The Dance Center Season 51 Passes | Fuse. Converge. Connect.

Season 51 | Fuse. Converge. Connect. — Spotlighting Intergenerational Dancemaking and Performance from September 2024 through May 2025

"Season 51 is the first Dance Center season as part of Columbia College Chicago's newly created School of Theatre and Dance and an opportunity for all of us to come together through dance to connect, witness, research, experiment, practice, imagine, and grow." - Artistic Director Meredith Sutton

Experience dance created and performed by established artists, student dancemakers, and elders and move with one another through the Friday Class Series. Together Season 51 is an opportunity to get at the heart of why dance is a ubiquitous phenomenon across all societies and cultures.

As a Pass Holder, you can

- Save 50% over purchasing single tickets to each offering a la carte and

- Prioritize opportunities to be connected with your own body, to be inspired by dance artists pushing boundaries, and to meet other dance enthusiasts this coming year.

Box Office staff will contact Pass Holders via email prior to each concert to reserve your preferred days and times along with information about each instructor for the Friday Class Series and friendly "don't miss class" reminders.

All programming is general admission and takes place at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S Michigan AVE, Chicago, IL 60605 except for the Mural Dances in October.

Season 51 Programming...

EXPERIENCING TIME / EMBODYING RHYTHM SYMPOSIUM (Sept 19-20, 2024)
There is no denying the presence of rhythm in our everyday. Rhythmic patterns and cadences in movement, music, and language spawn multiple forms and genres and as many ways to perceive them. How it looks isn’t the full story. Rhythmic ingenuity through devising, combining shared space and time, and making connections across different ways of being in the body, are distinctive attributes of the dance curriculum at Columbia College Chicago. The 2024 Symposium raises the question of how do bodies, spaces, places, identities, relationships, and power constructs support rhythm? What corporal geographies subvert it? What will multiple vantage points reveal about this phenomenon that saturates everything and everyone? From the individual to the community, from the simple to the complex, rhythm is the thread.

SHE’S AUSPICIOUS BY MYTHILI PRAKASH (Sept 26-27, 2024)
Blurring the lines between Goddess and Woman to explore the paradox of femininity, She’s Auspicious is a dance and music work rooted in Bharatanatyam whose starting point is Mythili Prakash’s study of her own identity as a woman, a mother, a performer, a person of color born and raised in the US, and a person of privilege – an upper-caste practitioner of a dance form with a complicated history of erasure. Featuring an all-female cast, including dancer/choreographer Prakash, three musicians, and a four-person ensemble, this work references mythological and cultural practices surrounding the Goddess, as well as the societal expectations of femininity.

MURAL DANCES (Oct. 11-12, 2024)
Synapse Arts' Rachel Damon (‘05) activates Columbia’s extraordinary murals in site-specific daytime performances by students. Exact mural locations TBA.

FREE FALL: Student Performance Night (Nov. 14-15, 2024)
Experience original, brand new, short works by student choreographers selected by faculty from an open application process. Lit by Theatre’s rising lighting designers, these eagerly anticipated concerts feature audiences as electric as the performers.

CHOREOGRAPHIC PROJECTS (Nov. 21-22 & Dec. 5-6, 2024)
Witness what in-depth, collaborative research into choreography in performance yields from student choreographers setting original works on sibling dance artists whom they have auditioned and invited into their 12-week process. Each weekend’s program is distinct.

PAMOJA: Repertory Performance Works (Dec. 12-13, 2024)
PAMOJA – Swahili for “together” - features works set on students by visiting artists South Chicago Dance Theatre’s Kia Smith and Synapse Arts’ Rachel Damon ('05), faculty members Bevara Anderson, Allen Desterhaft with Kelsa Rieger-Haywood, Darrell Jones, and alum Camila Rivero Pooley (‘18). Friday’s matinee performance includes a work created by Dance For Health study participants from Central West Regional Senior Center under the direction of Susan Imus.

MARAÑA’S ORGANISMO (Jan. 23-25, 2025)
An immersion into an organism created from wool, sounds, colors and textures combined with circus acrobatics, dance, rhythms, and music. The journey through the complexities and layers of the most basic elements of existence weaves a being out of threads, hands, and bodies to unfold a new world carried by the physical precision and blind trust between the performers. Organismo’s Idea and Performance Director Paula Riquelme is a Chilean artist based in Berlin and is presented in partnership with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, the largest event dedicated to the art form in North America.

MUSICAL THEATRE DANCE CABARET (February 20-21, 2025)
Dive into the newly created School of Theatre and Dance with student choreographers and performers from both Theatre and Dance bringing their original take to musical theatre dance numbers.

B-SERIES FESTIVAL: B-YOND BORDERS (February 27-March 1, 2024)
B-yond Borders: Celebrating the kinships and impact of Global Afrodiasporic street and social dancing, co-curated by Daniel “BRAVEMONK” Haywood and Kelsa “K-Soul” Rieger-Haywood, brings together guest artists, students and community members to honor the nuance and specificity of particular Afro street and social dances, the relationships and influences between them, and their immense global impact across bodies, disciplines and cultures through workshops, conversations, film screenings and a dance jam including performances and battles. B-yond Borders features pioneering and world-renowned Afro Dance artist and Sarah Olaniran, A.K.A. “Sayrah Chips” as well as influential local, regional, and student artists.

CHICAGO SOLO SPOTLIGHT FESTIVAL (Mar. 13-15, 2025)
The Dance Center continues to spotlight Chicago dance artists who are pushing the boundaries of the form. The 2025 Festival features two world premieres: THICK: a deconstructed freak show (working title) is a multimedia solo performance by Jenn Freeman | Po’Chop that confronts notions of femininity and civility and calls into question the creation of otherness. Freeman asks, “What does the spatiotemporal history of Black women, and our bodies, tell us about consent, commodification, and spectacle?” Origin Story is a dance-theater one-them-show from Nora Sharp, born from the outer space of trans dis-certainty that journeys down a choreographic and comedic rabbit hole of intertwined sci-fi futurism and personal history. Shaped by repression, resistance, and modestly-managed anxiety, Origin Story charts a pathway beyond queer and trans legibility.

SPRING FORWARD: Student Performance Night (Apr. 10-11, 2025)
Tap into the energetic lift of early spring harnessed through the soaring creativity of student choreographers collaborating with Theater lighting designers on original, brand new, short works.

16 (Apr. 17-19, 2025)
Red Clay Dance Company makes its highly anticipated return to the Dance Center in a program exploring emotional depth, technical prowess, and thought-provoking themes. The concert features a world premiere by legendary, award-winning choreographer Bebe Miller alongside Artistic Director and inaugural Walder Platform Awardee Vershawn Sanders-Ward's re-staging of Written on the Flesh. 16 is presented in partnership with Red Clay Dance Company.

DELVE: Faculty & Alumni Concert (May 8-9, 2025)
The Dance Center’s renowned professional dance faculty and alumni choreograph new works performed by students.

WITH INCANDESCENCE: BFA Capstone Concert (May 15-16, 2025)
Season 51 culminates with the graduating class of Dance BFAs Elizabeth Abel, Kayla Hansen, Konnie Kakridas, Aly Owens, and Rhianna Young’s original works drawing upon their years of study and practice.

Season 51 is supported in part by Alphawood Foundation, Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Kalapriya Center for Indian Arts, Illinois Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Additional support for She’s Auspicious is provided by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

Pictured left to right: Isabel Bastardo, Carissa Bracken, Bella Shea, Mia Garza, Aly Owens from Mosaic in Motion by Se'Niyah Tribble; Photo by William Frederking.

Host or Publisher The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago