2012 - 10YRS
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A platform to inform, discuss, and share The Seldoms' creative process. Here you'll get an inside view into our work and find out where we'll be throughout the season. Join us as we share behind-the-scenes action.
Photo credit: William Frederking (top), T.W. Li (top) & Dan Merlo (right)


Posted on May 17, 2012
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FLASHBACK #3: CONVERGENCE (2008)

Similar to the moment of looking down on Hamlin Park Pool from the second floor dance studio and wishing to see a dance there (GIANT FIX - 2005), the big garage space in Pilsen lived in my imagination as a future site for performance. I actually did live there - or rather right next door, and stored my bicycle and Seldoms set pieces in the garage with my landlord’s permission.
The last garage tenant was the Streets and Sanitation Dept, but they had vacated years ago, leaving the place in pretty rough shape. Nonetheless, it’s sheer size (18,000 square feet), the skylights across the length of the space, and the presence of a leftover cargo container made this dank and raw space a kind of wondrous place best appreciated by city folks.
With architect Joel Huffman, principal of Vertu and a regular Seldoms collaborator (and now, my husband), we set out to design a live performance event in the garage. We brought along Peter Gogarty (video), Julie Ballard (tech & light) and our costume regular - the wonderful Lara Miller. We spent weeks prepping the garage - there are some closets along the back wall that run underneath the ‘L’ that are so foul and dark we never entered them. It was a clean-up of massive scale.

This was the site-specific work that challenged us all. Some particulars:

  • In order to get our “amusement license”, Joel was required by the Chicago Fire Department to rebuild one of the garage walls with cement block, just days out.
  • Julie, with just one assistant, hung theater lights throughout to transform the garage and give us a rock concert.
  • The deluge of rain on Saturday flooded a performance area and had Joel running to buy sandbags and Julie running a shop vac in a puddle of oil, mud & water.
  • Our “dressing room” was a skanky small room with concrete floor furnished with a few old bench seats from a van.
  • Cara and Whitney performed a bold, gymnastic duet inside the rusted cargo container that still smelled like oil.
  • Damon - with superhuman strength - shimmied up a 2-story beam in just seconds to perform on a somewhat suspicious loft platform. I was always anxious about that moment for him, but it was actually later in the piece that he bit it, literally…right through his tongue while diving into the cargo container. Post-show stitches.

I know there are many other memories that the artists keep from this unforgettable project. Joel realized a magnificent group of architectural structures that anchored and inspired the whole of “Convergence”, which dance writer Zac Whittenburg called “large-scale, essentially minimalist archisculptures in the vein of Zaha Hadid and Richard Serra”. Our goal was to create both a space and an event to engage with; people were invited to come when they wanted, grab a drink, watch the looping performance once, twice, three times, and just hang for an evening in this transformed truck garage that you could easily have driven right by.

I drove by recently and noticed there is finally a permanent tenant - a guy that refurbishes old cars. He probably wonders why the pile of rocks in the corner is so artfully arranged.

~Carrie Hanson, Artistic Director

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Posted on May 3, 2012
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FLASHBACK PHOTOS

GIANT FIX/dance in a pool (2005) Photo by T.W. Li

Read FLASHBACK below.

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Flashback #2: GIANT FIX/dance in a pool

The second in our “Flashback Friday” series is already out of chronological order, fast-forwarding to 2005. I don’t know why I’m racing forward, other than it’s May and I’m thinking about being outside…though not necessarily dancing outside. Certainly one of our most memorable productions was GIANT FIX, the dance in a pool. Staged in the outdoor, Olympic-sized pool at Hamlin Park, the work was a dance for six courageous dancer-athlete-heroes and the collective effort of a big group of Chicago creatives.  With imaginative, sculptural costuming by Lara Miller; amorphous and geometric animation by Lisa Barcy; live, improvised sonic textures by Andy Hasenpflug and Corbett Lunsford; installation by Kevin Newhall and Doug Stapleton; and lighting design/technical direction by Margaret Nelson and her huge team, GIANT FIX somehow came together and was called “one of the best dance moments of the decade” by TimeOut Chicago.

GIANT was made within the Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artist’s program, a terrific granting program that awards a significant sum to realize a project on a larger scale, and emphasizing process, research, and inquiry, involves an ongoing conversation around each Artist’s project between the dancemakers and the consortium members. Without the support of CDF, GIANT would not have been undertaken. 

