For WTTW News theater critic Hedy Weiss, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s recent Chicago run brought back vivid memories. She first saw the company in New York City in 1972.
Auditorium Theatre
During the past couple of weeks, three of Chicago’s most formidable contemporary dance troupes — the Hubbard Street Dance Company, Giordano Dance Chicago and Deeply Rooted Dance Theater — have turned in terrific performances.
Chicago’s dance scene is in high gear these days with formidable performances by ballet, modern, jazz, tap, Spanish and classical Indian companies on stages in and around the city. A case in point was this past Saturday’s one-night-only world premiere performance of “Memoirs of Jazz in the Alley” by South Chicago Dance Theatre.
There is a palpable electricity in the air whenever the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater arrives on stage at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. A recent performance featured pieces both old and new.
As any traveler will tell you, a trip to Spain is invariably a great treat. But an evening spent with Chicago's Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater is, unquestionably, an ideal temporary substitute.
An estimated 2,000 people cheered the company’s superb artists as they took to the stage Saturday to perform a series of works, including a preview of “Goshen, The Story of Exodus.”
It was an evening of multiple celebrations Saturday as Chicago’s Ensemble Español Spanish dance company arrived on the stage of the Auditorium Theatre in full regalia to mark the return of live performance in the landmark hall following its pandemic shutdown.
Watching the company as it performed Boris Eifman’s latest work, the feeling that his dancers are not well served by his relentlessly madhouse style of movement – manic, extreme, repetitive – could not be denied.
In promoting his first work of fiction, “The President is Missing,” former President Bill Clinton on Thursday in Chicago demonstrated that he remains a super-smart, silky-tongued talker with both a healthy ego and an easily self-deprecating sense of humor.
Geoffrey Revisits 100 Years of History at Wrigley Field
Geoffrey Baer turns the lights on at the Auditorium Theatre, tells us where the hulking gas holding tanks went, and revisits 100 years of history at Wrigley Field in this week’s edition of Ask Geoffrey.
