phrase “white spaces” evokes quite a few strong images. Kohl’s. The LDS Church. Late-night talk show desks. Bar Harbor, Maine. And, for too many comics, improv clubs. It’s no secret that the sketch, stand-up, and improv worlds have long been incubators for exclusion and toxicity as much as laughter, and clubs have—to varying levels of sincerity—been working to answer calls for accountability. So it would be reasonable to feel some anxiety on behalf of the cast of Satirical Race Theory, a new all-Black troupe whose primetime Saturday night run at iO must come with some degree of rep sweats or undue pressure.

If the confident performance by the opening night cast of Andrew Baldwin, TJ King, Kim Whitfield, Cyntisha Coats, Coco Fernandez, and Elim Almedom is to be any indication, though, audiences should feel those concerns assuaged. It’s an all-around strong showing from an ensemble that very much has the goods and functions as a creative unit more seasoned and matured than its recent formation would suggest. They even function well in the most harrowing and uncanny of comedic assignments: the local news affiliate daytime lifestyle show promo hit.

Of course, the mettle of a troupe isn’t tested when the bits are flyin’ free and easy but rather when they aren’t, and even when they’re navigating the premise-woods, Satirical Race Theory’s ensemble keeps its momentum apace. Charming and affable, Baldwin excels when he steps in as host, and at opening, Whitfield and King had particularly memorable sets. Even the opening hype act by dance ensemble The Puzzle League feels like a fresh take. —DAN JAKES SATIRICAL RACE THEORY Through 7/1: Sat 8 PM; iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com, $30 ($40 VIP/$15 student) v