Chicago Dancemakers Forum Announces the 2020 Lab Artists
Chicago Dancemakers Forum announces the 2020 Lab Artists: Bril Barrett, Irene Hsiao, Erin Kilmurray, Christopher Knowlton, Sterling Lofton aka “Steelo” and Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas. These six dancemakers each receive a cash grant of $20,000 combined with mentorship and collegial exchange throughout a year of artistic exploration, as they research, develop, and present new dance works. Serving as the 2020 Program Mentors are BAMUTHI – Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla, Joanna Furnans and Anna Martine Whitehead.
Chicago Dancemakers Forum fuels the field of dance by stimulating and nourishing the artistic and professional development of Chicago’s individual dancemakers. Since its inception in 2003, Chicago Dancemakers Forum has granted over $1 million to artists and is the single largest, local source of support for the city’s dancemakers which has an open call for applications.
Executive Director Ginger Farley shares, “Especially in this time of great difficulty, we feel so fortunate to offer significant support to these distinguished dancemaking artists. We look forward to exercising flexibility and sensitivity with them and with all who are in our shared communities as we walk through this year together with care, creativity and hope.”
Chicago Dancemakers’ Lab Artists program is unique in its emphasis on an extended period of creative research. The Lab Artists are selected for the quality of their work, the distinctness of their vision, and their potential for artistic growth. Each of them has identified a unique path of artistic inquiry for the year ahead which will lead to the creation of a new dance. By engaging leaders in the field in dialogue with the artists, the Lab Artists program fosters excellence, innovation, and connectivity in the field of dance. Past Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab awardees vary in age, gender, race, and dance discipline. They work in tap, bharatanatyam, butoh, burlesque, Chicago Footwork, dance for the camera, voguing, classical Japanese, West African, contemporary, and more.
For more information, please contact Shawn Lent, Chicago Dancemakers Forum’s Programs and Communications Director at shawn@chicagodancemakers.org.
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Bril Barrett is a dedicated tap dancer, whose mission is to preserve and promote tap dance as a percussive art form, foster respect and admiration for the history and culture of tap, and continuously create opportunities for the form and its practitioners. Bril is the founder of M.A.D.D. Rhythms, director of The Chicago Tap Summit, and founder of M.A.D.D. Rhythms Tap Academy. His performance resume includes Riverdance, Tap Dance Kid, Imagine Tap, Kennedy Center and The Steve Harvey Show. Bril has taught and/or performed in Canada, Germany, Finland, Turkey, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Albania, Amsterdam, France, U.K., Brazil, Bahamas and the U.S. He has started outreach programs in schools, parks and community centers, and has provided after school and summer jobs for more than 300 youth from underserved communities.
During his Lab year, Barrett will be exploring the origin story of tap as it relates the history, music, and culture of the U.S. — as well as his own personal tap lineage. He hopes to develop “Hoofin It: The Untold Story of the Founders of Tap,” a trans-media experience encompassing dance pieces interspersed with historical footage and interview clips. Improvisation will be a centerpiece, with instrumentalists, vocalists, and dancers working together as musicians in real time. The libretto will be an academically rigorous collection drawn from the research process.
Irene Hsiao makes dances with visual art in museums and public spaces, a practice that includes interaction with visual artworks and experimental engagement with artists, institutions, and the public. Her work includes site-specific durational improvisation, solo theatrical dances, and video studies of art by Emmanuel Pratt, Virginio Ferrari, and Tang Chang at the Smart Museum of Art, and Philippe Parreno and Cevdet Erek at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has performed with companies and projects in the US, Asia, and Europe. Her writing on theater, art, dance, literature, and science can be found in venues including the Chicago Reader, LA Review of Books, SF Weekly, Newcity, and Chicago Sun-Times.
Hsiao’s Lab year begins by studying the Smart Museum/Wrightwood 659 exhibition The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China for an inquiry on museums, material, mortality, markmaking, and what it means to witness and undergo erasure through the medium of dance.
