Columbia College is Overflowing With Dance

BY Jenn Q. Goddu

“I feel really lucky,” says Phil Reynolds, executive director of the Dance Center at Columbia College.

While other producing venues may keep wish lists of the companies they one day want to host, Reynolds doesn’t have to worry about waiting and hoping.

“It’s not like I’m sitting around thinking, ‘Oh, if only we could work with XYZ company.’ Or. ‘If only we could convince DEF company to come in here to Chicago,’” he said. “I put a call out, if it’s a company that we’re interested in, and there is an immediate response.”

Why is the Dance Center, first founded in 1969 by Shirley Mordine as a dance education program at Columbia College, such a draw in the contemporary dance community?

“There aren’t very many dance exclusive presenters left in the United States and there aren’t that many that are as committed to new work as we are,” Reynolds said. The Dance Center has been presenting local, regional, national and international companies in Chicago since 1974.

Also, in July 2000, the Dance Center moved into “a very desirable venue,” he said. “We have a really nice, beautiful, 272-seat black box theatre, that’s state-of-the-art, a very large performance space and yet the relationship to the audience is one of great intimacy…”

It all leaves Reynolds in an enviable position as the programmer of the Dance Center’s annual performance season. “There are a lot more companies that would like to perform on our stage than we can deal with in any given year, both financially and because of the number of weeks in the year.”

The Dance Center typically presents 35-40 performances each year to an audience of 12,000 students, subscribers and members of Chicago’s community.

But wait, that doesn’t add up to a full 52 weeks of programming. That’s because the numbers above don’t take into consideration the time booked for student and faculty recitals.

First and foremost, after all, the Dance Center remains focused on education, Reynolds said. “The presenting arm of our operation, we think, really enhances our role as an educator and provides a very, very unique opportunity for our students. Then we have our audiences at large as well. But the core thing here is about educating dancers.”

The Dance Center’s public programming component is embedded in the curriculum, Reynolds said. A question he must regularly ask himself is: “What are our students getting out of this?

“We don’t just bring companies in and show the work and send them off.”

This focus on education also informs Reynolds choices of companies he invites to come into the Dance Center and perform.

“The goals for public programming, specifically, are to contribute to the sense of a total learning center for our students and our faculty and the artists we work with and our audiences,” Reynolds said.

Since moving closer to the Columbia College downtown campus (the Dance Center used to stage its performances and hold classes on the north side in Uptown), the department has grown to include roughly 220 dance majors.

It’s a big department that also draws in non-majors. All the students can learn from the guest artists as they contribute to technique or composition classes, attend lecture discussion classes, participate in panels or engage with the young people in the halls of the school.

An artist brought in for an artistic residency might even set a piece of choreography on a student ensemble, working with the young company over a period of weeks. 

The dance company or choreographer’s willingness to get involved with the students is a critical test when Reynolds is making his curatorial decisions for a season. “If there’s hesitation or reticence on the part of the company, then we will not work with them.”

The Dance Center has also moved increasingly into community outreach and education programming beyond the school’s walls. Alycia Scott was hired on full-time in November as Education and Community Outreach Manager to coordinate the initiatives coinciding with guest artist performances.

Among the initiatives she’s worked on is an upcoming panel on “can art save lives,” that will revolve around the Joe Goode Performance Group, coming to the center March 29-3. When Vietnam’s Together Higher Dance Troupe came to Chicago earlier this year with a piece performed by deaf or hard of hearing dancers examining HIV/AIDS, the Dance Center organized performances and dialogues with deaf school children and deaf arts and dance organizations, as well as a workshop bringing together practitioners in deaf and HIV/Aids communities.

“A lot of times people see dance and they may be unaware of all of the research and development and purpose behind the development of the actual piece,” Scott explained. ”[The outreach initiatives] are really important to the Dance Center because they allow us to really bring that to the public in an educational way and an experiential way, so that when they come to see the work, they have an even deeper connection and understanding of the work they are seeing.”

Since the Dance Center sees itself as both an educator and a presenter, the performances of guest artists and public education or community interactions go hand-in-hand, Scott said.  “It’s about presenting the dance work itself, but also about presenting the other side of dance that is not seen or experienced when you go to see a performance.”

Why does the city’s leading presenter of contemporary dance make such an effort to make inroads in the community?

“There’s kind of a sense of civic duty,” Reynolds said. “We feel like dance is an effective way to break down some of the barriers between people. So that’s sort of the altruistic goal.”

Yet he acknowledges there are more self-serving aims too. Some of the activities have an audience development agenda. Others, such as taking a guest artist to a high school dance class, can work on a recruitment level for the Dance Center and Columbia College.

Another aspect that contributes to the greater good of contemporary dance while assuring the Dance Center’s own future is the ongoing effort since the early 1990s to commission and produce new work. This “investing in creativity” is key, Reynolds said.

“We do it because we feel that’s what we are about. I wish we could do it more. To me that’s the apex, that’s the highest step in that relationship a presenter has with an artist – to really say, ‘We’re committed to your work and we’re going to help you find ways to make it.’”

The support of new work contributes to the Dance Center’s reputation as a place where you can always see something new, said technical director Kevin Rechner. “You never know what’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s always different and it’s always nice to then share that with our students.”

As a world-class institution for presenting modern dance, the Dance Center fills a need in the Midwest, Rechner said. “We have presented many up-and-coming artists and groundbreaking artists and we kind of fill that void in the Midwest.”

It is the international flavor and ambition of the companies that come to the Dance Center that appeal to Scott. ”[The Dance Center] brings in dance companies that are pushing the fold a little bit. It’s a really good opportunity to be exposed to dance from different countries and also dance that is coming from different terrains I think both movement-wise and geographically.”

Reynolds consciously aims to give the audience an experience that is both “stimulating and challenging.”

He wants audience members to worry less about comprehending the work and more about being affected by the movement and sharing the experience of contemporary dance.

“Take it on faith that some of the companies that we are working with here are some of the best in the world. They just are,” he said.

Describing the performances at the Dance Center as “a gateway into a more abstract kind of expression and thought,” Reynolds at last has come up with one thing he might wish for. Although he can get instant response from contemporary dance companies he asks to perform, he still needs to cultivate audience members willing to take a chance on a form that might lack the narrative people often anticipate in their performing arts.

“I would love to find ways to seduce non-dance aficionados to think about giving it a try and expanding their comfort zone a little bit. It seems to me for some reason it is harder with dance than maybe with some other forms because there seems to be some sort of inherent anxiety about ‘am I going to get it.’ I just wish people could just let go of that anxiety and not feel that they’re missing out, or that they are intimidated that there is something to ‘get.’ Because there isn’t always.”

The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago hosts the Joe Goode Performance Group March 29-31 at 1306 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago. For more information call 312/344-8300 or visit www.dancecenter.org.