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"Summer Dance Heats Up
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Three Beloit College choreographers—Chris Johnson, Dmitri Peskov and Kate Corby—will join forces for the Chicago premiere of Chelonia Dance, Friday and Saturday, July 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts in Chicago. The 24-member Chelonia Dance will feature Beloit College faculty and dance students as well as graduates of the program and members of several professional companies in the Chicago area. The program will include seven works, four new to Chicago, by the three Beloit College choreographers.
Chris Johnson, director of the Beloit College dance program, has performed and choreographed professionally in California, Wisconsin and Illinois and was awarded the Laureate and Grand Prix at the Seventh International Competition: Festival of Choreographic Collectives in Moscow in 2004. Chelonia Dance will perform two of her works new to Chicago: Holding Patterns, a visceral exploration of the theme found in its title, in which five women hold back, down and off and hold each other up. Selected for the 2003 Gala at the American College Dance Festival Association Regional Festival (ACDFA), the piece features Chicago dancers Kate Corby, Allyson Esposito, Maggie Koller, Allisa-Zee Hartmann and Leah Raffanti. Held/Accountable is her gut-wrenching and evocative commentary on the AIDS pandemic, performed by students at the 2005 ACDFA Gala and by students and graduates at these Chicago performances.
Dmitri Peskov is the recipient of the 2008 Illinois Arts Council Grant for Choreographic Achievement and the 2006 Dance Chicago Festival Choreography Award and is artistic director of Dmitri Peskov and Dancers, a Chicago-based company. He will perform Stray Dog, a dance suite in three parts, including the Chicago premiere of the first part, “Red Petals.” The piece is inspired by the Stray Dog cabaret, a meeting place in St. Petersburg for artists, poets and musicians in the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the second half of the program, an ensemble of Beloit dance students will perform his new work Earth, a ritualistic dance set to Russian folk music.
Completing the program will be three works by Kate Corby, recently appointed to the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dance Department and a Beloit College alumna. Corby also has served on the faculty at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago and directs the LIVE ANIMALS Performance Collective. She will open with In the Middle of Things, a 2005 work performed by four students. With a Spartan aesthetic, an athletic movement vocabulary and a simple spatial study, the piece rapidly transports the viewer to a surreal, nearly nightmarish alternative world. Her dance theatre work Liquidate, featuring Chicago dancers Paige Cunningham, Tess Dworman and Caitlin Marz, explores mortality, crises and violence. Corby will also perform her solo Yoke, a 2007 work inspired by her research on the Japanese performance form of Butoh.
A reception at the Ruth Page Center will follow the Friday evening performance to celebrate this new event on the Chicago dance calendar.
Chelonia Dance performs Friday and Saturday, July 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn Parkway, in Chicago. Tickets are $20 (students/seniors $15) and are on sale at ticketweb.com and at the Ruth Page Center box office, 312-337-6543.
The program is generously underwritten by Dawn and Jack Rozran and Mary Mikva and Steven Cohen.
Click here to read Lucia Mauro's segment on Chelonia that aired on Chicago public radio July 10th.