River North Dance Chicago performs Nine Person Precision Ball Passing (1980) by Charles Moulton, at the 2011 Chicago Dancing Festival in Millennium Park. Photo: Cheryl Mann

Tuesday won’t be the first time RNDC has appeared at the Pritzker; last summer’s “Celebration” featured the company in Charles Moulton’s Nine Person Precision Ball Passing (1980). That’s a difficult, intricate piece of choreography — but unusual in that each of its performers stays rooted in a single spot, on risers. I wrote in my review of that performance that RNDC handled the work “as if it were a walk in the park (although I look forward to watching these powerhouse dancers perform full-bodied again, rather than sit and trade balls as they have all week).”

They get their chance Tuesday in full-company works such as Evolution of a Dream (Sherry Zunker, 2009), Risoluta (Sidra Bell, 2010) and Habaneras, the Music of Cuba (artistic director Frank Chaves, 2005). Star turns will come courtesy of solos and duets including Ella (Robert Battle, 2007) and At Last, an excerpt from Misson (Chaves, 1999).

The outdoor show, titled “World Class, Home Grown,” lands between a big season for the company, just ending; and another slated for 2012–13. I spoke recently by phone with Chaves about River North Dance Chicago, as well as with dancer Lauren Kias, seven years old when the company was founded in 1989.

Kias and her dozen colleagues signed on for 35 weeks of work for 2011–12, but shortly thereafter, Chaves explains, a significant extension began to take shape: four weeks of touring in Russia. “We started talking about it just last fall and, for everything to happen within the same season like that, for a big tour, is pretty unusual.… Our season was pretty much set, and then a month in Russia, as an add-on? Wow. We ended up with a 43-week contract [for the dancers], which is great, in this day and age.” It was the longest overseas engagement in the company’s history. “Some of the younger dancers had never experienced that kind of a tour,” says Chaves, “and I think that, in some ways, those kinds of tours are a thing of the past.”

River North Dance Chicago member Lauren Kias. Photo: Bob Gallagher

The trip wasn’t a cakewalk, says Kias. Some days began at 5am, included six or seven hours of travel by bus on bumpy roads, and ended with a performance on a dimpled stage. “I never would’ve gone to Russia, though, if it wasn’t for the company. I never would’ve gone to South Korea, either,” she adds. During the dancers’ one stretch of free days — a short week off in Moscow — “I really took advantage of the city and what it had to offer. I went to the Bolshoi [Theatre] to see ‘Jewels,’ which is a Balanchine ballet.” (Her favorite part of the triptych was Diamonds, with David Hallberg and Svetlana Lunkina in the principal roles.) Kias attended the performance with Laura Wade, one of two coaches from Chicago who tag-teamed in rehearsal-director duties during the tour. Kias and Wade’s tickets cost 2,000 rubles each, or about $60. “I was willing to pay double that, just to get in. We were up in the fourth balcony and had to lean over the edge just to see. But it was one of the best experiences of my life.”

The Pritzker Pavilion, with its capacity of about 11,000, split between open-air chairs and a Great Lawn, is most similar among venues RNDC played in Russia to Kias’s favorite: a converted arena. “Toward the end of the tour, we performed at this place pretty much like the Staples Center, like, a basketball court slash hockey rink. They set up our stage like for a rock show, in the center of the court, with a huge curtain covering the ‘backstage’ area. I got to perform [Battle’s solo] Ella in that show. It was such a different experience, to have the audience all around, and there were so many people.… Hanna [Brictson, another RNDC dancer] made a joke: ‘I feel like I’m Janet Jackson right now.’ ”

Other whistle stops ranged from intimate playhouses to ornate state theaters, says Chaves, who had to stay behind but kept in touch with the company via his “eyes and ears”: Wade, company executive director Gail Kalver, and coach and massage therapist Patrick Simoniello. Kalver “has experience with this kind of touring from her time at Hubbard Street [Dance Chicago],” as former executive director there, Chaves notes. “She knows how to be in the trenches.”

River North Dance Chicago members at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russia. Photo: Courtesy of River North Dance Chicago

Positive responses kept Kias and her fellow dancers going. “We’d do two encores almost every night, just in response to the applause, which we’d done before, in Germany. I think that’s just a European thing, to keep dancing if the audience is asking for more.”

Bell’s choreography went over particularly well with Russian dancegoers, Kias says. “I found that they really enjoyed Risoluta, probably because it’s a seductive piece. There’s a lot of things going on, and a lot of diversity, in terms of what’s onstage. We’re not all moving as a group, and there are different connections between people at different times, throughout. And it showcases each dancer and what they have to offer, their style, who they are. I think [Russian audience members] might’ve enjoyed connecting with us that way, as individuals.”

Kias says that RNDC’s diversity of styles also appeared to engage. “I don’t think that they’d ever seen anything that River North provides before. Every piece [we performed] was different, and I think that was probably fun for the [Russian] audience, to get that kind of variety. Oh: And Ahmad [Simmons, another RNDC dancer] was like a superstar over there. Everyone wanted to take his picture. He got a very warm welcome. All of us did.… People would just come backstage, Russian kids wanting to take pictures with us and get our autographs and talk to us.”

That may recur soon, with American kids: Kias is slated to perform Ella again next week. It’s a showcase role, and her indefatigable take has earned roars of applause at the Harris. She sounds ready. “I think I’ve never been more excited to perform in my life, than at the Pritzker Pavilion. I’m excited for the possibility that a bunch of people in Chicago who’ve never seen us perform before will be there. I’ve performed at Ravinia before, and I love that feeling of being out in the open air, feeling it hit your body.”

Chaves says the number-one goal of the aptly named “World Class, Home Grown” is appreciation for the company in the city where its artists live and work. “We’re always wanting more visibility here at home. I would hope that people who’ve never seen dance, or maybe have but don’t know about River North, are out there on the lawn and turned on by what they see, and [that they] want to come back. It’s a great way to get the word out.”

Chaves notes Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s stated aim to get the word out about dance in Chicago, too. Emanuel will be honored at Tuesday’s event. “We offered a [River North Dance Chicago] Dream Maker Award and the mayor accepted it, and we’re hoping he can be there. Knowing how behind dance he’s saying he wants to be, and what he’d like to see happen in the city — We all want to see that come to life.”

