LXIV (six.four)

Premiering to a sold-out audience in 2025, LXIV (six.four) is an electrifying fusion of chess, dance, and storytelling that brings the game’s strategic brilliance to life. The performance unfolds in two dynamic halves where each chess piece is brought to life as a fully realized character navigating power, hierarchy, and the complexity of the roles they have been assigned.
The production’s titular work LXIV (six.four) anchors the first half of the program and features an original, ensemble-driven work curated by Artistic Director KC Bevis and Rehearsal Director Phillip Wood. Built through collaboration and the amplification of each dancer’s individual strengths, Crash artists use the structure of a chessboard to frame human relationships, hierarchy, and pressure. Part battle tactics, part storytelling, the work introduces the players and transforms the chessboard into a human landscape, revealing how we are born into uneven power, enter systems already in motion, and make choices that carry lasting consequences.

In Act II, James Morrow’s Immortal Games dives into the strategic brilliance of chess and the intensity of dance battles. Inspired by the legendary 1851 Immortal Chess Game, the work translates risk, sacrifice, and precision from the board into the body through raw athleticism and real-time decision making. The sound score was composed by Rob Flax during the original presentation of the work, using a custom-built MIDI chessboard that generates sound in response to each moving chess piece. The dance score was largely improvised and guided by a set of rules that mirror the structure of the game itself, allowing strategy and instinct to unfold throughout every aspect of the work.

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Host or Publisher Chicago Dance Crash