Erin Kilmurray is a powerhouse artist making genre-straddling pop-fringe works from dance, theater, space-making and nightlife culture, challenging traditional relationships between performer and spectator through electric, often political performance that enlivens body and environment. Her work has been presented by the MCA, The Dance Center of Columbia College, Links Hall, Thalia Hall, Pivot Arts Festival, DanceBox in Kobe Japan, and has held residency through High Concept Labs, University of Chicago Performance Lab, Ragdale Foundation, among others. Kilmurray has received support through 3arts and Chicago Dancemakers Forum’s 2018 Greenhouse Program. She is the founder + director of the Chicago institution, The Fly Honey Show.
Kilmurray will spend her Lab year initiating the Function, a multi-phase project built on envisioning fierce feminist utopias through dance. By vigorously cross-training with design, DJ, and production building, Kilmurray and her dancers will share visions for the future and tag-team creative skillsets in their process. the Function is a hybrid performance system investigation and social gathering — exploring agency, vulnerability and empowerment in the creation and operation of dance space.
Christopher Knowlton, Ph.D., is a movement artist, research scientist, dancer and engineer who uses emerging technologies to investigate the nature of dance, choreography, health, cognition and audience engagement. While completing his degree in Bioengineering, Chris has acted as manager of the Rush University Medical Center Motion Analysis Laboratory and worked as a collaborative performer with numerous Chicago dancemakers. Affirming that art and science have always been intertwined, he believes that the body holds intrinsic information conveyed through movement, while our technologies, old and new, allow us to access that information and extend our bodies into new expressive possibilities.
During his Lab year, Knowlton is developing “Extended Play,” an augmented reality dance work for the rotating surface of a playing vinyl record. A custom-designed mobile application applies image recognition to overlay avatar dancers, whose original choreography is recorded through motion capture technology and is viewed by the audience at any angle through their devices for a personal and intimate experience. The technological framework of this project builds a platform for distribution of not only Knowlton’s own dance work but that of other Chicago dancemakers — past, present and future.
Sterling Lofton aka Steelo’s art is Chicago footwork, a battle dance and music with roots in 1980s Chicago. After more than a decade dancing, winning battles and prizes locally and internationally, he’s proud to be called “a footworker’s footworker.” Lofton has performed on stages across the world with The Era Footwork Crew, a collective he cofounded on the south side of Chicago in 2014. Beyond performance, he also channels his artistry into dance education and fashion design. After learning to sew, he started “Stitched by Steelo,” a clothing line inspired by the crossroads of fashion and dance.
During his Lab year, Lofton is developing “Sterling Publishing Company (SPC),” a new performance at the intersections of fashion and dance across Black history. The work invites audiences to gather around the runway, embedding the architecture of a fashion show into a dance performance. Drawing on historical research, SPC finds inspiration from archives housed at Stony Island Arts Bank, including those of the Johnson Publishing Company, whose name inspires the project title.
Christopher “Mad Dog” Thomas is an extremely motivated dancer, activist, and youth mentor. Born and raised in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens housing project, he was inspired to dance at age 5 by artists like Michael Jackson and New Edition. “Mad Dog” became a member of the FootworKINGz in 2007 and was the official spokesperson for FWK during their 2009 appearance on “America’s Got Talent.” In 2005, Thomas joined Kuumba Lynx, where he is now the Program Manager. He also teaches footwork at a juvenile temporary detention center as a part of a social/emotional development program and is a member of the dance fraternity Delta Phi Delta Dance Fraternity Incorporated.
Thomas’ Lab year centers on social liberation through artistic expression. He plans to explore the idea of codifying his style of Chicago Footwork while developing new choreographies that tell the stories of how bodies react to certain traumas, including his own — at Altgeld, Thomas and his family were exposed to pollutants that caused them to have respiratory problems. Imagine trying to dance at 160 beats per min when you have asthma.