River North Dance Chicago presents “World Class, Home Grown” at 6:30pm on June 5 at the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Admission is free. The company performs August 21 at the Ravinia Festival, and Chaves visits Cuba this fall with composer Orbert Davis, in preparation for “The Cuban Project,”  April 13, 2013 at the Auditorium Theatre, in collaboration with Roosevelt University and the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. During its 2012–13 season, RNDC will host dancer Nunzio Perricone, who won an apprenticeship with the company as a contestant on Amici Serale, a competition on Italian television. River North returns to the Harris Theater this November 16 and 17.

Samantha Allen in Man in the City by Julie Mayo. Photo: Ryan Bourque

I’d be hard-pressed to dream up a more efficient way to get to know choreographers. (Two out of three featured at the performance I attended, Christy Funsch and Colleen Leonardi, were new to me.) Time was the only constraint coproducers Kate Corby and Julie Mayo gave the participants; originals and wrecks both had to last 15 minutes or less, and most of the wrecking processes took place within just a couple of days. So during each of three performances, within about 90 minutes, one could see an artist’s work and then that same work again, through the eyes of a different artist, whose original choreography was also shown. Links Hall was a data-rich environment, to say the least.

Having written a preview of “The Wrecking Project” for Time Out Chicago, I didn’t review the performance. I had an interview with Mayo in the can, which, as my article focused more on Corby’s experience, didn’t get much play. And as Jessie Young told me last Friday, while we shared a bench in Chicago’s Welles Park, “we dancers just don’t do postmortems, usually. Like, not in the way that some theater groups will, I feel, get together after a show and talk about what happened, how something shifted, whether it changed for the better or worse, you know?”

This blog post might best be considered something like that, focused specifically on Mayo’s duet for Young and Samantha Allen, Man in the City; and Leonardi’s wreck of it, Her Sometimes She. Both dances were performed by the same bodies, as with the other works in the festival.

Jessie Young in Man in the City by Julie Mayo. Photo: Ryan Bourque

Man in the City, like Mayo’s previous pieces, features characters in scenes that feel knowable and complete despite numerous, sudden and often extreme shifts in tone. Her choreographies “should” be fractured and incoherent, and yet their internal logics unfold throughout and solidify.

Two sisters or rivals or sides of a psyche, Allen and Young in Man in the City are in a kind of cage match. There are images of cruelty: Allen, grinning, switches a floor lamp pointed at the back of Young’s head on and off, repeatedly. Young begins to weep, softly — then crescendoes into full-tilt, choking sobs. Allen seems to derive pleasure from getting this rise out of Young, as would a bully, except Young faces us in the audience, not Allen. (Allen stands about ten feet upstage of Young, with her hand on the lamp’s switch and her smiling eyes locked on this crying woman, whose face she can’t see.) We become complicit in Young’s discomfort and are put in a position where we might intervene, but we don’t, because it’s just a performance.

The complex dynamics in this scene, says Young, emerged between her and Allen in rehearsals. “There came a lot of dialogue between Sam and I that Julie just listened to and facilitated. It wasn’t really character, it was just Sam and I, bumped-up, danced-up, and Julie gave us space and forum to explore that. It was our first time dancing together. So this wrought relationship, between sisters or whatever we were — Sam would take this playfully, lighthearted, sort of teasing [approach], which is what she just does, a lot. And where I tend to go is more guttural, like this crying, which increased. It’s hard to cry! It’s deep-reaching, which I think is why it comes out in that Claire Danes in [Baz Luhrmann’s] Romeo + Juliet way, that sort of [Lets out an anguished, convulsing bawl] Gaaauuurrrggghhh!”

Jessie Young in Man in the City by Julie Mayo. Photo: Ryan Bourque

Mayo made Man in the City in Chicago’s OuterSpace studio, shortly after moving to Brooklyn from Riverside, California. The duet was created as a standalone piece, then shaved down to 15 minutes from its original 20, to honor that parameter of “The Wrecking Project.” When I talked with Mayo by phone on March 21, she offered hypotheses as to what Leonardi might do to her piece.

“My work can be bombastic or emotionally charged or… It’s excessive, in a lot of ways. I think [Leonardi] might meditate on it, distill from it. I would use the word ‘contemplative’ for her work, and maybe ‘expressive’ for mine, not that those are antonyms. Sometimes, I think of her work in terms of outline: It’s quite beautifully rendered, in terms of minimalism.” (Leonardi’s original work in the festival, Spending Time Mending Things, included a slow walk around the perimeter of the stage while unraveling a skein of yarn.) “I’m interested in affective landscapes and I feel like her work is more centered on the body, less psycho-social.”

While Man in the City has dark moments, it also shows Mayo’s expertise with lighter moods, clown and comedy. Allen in particular brings a finely tuned, fictitious “lack” of coordination to the table, a false awkwardness only highly trained bodies can pull off. (Think the dance equivalent of Colleen Ballinger singing as Miranda on YouTube. A dance by Mayo is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but you might giggle when its operatic excesses peak.)

“The original piece was just us and our choices,” says Young, “but in such extremes. Colleen saw how that made [Allen and I] seem as characters.”

Leonardi’s wreck was indeed what Mayo predicted. Portions of the original choreography and text — there’s a lot of speech in Mayo’s scenes, suggestive, layered and poetic sentence fragments — were isolated and looped for Her Sometimes She. Leonardi’s wreck was a remix in the pop-musical sense; singular moments became riffs and existing cycles extended further. (In comparison, Corby’s wreck ran Hope Goldman’s original duet more or less backward, through new goals and textures, and featured dramatically different costumes for both performers.)

Two days of wrecking with Leonardi, which Mayo observed, at BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange) and South Oxford Arts began with a run-through, Young recalls. “[Leonardi] watched us do it once and then she dove right in. ‘Okay, I’m gonna take this section and put it here. Let’s take that section and put it here.’ The way that [Leonardi] wrecked [Man in the City] was like the way someone who doesn’t know how to shuffle cards mixes up [a deck of cards]. She didn’t wreck any of the concepts or energies, really, she’d just take a section, like, ‘That section where you [two] are walking back and forth, with your eyes closed? Let’s begin with that.’ And she built it that way, from the beginning to the end.… To me, it was totally collage. The lips from one thing, the eyes from another thing.” Mayo, on site for most of the first day and the end of the second, didn’t intervene. “Aside from her presence in the room, and however that might’ve changed things,” says Young, “Julie just stepped back and was, like, ‘I’m just really interested to see how this comes out.’ She gives total space, which I appreciate.”

