Since April, the Chicago Human Rhythm Project has been traversing the city, bringing percussive dance into neighborhoods far and wide as part of a two-month festival called Stomping Grounds. The series kicked off April 2 at the Chicago Cultural Center, followed by five neighborhood performances featuring one or two headliners and a rotating cast of local rhythmic dance companies.
Each year, CHRP has increased the roster of participating companies, widening the lens of what they include as percussive and rhythmic dance. This year Chicago Dance Crash, which blends hip-hop, acrobatics and modern/contemporary dance, was included as the first company in the festival not specializing in some kind of foot drumming (i.e. American tap dance, flamenco, Bharatanatyam, Irish step dance, etc.).
I attended the series’ final neighborhood show Wednesday at Garfield Park Conservatory, a picture-perfect evening in Chicago and a glorious setting for, well, anything really. Though not the most conventional of concert venues, a portable stage in center of the Conservatory’s gorgeous Show House and another in front of Horticulture Hall’s beautiful tile mosaic fountain provided the perfect backdrop for Chicago Dance Crash, Stone Soup Rhythms (CHRP’s resident tap company, previously called BAM!), Natya Dance Theatre and Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater.
And now that it’s in its fourth season, Stomping Grounds appears to be getting the formula down. Increased exposure from inclusion in the Chicago Parks District’s Night Out in the Parks has led to an uptick in participation at these free neighborhood performances, but popularity inevitably brings challenges.
Well-attended events which travel between spaces can get a bit unwieldy. They become like an aggressive game of musical chairs; everyone wants a seat with the best view and only the strongest survive. I knew going into this performance that it could potentially be a little like Black Friday at Walmart. Fortunately, most dance patrons are polite and considerate, and I’d known to call ahead and save myself a seat. Those who don’t have that luxury are left to duke it out for their spots, and it helps to just go with the flow and be good-spirited about the thing (after all, it’s free …).
Families with young kids opted to camp out at the edge of the stage, and must have felt better about sitting on the ground when the amazing athletes of Dance Crash somersaulted into the crowd and crouched beside them awaiting their next entrance. They got to witness, at eye level and mere inches away, the flurry of footwork produced by the feet of Natya and Ensemble Espanol’s dancers, and received winks and nods from the charismatic hoofers of Stone Soup Rhythms.
For a kid curious about dance, I can’t think of a more awesome experience, which included an opportunity to meet and greet dancers in full costume before the evening’s two performances. And for the most part, each company brought its best. Sure, I wished Stone Stoup Rhythms had reworked their dances to face the audience on all four sides (I looked at their backs for the whole set), and I wish Natya had sent a more mature contingent to really show off their typically-polished dancing. But the two headliners of the evening, Dance Crash and Ensemble Espanol, held absolutely nothing back.
Crash’s KC Bevis and Kelsey Reiter opened the evening with “Sisters,” an excerpt from an evening-length concert set to Shel Silverstein poetry, by leap-frogging over each other’s backs and performing aerial flips on that precarious portable floor in the Show House. The intensity only increased from there, with excerpts from “Bricklayers of Oz” (one of my favorite performances last year) and a fantastic full-company piece called “Heard That,” both of which reaffirmed that this company simply does not know how to “phone it in.”
Ensemble Espanol presented three equally electrifying pieces, but for me, “Una Obra de Arte” took the cake. Typically a men’s dance, I absolutely love this interpretation created by associate artistic director Jorge Perez and first dancer Claudia Pizarro, who dances front and center among four of the company’s men in a most fabulous bright red bolero jacket and high-waisted trousers. Pizarro is the Spanish dance equivalent of a prima ballerina, a 15-year veteran of one of the most prolific and recognized dance companies committed to Spanish dancing.
In bringing all these companies together each year, CHRP artistic director Lane Alexander aims to put percussive dance styles side-by-side to show that rhythmic dance is a unifying force linking cultures together. The steps, costumes, and rhythms might be different, but noticing the diversity of the crowd at Garfield Park, Alexander’s point is well-taken. “Let’s find common ground in the stomping grounds,” he said in his parting statement, encouraging all to make dance a part of their lives.
Stomping Grounds Grand Finale includes all eight participating companies — Stone Soup Rhythms, Chicago Dance Crash, Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater, the Mexican Folk Dance Company of Chicago, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, Itotia Mexica Xi, Natya Dance Theatre and Trinity Irish Dance Company — at 7 p.m. June 7 Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park; free, pavilion opens at 5 p.m., more information at www.chicagotap.org.
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.
lauren.warnecke@gmail.com
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