The work premiered on the first weekend of October 2005, and was restaged in 2007.  Everyone who danced in the 2005 premiere remembered the EXTREME COLD. As it goes with Chicago weather, it was an unseasonable 90 degrees during technical rehearsals and then plummeted to 45 degrees on opening night. Dancing barefoot on the very cold pool floor, our feet were like blocks of ice. I had placed some heating pads around the edge of the pool for dancers to stand on during their “off-stage” moments.

Beyond the challenges posed by October weather, the GIANT production included all of the logistical tricks that go with site-specific work. Christina Gonzalez-Gillett (‘05 and ‘07) reminded me that there had been an episode of ER being shot on the same block and Danny Glover was hanging around. The ER folks tried unsuccessfully to shut down our show, but they did rent a quieter power generator so we wouldn’t ruin their shot. There was also a boxing tournament happening inside the park fieldhouse, and the cheers, boos and whistles mixed with our sound score.

Other memories…Bruce Ortiz (‘05 and ‘07) remembers dislocating his shoulder and tearing a ligament during dress rehearsal; Jen Grisham (‘05 and ‘07) stepped in with some amateur PT skills and literally taped Bruce’s arm on for the performance run. (There were no understudies.)

Julius Carter (’07) remembers GIANT as his first professional show, right out of college. (Julius is in Spiderman on Broadway now…perhaps flying around the pool was good training.) Matthew Coley (’07) felt it was one of the hippest dance projects he’d been a part of and one of the best, despite the working conditions (summer rehearsals in the spacious, but sweat-box Pilsen studio and feet torn up by the pool floor).

For Amanda McAlister and Cara Sabin (’07), it was their first project with The Seldoms. They’ve both stuck around and contributed so greatly to our work – I guess dancing in GIANT was their first test and taste of what was to come…performance on concrete, in water, 3-hour endurance events. We do observe that there are no divas dancing with The Seldoms.

For me, I remember looking out the dance studio window that overlooks the pool and thinking something should happen in that big, sunken, white space. And I remember not knowing what I was getting myself into – the scale of production and organization. And finally, the absolute pleasure of performing and witnessing the performance of my dedicated dancers before a crowd of people drinking hot chocolate, on bleachers on a crisp, cold night in a Chicago neighborhood.

-Carrie Hanson, Artistic Director

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FLASHBACK VIDEO

GIANT FIX/dance in a pool
October 2005, Hamlin Park Pool, Chicago
Performance by Christina Gonzalez-Gillett, Jen Grisham, Krenly Guzman, Carrie Hanson, Brian Robert Hinkle, Bruce Ortiz
Music Performance by Andy Hasenpflug and Corbett Lunsford

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Posted on April 26, 2012
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WCdance from Taipei, Taiwan, will be with The Seldoms in Chicago for the entire month of June to share ideas, movement, and inspiration and to develop new dances.

Under the artistic direction of Wenchung Lin, a former dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, WCdance has ignited the Taipei scene in its short five years. In that time, Wenchung has developed his acclaimed “Small” series of work, configuring innovative perspectives for audience in what he calls “Miniature Theater”. The series began in 2008 with a work called simply “Small”, which was danced inside a glass 3 square meter box. “Small Songs” followed in 2009, staged to both Eastern and Western love songs and, again, played out within a confined space. In 2010, the performance space opened up with “Small Puzzles”, but was filled with large geometric forms - puzzle pieces - ordered and reordered by the dancers. The fourth work of the “Small” series is currently in development - “Small Nanguan” - about the traditional Taiwanese music form, nanguan.

The heart of this creative exchange with WCdance involves each artistic director making a new work with the other company - a tremendous opportunity for both choreographers and all the dancers! We’re interested in Wenchung’s blend of Eastern and Western influences and material in his work and approach; in his re-imagining and ordering of the performance space; in his extended inquiry inside his “Small” project; and in his extraordinary physical articulation and power.

Stay tuned for much more about Wenchung and WCdance in the coming months!
And SAVE THE DATE for our shared concert at Ruth Page Center for the Arts -
June 28, 29, 30 and July 1.


Our exchange with WCdance is funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund.

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