Update for June 5: Pivot Arts has made some changes to the schedule for this year’s festival. The livestream celebration and dance party originally scheduled for tonight’s opening night have been postponed to June 11. Instead, tonight will feature new works on video by Red Clay Dance Company (originally scheduled June 6) and the Era Footwork Crew (as scheduled). See the festival website for complete schedule.
One of the “silver linings” of the reimagined Pivot Festival for Ehre is the ability to bring in artists from outside Chicago, including New York-based Obie Award-winning solo performer David Cale, who has been performing at the Goodman for decades. He’s appearing as part of the (Un)touched series of short video performances, debuting on June 8 and curated by Ehre and Tanya Palmer, the former director of play development at the Goodman who currently heads the MFA program in dramaturgy at Indiana University. Palmer and Ehre asked Cale and several multigenre performers (including dancer and Reader contributor Irene Hsiao) to create short video performances reflecting on “both the absence and impossibility of touch and moments of connection during the quarantine.”
She adds, “I’m asking them to be vulnerable and transparent. Letting people see your home space—that’s a very sacred space.” And yet, as Sanders-Ward points out, the police slaying of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville home shows how easily that sacred space can be violated for Black citizens. While the pieces the dancers perform in the festival may not explicitly reflect on Taylor’s death, Sanders-Ward says, “It’s just a part of our lived experience that I’m sure the dancers carry with them and it will appear as it makes sense in their ideas about resilience and space.” The festival will also feature a recording of the DuSable performance, so viewers can see the new pieces (which debut on Saturday) in conversation with the earlier performance.
6/5-6/30: see pivotarts.org for details. F, but donations welcome.