Samantha Allen in Man in the City by Julie Mayo. Photo: Ryan Bourque

For Young, the nature of Mayo’s creative process itself generated a metalayer when it came time for Leonardi to rip apart and reassemble it into something new. “The way I conceive of a wreck is kind of the way Julie’s work feels, you know what I mean?” She laughs. “It feels pieced together, feels seemingly disjointed or nonlinear. And I never know what she’s going to use. Something will be said [during a rehearsal] and it’ll seem to go into the ether, but then it’ll come back, maybe in a verbal context. She’ll say, ‘Remember when we were talking about this? I want you to talk about that onstage.’ Or it’ll be, ‘Let’s work on movement that feels unfinished in some way,’ which might come from something one of us said, just in conversation.”

One of Mayo’s choreographies, says Young — and this resonates with my experiences of them — “feels like its own culture, its own language. Things that we’ll make on different days with totally different intentions get collaged and put together, like, découpaged. In terms of both movement and text.” Once it’s drafted and the dancers with Mayo refine the work, by running through it in sequence, “it starts to make sense.… Upon first seeing her work, it was maybe like, ‘Okay, this is strange,’ but over time, I’ve realized that she’s not going for ‘strange.’ It’s like she finds a stable, solid starting point, ties a string to it and takes us into this where-the-fuck-are-we-going place. But she knows where we’re going. She’s in control. [Man in the City is] all environment and mood, and she’s always creating those things deliberately.”

Mayo’s music choices for her works, and the sequence in which they play, might be the most effective way she sets tones you can’t find anywhere else. True to form, Man in the City utilizes a compelling set of recorded tracks, faded in and out of silence: “Wanna Say Faux” from Co La’s Daydream Repeater; “Starbucks, Dr. Seussism, and While Your Mac Is Sleeping” by James Ferraro; and “Genrecide (I Wish Tricky’d Die Any Way I Hope)” by Terre Thaemlitz. “I love Julie’s sound design,” Young gushes. “The whole first leg of her rehearsal process [includes] no sound, or just voice. No music, not even [before beginning work,] to set a tone. And then she layers [music into the work], after it’s pretty fully conceived and made.… How that fleshes out, for me anyway, what I’m doing with the movement and what it might mean — Sometimes, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around what’s going on in her pieces. And then the music comes in [during rehearsals] and I’m, like, ‘Oh!’ For me, it lubricates things. It’s one of my favorite parts of her process.”

Said Mayo of Allen and Young, between completing the duet and Leonardi wrecking it, “It’s a lot for them. They’re both really talented artists and they’re young, but they’ve grown a lot in this work, being open to just go, to just try this out. There’s not a lot of physically difficult things in Man in the City. It’s not such a technical feat. But I do think of it as a technical feat, in terms of performance, and that’s what I’m interested in — and they are, too, now.”

Dancemaker Julie Mayo keeps a site about her work at dimsumdance.org.

Covers in pop music — especially ironic ones — are a dime a dozen, but in theater décor? That’s not an everyday occurrence, as far as I’m aware.

So when I read the program for the Goodman Theatre’s current production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, starring Brian Dennehy as Larry Slade and Nathan Lane as Theodore Hickman, the following credits caught my eye: set design by Kevin Depinet, inspired by designs by John Conklin.

In 1990, the Goodman produced Iceman with Dennehy in the “Hickey” role. Conklin created the décor with Robert Falls, director of both versions.

I had questions. What follows is my conversation by phone with Depinet on May 16.

Each act’s set is a variation on a theme, I thought: They all fit together as a…well, as a “set,” themselves, but there’s a great progression from Act I to Act IV. And this is coupled with elegant references to art history. The opening scene is reminiscent of Rembrandt, with the strong chiaroscuro, and we also get whiffs of The Last Supper and other well-known works of art. How much of all of this came from the previous designs by John Conklin, and to what extent did you introduce your ideas to this production? That’s, of course, about ten questions in one, but what I want to discuss with you today, in a nutshell.
[Laughs] Well, let’s start with the idea of the four different sets. In terms of how Bob [Falls] and I worked, because there was a previous set and because he wanted to use the guise of the original production, one of [John Conklin’s] design’s major ideas was these four points of view [onto the bar]. That production being at the old Goodman, which was a different space entirely… You could literally have four sets and wheel them in as you needed them, you know? One might be offstage right, [another] offstage left, and then upstage, and you could just wheel the whole sets in [as the show progressed]. In the new Goodman, you can’t do that, so one of my biggest challenges was figuring out how to make it work, within itself. There isn’t that [offstage] space to put everything. So the original production [had] basically these four separate ideas that were trucked on, and this was more a morphing, sort of onion-skin, layered thing that unfolded, with the [bar]room getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

But, conceptually, the idea of these four spaces was — Bob told me that the whole thing is a kind of journey about being drunk, [and] should be intoxicating. So, the first space: When you’re at the height of being drunk, you don’t remember details. You don’t remember a whole lot of anything. [Laughs] So the room is, on the whole, void of all detail, except for the essentials. Now, there are certainly artists that you could see being references [in Act I], in terms of what it looked like, but that isn’t where we started. It was more about this idea of the journey of drunk men.

The second act, Bob told me he wanted it to [suggest] the inside of someone’s stomach, or vomit. It could be considered “the morning after,” this birthday party — a nasty place. Which is why the walls are that vomitty, putrid green. And then the third act, which is really the most realistic point in the play, or where we felt that it got the most realistic, [takes place] during the day. So we created this blinding, pounding light that was, like — you didn’t want to go outside. And the forced perspective was about everything pushing [the characters] toward that light. And/or everything was coming from that light. Either way, the significance was on that door and what might be beyond it.

And then the fourth act, which probably departed the most from reality, was about drawing [attention] to that singular window. In our minds, that was the space that needed to be as big as Hickey’s last monologue. We needed a big, almost hollow, empty space, with nowhere [for the other characters] to go. And it was great because this big, empty space creates almost an echo effect. Unto itself, the fourth act was an almost Expressionistic place, which is what we wanted.

Throughout all of the sets, I laced little bits, brought in specific architectural pieces in each set in some way, but distorted and used in different ways.

