Dance In 2022, the best of dance held and sustained space for others.

THEATER

Don’t wait for the knock on the door

In 2022, the best of dance held and sustained space for others.

By IRENE HSIAO

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 individual behavior,” could it be possible for them to address the needs of an entire population?

“You can wait for a museum curator to knock on your door, or you can just go ahead and do it yourself. So I am choosing the latter, because I never waited for an important person to come; I’ve always shown our work,” declared Eiko Otake in advance of I Invited Myself, Vol. 1, her February residency in the galleries of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Duet Project: Distance Is Malleable, her audacious and elegiac performance with Ishmael Houston-Jones and Iris McCloughan at the Dance Center of Columbia College days before her 70th birthday in February. In one moment, Otake, dressed only in a thin white shift, fl ung open a door house left, flooding the theater with a sudden draft of piercingly cold air, revealing that nothing but a door and a decision separate outside and in.

For those who have devoted our lives to this art, dance is not an event; it is a practice and a way of being that began before and continues beyond this year. Every year, there is vastly more dance than any individual can experience—and many dances experienced that are not recorded. As Merce Cunningham famously said, dance “gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fl eeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.”

And yet, part of practicing any art is the sense that life lived with intensity in its moment must disturb the universe. And part of documenting it is the sense that some vivid-

The Rite of Spring, performed by École des Sables at the Harris Theater in October MAARTEN

VANDEN ABEELE

ness can persist beyond the frailty of individual memory—which is briefer and even more fallible than the mortal bodies that transmit this energy, channeling it into temporary form before it succumbs to the heat of our entropic existence. When we enter a space of performance, we mutually agree—as performers and as audience—to share this fragment of being with one another, to be present for each other, and to surrender to what the time brings.

For this reason, the stories and events that feel most necessary to refl ect upon from this year are those that hold and sustain space for others. As demonstrated by the breaking community, few resources beyond intention are required for an art to sustain itself; the labor, ingenuity, and generosity of committed individuals contribute to and create the whole. “Each one, teach one,” said Angelina RichUsher, who founded what eventually became the city’s largest open breaking practice simply to create a safe space for women to break. (It’s continued under Melissa Metro and Jason Poleon’s care and moved on from its longtime home at Clarendon Park.)

If everyone is a teacher and everyone is a student, everyone has something to share— space, knowledge, energy, attention, appreciation, music, food, love, time.

Other communities sustained by the spirit of sharing and inclusion include new crew Ajumma Rising, which celebrated Lunar New Year and Black History Month with a fl ash mob at a Korean market. (“If you have struggles, if you hustle and self-sacrifi ce for other people, if you work hard . . . you’re an ajumma,” said founder Joanne Yum Gutierrez). The Fly Honey Show, which marked its 12th year with its fi rst performances at Thalia Hall, o ers that inclusion necessitates and embraces evolution. “In the best way possible, the people who watch and the people inside tell us what it is every year,” said founder Erin Kilmurray. “Over the years, people inside the project started taking ownership over what they loved. It has created its own culture.”

“Privilege . . . is a system of hierarchy. It is so ingrained in how we perceive each other. We’re always in a scarcity mentality, in competition for power,” noted dancer and founder of the Blasian March Rohan Zhou-Lee. Sharing resources is “a way to reimagine what our world could be. Every action, every book fair, every rally, every community fridge filling, needs to be a snapshot of the world I believe in, the world I want to see.”

If we make enough snapshots, we get motion; if we make enough motion, then we have movement. Bim Bom Studios, which opened in January of this year, is already a small but mighty space for dance and music in Portage Park with a particularly thoughtful sliding scale that honors “work that might never be shown” and the “tender, messy phases of your process that often go underfunded / self funded / or not funded at all.” During Freedom From and Freedom To, which has occurred periodically at Elastic Arts since 2019 and extended its footprint to the Museum of Contemporary Art and Links Hall in 2022 (full disclosure: I have performed in this event), audience members draw names of musicians and dancers from a bag for immediate spontaneous improvisation. For intervals of 15 minutes, strangers push boundaries and create tenuous utopias that are dependent on the agreement to cooperate and collaborate.

Perhaps it was the visceral illustration of the fragility of the individual and the power of the collective that made Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring, performed by École des Sables at the Harris Theater, so profoundly moving. Or perhaps it was simply the sense that it could be possible to sit together and surrender to a work of art, to feel or at least imagine Stravinsky’s overwhelming bass as a collective heartbeat, for an evening.

“Dance is not sustainable—yet here we all are,” said Joanna Furnans, as of 2022 the executive director of Chicago Dancemakers Forum, during the Elevate Chicago Dance Festival this fall. Moment by moment, step by step, in practice, in process, in progress—we cannot wait for an important person to come. We must share our work now. v