Local dance troupe Thodos Dance Chicago (TDC) has had a whirlwind of a year. TDC kicked off its 20th-anniversary season with the revival of its 2011 hit The White City: Chicago's Columbia Exposition of 1893, a story ballet choreographed by artistic director Melissa Thodos and Broadway legend Ann Reinking. The ballet was also featured in a PBS documentary by Chicago-area filmmaker Christopher Kai Olsen that premiered on WTTW-11 in February.
Beneath the White City Lights follows the making of the ballet and is currently touring the film festival circuit. Utilizing a MetLife Foundation grant through Audience Architects, they participated in a cross-company concert with Luna Negra Dance Theater at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. In April, the company set off on a month-long tour of Alaska combining performances with educational outreach stops across the state.
This month, TDC concludes the season by flipping the tables and letting the dancers create the dances. New Dances 2012 embraces one of the three main mission goals of the company: dance education, choreography and performance. The choreography initiative encourages the dancers to find their voice as a dance maker in a friendly, structured environment. In fact, for many of the company members, it is exactly what drew them to TDC in the first place. For example, Jeremy Blair, a five-year veteran of the company, has choreographed for New Dances all of those five years. He will be leaving after this season to attend the University of Iowa on a full scholarship to achieve a Master of Fine Arts in dance.
TDC's New Dances Project has created more than 90 new works since it started in 2000. Several Chicago companies present a new-works or in-house choreography program as part of the season; however, TDC adds a unique component with a panel of dancers/choreographers that serve as mentors and give the budding choreographers feedback throughout the process. This year's panel includes Winifred Haun, artistic director of Winifred Haun & Dancers; Kristina Fluty, a movement collaborator with Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak; Jeff Hancock, a dancer/choreographer/costumer/founding member of River North Dance Chicago; and Michael Anderson, a choreographer/teacher/former dancer with Joffrey Ballet.
New Dances 2012 will feature nine new dances by company members, one trainee and a guest choreographer, Brian Enos. Thodos is constantly searching for new talent to bring in as a guest to the New Dances Project. Enos is a former dancer with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC). His name came up in conversation with HSDC artistic director Glenn Edgerton, who was on last year's mentor panel. "Every year I look within the community," Thodos said. "I love Chicago. I'm a big cheerleader of this town artistically. I think it's an unsung treasure trove of voices and a big part of my mission is to really support and work with what happens here, is gestated here and then take it to the world. I look for someone who is ready to come in and have this experience and take from it what they want to learn. The whole goal is to grow. That is a critical component of the process and needs to happen a lot more, in my opinion. Artists need these neutral places to grow and be mentored."
Chicago audiences may remember Enos as the fluid dancer with a mohawk. Growing up in Sonoma County, Calif., he found dance through musical theater. "I realized I didn't enjoy speaking on stage and singing," he said. "I was the person that would stand in the back and then come out for the dance break, so I thought maybe I should go in that direction." He began studying ballet and quickly proved to be a natural attending the summer program at Houston Ballet, which led to acceptance to Houston Ballet's year-round academy and being asked to join the main company as an apprentice all by the age of 18. While still in the academy, Enos choreographed a piece on his fellow students that caught the eye of artistic director Ben Stevenson, who used the work in the graduation spring program and invited him to choreograph for the main company.
Enos also won HSDC's International Choreographic Competition, which brought to Chicago to set the work on the second company and eventually brought him back to dance with the main company for eight years. He left HSDC in 2010, had surgery on a labral tear in his hip and has been creating work for companies across the country as a freelance choreographer. He lives in Uptown with his partner of five years.
Enos' piece for this concert started with finding the music. The two-section dance for eight dancers is set to The King Singers, an a capella group from the U.K. "I almost always start with the music," he said. "With this piece, I was approaching the first section very architecturally. The second section is very human, emotion-based, so I wanted to keep the first section emotionless and stark. I was doing it like building blocks, just creating structure, rather than trying to create a connection between the dancers. I'm not trying to tell a particular story," he said. "I'm more trying to evoke a mood rather than trying to tell a story, but I have a feeling that audience members will develop a story for themselves."
Along with Enos, TDC dancers creating new works for the performance include Jeremy Blair, John Cartwright, Annie Deutz, Chelsea deVera (trainee), Josh Manculich, Ray Dones, Brian Hare, Jon Sloven, Jessica Miller Tomlinson and Michael McDonald.
Thodos Dance Chicago presents New Dances 2012 at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St., Friday-Saturday, July 27-28, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, July 29, at 5 p.m. Tickets are $28-$35; call 312-266-6255 or visit www.thodosdancechicago.org .