To that last point, I wanted to talk specifically about windows, doors and chairs, as the three motifs that appear in some form in each scene. The chairs all being battered and unique was interesting to me, and made me think that each was representative of the unique, battered container of each man’s life.
I think that’s a great way to put it. They were all battered and distressed and aged, but every one of them was different and I think that’s the important thing. There are all of these different points of view on life [in the play] and the chairs represented that. But they also sort of blend in, in a way that I thought made sense. They don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves.

One other thing that tied the different [acts’] sets together was that everything was [painted] in different shades, different tones of green. Act I was really dark green. Act II was that yellowy green. Act III was an olive-y green and Act IV was a blue-green.

And I should add about Act IV that Bob wanted it to feel as if [the actors] were at the bottom of the sea. That they had literally sunk, and I think there’s even a line in the play where they talk about being at the bottom of the sea. So that was the inspiration for that blue-green, almost seaweedy color of the walls.

Yeah: In Act I, I noticed there was a hanging rail, which is about where a hanging rail on a wall would be, about 10 or 11 feet above the floor. And in Act IV, I don’t remember if there’s a rail at all, or if there is one, it’s really high, like where the window is.
Exactly: The picture rail is in all of the sets except for Act IV because, again, Act IV is a departure from reality, in Bob’s mind. We leave the saloon at that point, in an odd way. It becomes about the isolation that those people feel, and at the end, they come back together, as a group — they don’t want to change. The only thing that the Act IV set has in common with the others is the color treatment, aside from the baseboards, the chairs, the tables and the actors.

Everything else was meant to be very simple. A lot of our inspiration came from a book of photos of crime scenes at the turn of the century in New York. Which is the only place you can see a lot of photos of these types of places, because no one took pictures of these places, because they were just sort of horrible. Why would you? [Laughs] But photos of crime scenes really articulated [for] and showed us what these interiors looked like. And the biggest thing that I noticed was the lack of detail: They were just hollowed-out carcasses of rooms, you know? Just places for men to go and get trashed beyond belief.

To your original question, about [Leonardo da Vinci’s] The Last Supper imagery, I’m not sure how much of that was John Conklin and how much was Bob. [Falls] did make mention to me of that imagery, at least in terms of how he wanted to stage it.

There were two reviews I read from 1990. Tony Adler’s in the Reader said, “There always seems to be a game of Name That Reference being played in Falls’s shows, and Iceman is no exception—a good contestant can catch allusions ranging from Leonardo’s Last Supper to Beckett’s Endgame.” So it does sound like Conklin’s original design triggered that image.

And Frank Rich, reviewing it for The New York Times, wrote that “The design plays a crucial role, with Mr. Conklin varying the standard set in each act to help push The Iceman Cometh out of kitchen-sink realism and into the timeless, trancelike realm it must finally inhabit. The third act, in which the barflies don their Sunday best in a doomed effort to return to the outside world, unfolds in a spooky, tilted barroom whose gates open into a blank Magritte sky.”

Rich continues: “When Hickey’s final departure allows the bar’s denizens to emerge from that stupor and retrieve their sustaining pipe dreams once more, they return to demented life by slamming all the tables together and drinking, stomping, singing and dancing their way back to oblivion. The stage picture could be from Daumier.”

It was interesting to read these old reviews because, despite being more than 20 years old, they conjured images quite similar to the play I just saw.
Absolutely. The thing is, though, that there are very few photographs of what that show was. And the Goodman had a DVD but [the play in 1990] was lit so darkly that I couldn’t really see it. And in the ’90s, too, video-recording was not the best thing in the world. [Laughs] In terms of how I viewed what Conklin had done, that came mainly through Bob, and what Bob had to say about the play. The costume designer had some production shots, there were a couple of photos, but it was mostly listening to Bob, taking those ideas and distilling, for me, what those were.

Between what Bob remembered of his collaboration with John, what little imagery was left over that I saw, and all of the research I did on my own to develop [a sense] of what these spaces were: that’s how it became what’s onstage now.

The other thing I wanted to ask you about is each act’s orientation, its sense of where “front” is, and how that changes from set to set.
The third act is the most realistic interpretation of what the space “is.” I would say that the front of the building is through that door, where the light is. The previous two sets, if you were to ask what those “were,” were for me back rooms of the saloon. And, like I said, in Act IV, all of those rules get thrown out the door. [Laughs] Logically speaking, that [last] room doesn’t exist within the bar, at all — it’s more of a psychological space.

We didn’t ultimately think of this set as a realistic set, as in we mapped it out. And, really, the play itself is not a realistic play. So we designed the set in that same manner.

Well, I can say that, at the beginning of each act, the reveal of the set was quite powerful, in how it set a tone. In particular, when the curtain rose for Act III, people around me audibly gasped. There’s definitely an unfolding sense throughout of what and where this place is, and that it’s swallowing these people alive. If Edward Hopper interpreted the whale in Pinocchio as a room, maybe — that’s for me what your Act III set was like.
What you said about the saloon swallowing these guys up: That’s a great analogy of what, ultimately, we wanted to create. And there’s a sense, hopefully, of danger, too. The idea that it could snap like a mousetrap, that it could collapse, could fall apart: The sense of danger was laced throughout and that was part of my design for the first act, where you feel like it’s so small that people might actually fall off the stage, [Laughs] really tight and really crammed. But in the third act, making it a tunnel, toward this light and that door, a kind of freedom although, also, there’s nothing there. It’s a void of light.

Rich’s review, where he mentions the “blank Magritte sky,” makes me think there might’ve been some kind of blue past the doors, with clouds. But in your set, it’s even more abstract, another step removed, just this milk-colored, pure light. How closely did you work with Natasha Katz, the lighting designer, on how light would flesh out and complete your designs?
Absolutely. Absolutely. If you look at the ground plans and what this [set design] looks like from the top, you’d see that each set is nested in the next set. And in order to light that… It’s really tricky. Act I was all the way in. Act II was directly behind that, and wrapped around. Act III was beyond that, right behind [Act II]. Each would fly out to reveal the next. The entire Act III set, much like a Transformer — its ceiling came off, like a pop can, and the whole downstage area flew out. And then the Act IV set flew in, [although] the Act IV side walls were surrounding all three [prior] sets, the whole time. They were just exposed once the other walls all flew out.

This is all a testament to the Goodman scene shop and the production managers: Those guys are wizards. It’s insane what they made happen. But back to Natasha: We had meetings about figuring how to get light into these spaces, especially since they were so specifically and so tightly lit. I don’t know how much some of the lighting ideas carried over from the original production, either, but I know that [lighting] was very important to Bob, from the very beginning. And you don’t want to have the light hit the back wall, usually, you just want it to hit the actors. You can’t see them, but we cut quite a few slots in the sides to allow lighting to come in, from the sides, to light the actors.

How did you hide those openings? Just by tucking them into places where they can’t be seen from the house?
Yeah. It’s all mysterious. [Laughs] That was a big part of the process: getting these walls to look the way we wanted them to look, and also doing it in a way that we could hide all of the theater stuff. The Act III set had an entire ceiling over it. We had to make slits in the ceiling that you couldn’t perceive [from the house]. It all happens behind the curtain. It’s really impressive.

Lastly, let’s talk if we can for a sec about doors: In the fourth act, despite the enormity of the space, there’s a door stage right that feels, in context, undersized; and then stage left, there’s just a channel, open to the ceiling, a mysterious “non-door” through which actors come in and out. There’s great tension in that last scene between stage right and stage left, and which things happen on what side of the stage. Also, at that point, we’re on the other side of what doors have represented in earlier scenes. The opening in Act I through which Hickey makes his grand entrance, for example, and the door in Act III, this heavenly gate, or mouth, which simultaneously beckons and spits back out. Doors in The Iceman Cometh are loaded entities, and that only builds as the Goodman’s production unfolds.
Totally. Instead of doors, actually, one of the things that Bob and I called them were “portals,” into and out of this world. “Door” was too realistic. The only actual door was in Act III, the most realistic, the most sober version of the space. And that’s also the only time that you see the full bar, in the most detail.

But the other three acts, you totally caught on to it: Doors are so significant, and part of the reason is that there are only one or two ways into each space. In Act I, the portal into that space was the only one. In Act II, stage right, it was more an archway, a larger opening, and then a small door stage left, which we almost got rid of, to minimize, to hone in on these doorways and give them the significance that you’re talking about. And then, what’s interesting about Act IV is, the little door stage right got added, [Laughs] kind of last-minute. Bob needed a way to get some actors out. I really loved the idea of that space not having a door at all, just the sense of that sliver, that opening into the space was right. But the extra door was a practical matter: Patrick [Andrews, as Don Parritt] needed to get out on that side and, in hindsight… I actually thought that that door needed to be taller, more out of scale, out of proportion. But Bob thought it was important that we didn’t draw any significance to it, make any statement about it. And then in Act III, that double door is so significant. We felt it was really important for it to feel realistic.

You just came back from London, correct?
Yeah, yeah. I was working on Detroit, which was at Steppenwolf [Theatre Company in fall 2010]. We did a new production of it for the National Theatre, which was fantastic.

Is there a show you’d like to design that you haven’t yet had a chance to?
Oh, God. People ask me that all the time. I fall in love with every show that I’m designing. Hm. [Pauses] That’s a hard question. It’s more about the relationship that I want to have with the director and the other designers, and looking forward to those collaborations that I enjoy the most. That’s what I really love about my job.

Well, then let me ask you a different question: Is there a set designer who’s a real touchstone for you, creatively?
Oh, sure. There are a couple of designers who I envy and who I think are fantastic. Eugene Lee is, I think, a fantastic designer, a brilliant artist. And I’d say the other designer who I’ve learned from and I respect a lot is Michael Yeargan. Those two guys are just amazing to me and I hope I can do something close to what they have someday.

The Iceman Cometh plays the Goodman Theatre in Chicago through June 17.

Anna Elise Johnson, Camp David, November 15, 1986, Reagan / Thatcher, 2011. Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gerhard Richter, more than Lichtenstein, was on Johnson’s mind while she painted deinterlaced, close crops of political speeches and summits between 1981 and 2011. But “a lot of people brought up Lichtenstein in my critiques,” Johnson tells me by phone, and there’s no doubt that her rendering of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s legs at Camp David, for example, has much in common with Lichtenstein’s black-and-white portrait of a car tire. “One can almost smell the rubber in this picture,” says exhibition cocurator James Rondeau of Tire (1962) during the audio guide for “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.” Likewise, one can almost hear Thatcher and Reagan’s shoes hitting the pavement in Johnson’s Camp David, November 15, 1986, Reagan / Thatcher (2011).

Faced with either painting, however, one is also confronted with a multitude of questions about representation, contemporary culture and painting itself. Lichtenstein’s Tire is about tires and yet, at the same time, isn’t at all. Johnson’s bifocal close-ups — she takes two slightly different points of view on the same scene, cuts them into narrow strips, then shuffles them together like playing cards — are and aren’t about political leaders or, in the case of Moscow, March 15, 2011, Blankfein / Medvedev (2011), titans of finance.

The Art Institute currently holds more than 160 Lichtenstein works, which museum Ditmer chair and contemporary curator Rondeau, with Sheena Wagstaff of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, culled over five years spent looking at thousands of drawings, completed paintings, sculptures and reproductions. Their show’s hall of mirrors is, for me, the chief reason to see it.

Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror in Six Panels, 1971. Oil and Magna on canvas. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Seven “mirrors” hang in their own room, at eye level for most adults. From a series of nearly 50 mirror-related paintings Lichtenstein created between ’69 and ’72, this subset, given their own space and the fact that some of them face one another, is a kind of installation within the exhibition. The dramatically enlarged, isolated panels from comic strips are out of sight from most angles. Ditto workaday objects as portrayed in ’60s advertisements, and the painter’s late-career nudes and “Chinese” landscapes.

At first glance, this room doesn’t even appear to contain any paintings at all. The works are momentarily confusable with their non-art twins and, unless crowded by people, also aren’t suspiciously absent any reflections of their surroundings. (Try to be alone among them, even for just a second.)

“He’s not so much interested here in mirror-as-object,” says Rondeau for the guide, “although that certainly is a part of the fascination.” The mirror paintings are, he continues, “vehicles [for Lichtenstein] to examine, and to understand, what the graphic codes that signify reflection are.” Paintings themselves are, of course, reflections of their creator’s views onto the world. And Lichtenstein’s looking-glasses continue a tradition of mirrors in painting that includes, to name one example, Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez.

