A trio of dance works exploring memory, grief, healing and personal histories are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art this month as part of the museum’s Chicago Performs platform reserved for local performing artists.
Red Clay Dance, Robyn Mineko Williams and Helen Lee each premiere works in the four-day festival, running Sept. 18-21 at the MCA. By design, Chicago Performs gives a lot of artistic license to present pieces in any stage of development. Red Clay and Williams have opted for staged productions in the museum’s 300-seat Edlis Neeson Theater, while Lee presents more of a guided, progressive tour leading audience members a few blocks to Lake Michigan.
Williams is preparing a soft premiere of “To Leave You,” a danced kind of curio cabinet with tidbits and memories she wants to leave for 10-year-old son, Knox. It’s not precisely a companion to her recent “Hisako’s House,” a piece set at her late grandmother’s home exploring Japanese American internment during World War II; “To Leave You” is more a continuation of Williams’ desire to interrogate her own personal histories, reflecting forward and back from her vantage point in the middle of her life.
“This is only thing I feel in my gut that I want to try to say or explore is this idea rooted in a package for Knox,” she said.
That meant bringing in familiar faces, like composer Nate Kinsella, who just wrote music for another of Williams’ projects with Seattle-based company Whim W’him, puppeteer Julia Miller from Manual Cinema, who partnered with Williams years ago for the whimsical “Mariko’s Magical Mix,” and fellow Hubbard Street Dance Chicago alums Jessica Tong and Jason Hortin, who along with Williams are returning to the stage after long absences for “To Leave You.
“It’s been magical,” she said. “There’s something that is so relieving about just dancing. This is what I know how to do. I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life doing stuff I feel I don’t know how to do. And watching my friends dance and working with them — it’s not very much different than it was before.”
Nate Kinsella and Robyn Mineko Williams in “To Leave You,” which opens the Chicago Performs festival with performances at the MCA. (Chris Strong)
Chicago Performs is a series originally imagined by Tara Aisha Willis, who shepherded the museum’s live arts offerings through the pandemic, and continued by associate curator Laura Paige Kyber. Since then, the museum has hired a new chief curator, Joey Orr, who has a background in performance, and secured a $10 million gift to ramp up programming in the Edlis Neeson Theater, an effort led by director of performance and public programming Moira Brennan. Brennan joined the MCA in March after two decades as director of the MAP fund, a major distributor of performing arts grants.
It’s a rare example of a dance presenter currently building momentum — reintroducing an enviable theater to artists and audiences at the same time as lauded small performance venues have closed. And there is proof of concept: Trinity Irish Dance Company made its MCA debut this year. Visceral Dance Chicago has found it to be a suitable compromise between the 1200-seat Harris Theater and its studio black box in Avondale. And Chicago Performs, now in its fourth year, is more ambitious than ever, including the festival’s first-ever engagement with the size and scale Red Clay Dance brings to the table.
“It hasn’t been perfect,” said Red Clay artistic director Vershawn Sanders Ward, but she’s seen a genuine desire and openness to visit long-standing issues that contributed to dance companies like Hubbard Street retreating from the MCA: its notoriously hard floor, lack of dressing room space and the impossibility of some technical elements. “We have this space in Chicago,” she said. “They want to welcome in dancers and choreographers. As a Chicago artist, I’m always like, how can we put more Chicago artists on all the stages in the city?”
“Freedom Square: The Black Girlhood Altar” was intentionally made for the MCA as a response to a mixed-media installation of the same name premiered at the museum in 2021 by A Long Walk Home artists Scheherazade Tillet and Robert Narciso. The altar is composed of found objects commemorating the lives of Black women and girls who have been victims of violence. Among them is Rekia Boyd, who was fatally shot by an off-duty Chicago Police detective in 2012; Marcie Gerald, a 14-year-old student at Homewood-Flossmoor High School attacked while walking home from the library; Lyniah Bell, a 19-year-old shot and killed in a Chatham apartment in 2019; and Breonna Taylor, killed by police in 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky, during a forced entry operation.
“So, it’s kind of full circle for the altar to come back to the MCA in a slightly different way,” she said. “I’m very aware of the placement of it, but I wanted it to be a staged experience and not a site-specific work.”
Ward was most drawn to the altar itself, plus a collection of locket pendants and a rain jacket with barrettes and other bits and bobs used to style girls’ hair. She incorporates these into the choreography, scenic elements and digital media, combined with personal stories from the Red Clay dancers performing the work. Singer/songwriter Jamila Woods has created an original composition. It’s a sacred space, she said, but not only an expression of grief and trauma. Indeed, “Freedom Square” isn’t intended to be sad. It’s inherently hopeful, filled with memories of these and other women’s lives, not their deaths.
“Some days it hits heavier than others,” she said. “I don’t know if something better will come out of that particular incident or that particular life being lost, but there’s always an opportunity to honor and remember their life and who they were — then it’s not framed by what happened in that moment. Let’s continue to honor and uplift.”
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.
Chicago Performs runs Sept. 18-21 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 200 E. Chicago Ave.; tickets $30 at 312-397-4041 and mcachicago.org