Painting convincing reflections has long been “a sign of technical virtuosity,” the AIC’s wall text reminds us. In witty response, Lichtenstein’s mirrors, though made by hand and unique, employ techniques used for mass reproduction, such as Ben-Day dots and halftone gradients. The retrospective’s mirrors also include their frames and, as paintings, are unframed. Said the artist, according again to museum text, “Making a painting that is also an object bridges, somewhat, the gap between painting and sculpture.”

Representations of usually reflective objects, on the cusp of painting and sculpture, facing each other in an otherwise empty room, reflecting nothing except concepts grappled with throughout centuries of art history: This is the genius of the hall of mirrors in “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.” It’s a room of ideas in line with what Rondeau and Wagstaff told press on May 11 were their goals for the exhibition: to begin a new trajectory rather than present closure, and to offer viewers questions, not answers.

“Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective” is on display through September 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

zoe | juniper, A Crack In Everything. Photo: Gia Goodrich

Diversities of all kinds are in the South Loop between September 13, 2012 and April 6, 2013. The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago’s next season lineup, which includes per usual a variety of related discussions, master classes and family matinees, features for example an intersection between Butoh, African dance and architecture; and the beginnings of a Grotowski-influenced physical theater cycle inspired by Marc Chagall. Single tickets and subscriptions are available starting July 9.

The work of five independent female choreographers from Africa comprises a kind of mini festival September 13–15, “Voices of Strength.” See Correspondances by Haitian-Malian artist Kettly Noel and South African dancemaker Nelisiwe Xaba, Sombra by Maria Helena Pinto of Mozambique, Quartiers Libres by Nadia Beugre of Cote d’Ivoire, and Madame Plaza by Morocco’s Bouchra Ouizguen. That’s followed by (glowing) September 27–29, the aforementioned Butafritectural bonanza, presented by New York’s Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug. The work’s six dancers are American, Ethiopian, Japanese-American and Senegalese and its score is by Koji Setoh.

Gallim Dance comes to town October 11–13. The NYC ensemble performs choreography by Andrea Miller, seen recently at the Dance Center performed by Ballet Hispanico and in repertory at Hedwig Dances. Gallim’s Chicago show will be one of two full-lengths, Blush (2009) or Wonderland (2010), to be decided.

The Seldoms, from Chicago and on a roll, follow October 25–27. An evening-length work, title TK, by Carrie Hanson continues her choreographic interest in current events, exemplified by last year’s Stupormarket and February’s This Is Not A Dance Concert. It’s the Seldoms’ 10th year and fellow local group the Chicago Moving Company’s 40th; the latter presents a new work by Nana Shineflug plus four revivals, from 1984–2001, March 21–23.

Between the two come three programs from both coasts. Columbia’s theater department cocommissioned The Grand Parade from Massachusetts project Double Edge Theatre, showing January 18 and 19. The first episode of that prenominate, Chagall-inspired cycle will include as many as five students as well as possibly puppetry, object work and circus arts. (Coincidentally, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s season opener is also inspired by Chagall.)

zoe | juniper is the collaboration between Seattle choreographer Zoe Scofield and visual artist Juniper Shuey (they’re also married). A Crack in Everything, the pair’s latest, runs February 14–16 and “uses dance, performance, video projection, lighting and text to examine liminal states of mind.”

It’s been more than a decade since Stephen Petronio Company last played Chicago; the New York group ends its absence March 7–9 with Underland, created in 2003 to music by Nick Cave. Closing the season April 4–6 is the return of Mexico’s Delfos Danza Contemporánea, memorable in its local debut (in the same space) in April 2009.

For further details, visit the Dance Center site or call 312-369-8330.

FootworKINGz, from left: Trevell Johnson, Charles “King Charles” Parks and Ukemosay Sanders. Photo: Brazilionaire

Two concerts in the past week brought ten dance ensembles together. Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s “Windy City Rhythms” gave the city a head-start on National Tap Dance Day (May 25); and DanceWorks Chicago and Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago shared a stage at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie.

The scale of the two programs and their collaborative natures introduced some pacing issues and minor hiccups. But overall, these were strong examples of arts partnership and cultural exchange. “Windy City Rhythms,” which I attended May 11 at the DuSable Museum of African American History, gave an enthusiastic crowd including many kids a whirlwind tour of percussive dance and hip-hop, genially emceed by CHRP artistic director Lane Alexander. FootworKINGz, M.A.D.D. Rhythms and CHRP group BAM! all performed twice during two acts. Ayrie “Mr. Taps” King, Boom Crack! Dance Company, Martin “Tre” Dumas III and the Bronzeville Lighthouse Charter School Tap Ensemble presented one piece each. While the last and Boom Crack!, plus the “BBF Crew” from M.A.D.D. Rhythms West were all recitalish to some degree — one girl shuffled onstage late — I enjoyed seeing young dancers perform alongside seasoned professionals. No doubt the kids learned a thing or two from the experience to boot.

FootworKINGz, featured in the otherwise horrid, seizure-triggering video for Nicki Minaj and Willow Smith’s “Fireball,” had the audience roaring after both of its brief numbers. The first, set to a juked-up mix of classic tracks including Cajmere’s “Coffee Pot (It’s Time for the Percolator),” was preferable to the second, whose soundtrack simply cut and pasted together familiar slices of mediocre pop from from the likes of Ke$ha and the Black Eyed Peas, and which suffered from a janky ending. You can’t argue, however, with the speed and showmanship of these dancers: Stephan Gregory, Donnetta Jackson, Trevell Johnson, Kenneth Livingston, Brandon Love, and Eddie Martin, Jr. Great footworkin’ is pure energy and FootworKINGz are a power plant.

Props to Alexander for programming a lineup that took us from the Percolator to his own Reflections, a premiere tap quartet set to three keyboard works by Bach, tenderly played by Joffrey Ballet accompanist Mungunchimeg Buriad. It’s a lovely work, which comes casually into being and then dissolves. I hope to see it again soon.

Soloists Dumas and King couldn’t have less in common. The “Mr. Taps” routine is a wild, sequined ride, King’s seemingly stream-of-consciousness, tenor tap riffs alternating with runs of seemingly stream-of-consciousness half-jokes. Dumas’s taps have a bassy weight to them, real heft and seriousness, and long phrasing. Both are fine artists and their differences only contributed to a show whose chief reward was its variety.

I saw six of the eight programs supported by the New Stages for Dance Initiative, which I detail here. My questions about the program when it was announced two years ago centered on whether it was a handout for venues in the guise of company support. When I asked Dance/USA executive director Amy Fitterer about New Stages last summer, she allowed that in a pilot year, “conversations like these are exactly the ones we need to be having. You’re absolutely right: There are going to be certain works of dance that might not fit in these particular [first-round] venues. There really is no one-size-fits-all.” There’s no word yet on whether New Stages will go another round in Chicago and, if so, what changes might be made to the initiative. If it does continue, I hope it fosters the kind of collaboration and exchange seen May 12 between DanceWorks and Muntu.

They’re very different dance companies, both stylistically and in their objectives. Muntu is in its 40th year of presenting and maintaining dances from Africa and the African diaspora. (It’s also commissioned choreographers such as Reggie Wilson and Ronald K. Brown, who’ve built fine contemporary work on this foundation.) DanceWorks is a grad school, if you will, that stewards early-career artists.

While their joint show began a simple tag-team affair, with the two companies alternating short works, it proved much deeper as it progressed. Three of 12 dances on the bill involved artists from both troupes, working together in three quite different ways. See(in) Me, by River North Dance Chicago alumna Monique Haley, featured a male-female couple from each group in choreography that employed multiple techniques. DanceWorks’ six members performed If Ever (an Ocean) Relinquished by Bay Area choreographer Alex Ketley, to live music by Muntu’s phenomenal percussionists. (The work has had multiple scores.) And a finale choreographed by Muntu artistic director Amaniyea Payne brought the artists together in celebration.

Dancer Joan Sebastian Zamora in First Position. Photo: Bess Kargman / Sundance Selects

As good a corrective as you’ll find to notions about dance training perpetuated by Lifetime TV series Dance Moms, First Position is a clear-eyed, fair look at aspiring professionals who understand what “professional” means. Granted, this new documentary from Bess Kargman — a journalist who hung up her practice slippers at age 14 — focuses on the Youth America Grand Prix, a competition for serious ballet students mostly above the overtly sexualized and sequined fray of the Dolly Dinkle.

Any central subject in this 94-minute film could become a major classical artist. Well, anyone except First Position’s youngest player, Jules Fogarty, a preternaturally self-assured California 10-year-old who eventually decides to quit ballet. But his older sister, 12-year-old Miko, like the rest of the kids Kargman’s camera follows, is as career-minded as any would-be prima ballerina or danseur noble is by the time he or she enters high school.

First Position is as neatly organized as a ballet class. Combinations of clips delve into, in turn, the emotional, financial, physical and social costs of ballet training for devoted students and their families. And while the Fogarty siblings reinforce what you’d expect from real-world examples — their hovering mother drives a Jaguar and videotapes their private lessons — First Position is most compelling in its portraits of two courageous teenagers. Michaela DePrince, orphaned during civil war in Sierra Leone, and Joan Sebastian Zamora, from a poor family in Cali, Colombia, will handily remind if you’ve forgotten that elegance knows nothing of class.

Other assumptions about ballet dancers are likewise punctured by 11-year-old Aran Bell, a Navy-brat-without-the-brat; and his Israeli sweetheart Gaya Bommer, also 11, who’s not only a gifted technician but a shape-shifting, rambunctious stage actress.

Sound editing during the climactic awards ceremony feels suspiciously drawn out for dramatic effect, and there are too few substantive examples of real expertise transferred from teacher to student. By and large, however, First Position is among the best documentaries released to date about ballet.

First Position opens May 18 at Chicago’s Landmark Century Centre (2828 N Clark St, 773-509-4949) and at Highland Park’s Landmark Renaissance Place (1850 Second St, 847-258-7282).

Elías Aguirre, left, and Álvaro Esteban of EA&AE in ENTOMO. Photo: David Vega / Objetivo Producir

At a casual, one-time performance at 2pm on May 6, Spanish duo EA&AE performed ENTOMO for about 25 people. The Chicago debut followed Victor Alexander’s rigorous, intelligent men’s trio Line of Sighs and Hide, My Red-Eyed Beauty, a mixed-gender trio from the Humans far more engaging in performance gallery DEFIBRILLATOR than where I last saw it, Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater. (There are details in the latter work, such as director-choreographer Rachel Bunting’s automatonic, ventriloquist’s-dummy jaw movements, that are too easily missed in a black-box presentation.)

ENTOMO started simply: Álvaro Esteban, wearing all-black business casual and rubber-soled shoes, strolled toward the center of the space with his hands in his pockets and lay prone on the polished, white-painted concrete. Elías Aguirre, the other half of EA&AE, followed suit, dressed the same only in a plum-colored shirt, and draped his upper body over Esteban’s back. The sound of insects chirping, maybe a field recording from a forest floor, filled the sparse, silver-walled space. The men, Aguirre first, started to make small, hyperspecific movements. The work’s score passed through a slanted take on “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess and into a slick set of Saturday-night cocktail beats.

The two were brothers or sparring adolescents or grown rivals but also convincingly entomological. Their presentient actions were skillfully modulated to be action-packed but not appetent, data-rich but not diarrheal. Inverting the antler-locking bouts of young bull elk, Aguirre and Esteban butted back-to-back more often than head-to-head. (They also broke for bits of unison, suggesting synchrony — a grand design? — inside ritualistic opposition.) The final stage of their encounter was epic in short strokes like calligraphy from a wise hand.

Suggesting the brief lifespan of most insects, they made their way back after about ten minutes to their opening arrangement, where they spasmed before finally being still once again. The whites were all I saw of Esteban’s eyes as he gave himself fully to this stage-death, completed to the sound of insects chirping, maybe a field recording from a forest floor.

Oversized expectations preceded the work’s local premiere — it’s received raves and awards. How satisfying to see the hype justified through the thoughtful evocation of life in miniature.

EA&AE presented ENTOMO at DEFIBRILLATOR with the support of SPAIN arts & culture, the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain. The pair’s American tour concluded with three performances during the Kennedy Center’s “Look Both Ways: Street Arts Across America” Festival in Washington, D.C.

Here are the internets I found interesting during the past week, sorted by source and teased by pullquote:

From twitpic: “It was the first movie I acted in, if you don’t count being killed in the Kung-Fu movie ‘Ninja Turf.’ Love is more important than material possessions.” | From imgur via Reddit: “Man drills magnets into arm to mount ipod” | From Matt Richardson dot com: “Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.” | From The Atlantic Wire: “According to Germany’s Der Spiegel, German police shot only 85 bullets in all of 2011.” | From hashtag battle dot com: #love vs. #hate | From Guerrilla Semiotics: “The main difference between this Berlin audience and, say, the Melbourne audience which might never walk out of a boring performance, but will check phones like nobody’s business, is not that one is rude and the other not…but that one engages, and the other disengages from the social, communal nature of the encounter.” | From WJXT-TV via MSNBC: “They feature a hoodie with crosshairs aimed at the chest. A bag of Skittles is tucked in the pocket and a hand is holding a can resembling iced tea.”

From The Guardian:

“Gay rights in the US, state by state” | “We, as a city, are in the throes of a full on civil rights crisis.” | “One participant in the program said police got him ‘high as fuck.’ ”

From Metro Weekly’s poliglot blog: “But, that is not [sic] the circumstances in which he makes these comments.” | From Mark Twain, via the hairpin: “I suppose there is nothing like it in heaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and show off.” | From the Kuwait Times: “Different professions have different tastes.” | From the Idaho Statesman: “Two days of record high temperatures and two days of record rainfall the same week in late April sent 26,000 cubic feet per second surging into the Boise River dam system.”

From YouTube:

“She appeared in Higglety Pigglety Pop! What am I saying? She appeared in every book I did.” | “Rare footage of Steven Spielberg directing his cast and crew on the set of Jurassic Park in 1992.” | “Alinea chefs prepare a new course comprised of 86 individual components.” | “Double Oh Double Oh” | “When you look down…and you look up, that is, for me anyway, the most important in dance.” | “Johan Kobborg on pointe!”

From Kickstarter: “He Said She Said That’s What She Said” | From The Daily Beast: “Are the banks too big to jail—or is Washington’s revolving door at [sic] to blame?” | From Bits of Freedom: “Digital rights movement Bits of Freedom calls upon other countries to follow the Dutch example.” | From Dance Spirit: “Those legs! That panache!” | From Gawker: “AJ and Nick are just play-fighting to get pageviews.” | From ArtsJournal blog Artopia: “Art critics never appear anywhere before noon.” | From The Week: “The classiest flash mob ever?”

From The New York Times:

“Houses that sold for $1 million before the crisis have been turned into grow houses, equipped with the high-intensity lights, water and air-filtering systems necessary to produce potent, high-quality marijuana.” | “It may just involve just a couple of mouse clicks, or maybe just one mouse click, but the point of that mouse click, a major point of that mouse click, is to inform others that you like whatever that means.” | “A chandelier hangs over the table, but it’s not turned on; his computer provides the only light.” | “The dual explosions forged a hellish landscape of incinerated corpses, burning vehicles and a billowing plume of smoke visible throughout Damascus.” | “What’s missing? The outrage.” | “For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son.” | “Dancers wore costumes designed by Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy and Gilles Mendel of J. Mendel, with Swarovski earrings designed by Jamie Wolf.” | “He never screams at us. He never raises his voice. He makes you feel like you’re capable, and it’s like: Just do it. It’s not a big deal.” | “ ‘Amtrak tells me they have more delays here than anywhere else in the system.’ More delays than anywhere else in the Chicago area? No, he explained. ‘In the entire United States.’ ” | “ ‘I am tir-ed, I am tir-ed,’ she chants in a sing-song, childlike rhythm.” | “If you live in the suburbs of Chicago, where I’m from, vampires go crazy and start feeding on squirrels.”

From Interchange Project: “How do you do great work if you’re always being interrupted?” | From GigaOM: “The format of a single device does not change the fundamental ecosystem underneath it, and this shiny tablet has taken media companies’ eyes off of the ball.” | From the Chicago Reader: “If only it were so simple.” | From A Good Day’s Work: “I started this project because while it is not considered to be among the most ‘beautiful’ of Chicago’s streets, Western Avenue is a perfect place to document the humanness of Chicago, the positive and the negative.” | From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Respectful Yo Mama Jokes.

Inbox zero.

This blog is 400 posts old as of this you’re reading right here. (It’s been 175 weeks since my first post, for the record.)

Now, I ain’t tryna be precious about it, I’m just sayin’. Let’s round up ten posts you dear readers have particularly liked, or hated, or whatever — clicked on a lot — and then it’s back to work for the both of us.

“make money but don’t work too hard — make somebody else pay to make it — and don’t smoke too much but drink enough to relax, and stay off the streets”
February 8, 2009

“It’s all very funny and easy and the characters are beautifully drawn, pinned-together muslin mockups of odd interests, irrational anxieties, raging hormones and idle minds.”
February 21, 2009

On Two Experiences Yesterday Evening, Specifically Dean Wareham’s and Britta Phillips’ Concert at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Being in a Car Accident Placing Around 6 Or 7 On A 1–10 Scale of Car-Accident-Seriousness.
March 9, 2009

My review of Orpheus and Eurydice by Compagnie Marie Chouinard remains popular. Could the photos of scantily clad performers have anything to do with that popularity? Ha! What do you think this is, the internet?
April 18, 2009

Here’s a review of Cupola Bobber’s Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me. Damn that was a good show.
April 19, 2009

To this day, I’ve reviewed Nederlands Dans Theater only once.
June 17, 2009

This is my first in-depth look at the choreography of Julie Mayo. Keep an eye on this blog for a follow-up with Mayo about her recent programming venture, and with Jessie Young, a performer-collaborator on the project.
August 30, 2009

This interview with Edward Villella was published on the eve of Miami City Ballet’s first performances in Chicago proper.
September 25, 2009

This interview with Hema Rajagopalan was published on the eve of Natya Dance Theatre’s 35th anniversary.
September 26, 2009

This is a review of EMPIRE (Art & Politics) by Superamas.
October 6, 2010 

Whether this is your first or your 400th visit to trailerpilot, thanks so much for reading. And thanks to Sauce for the source image above and for her thoughts upon her 400th blog post, not unlike my own today. Cheers.