The Seldoms, Artistic Director, Carrie Hanson

March 24th, 2013

We are a Chicago-based dance company that values making intelligent, visually rich dance theater driven by inquiry. We ground our inquiry in contemporary issues, the history of art and ideas, and reflection on personal experience toward our pursuit of bold, exacting and potent physicality.

Under the direction of choreographer, Carrie Hanson, the center of The Seldoms’ work is dance, however the vision extends to the whole of action and environment on stage. We see our process as a sort of alchemy, believing that movement, along with image, sound, text and location, can expand action and environment into larger restless visions. Our numerous collaborations include partnerships with international, national and Chicago artists including the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), composer Richard Woodbury and Mikhail Fiksel, architect Joel Huffman, visual artists Fraser Taylor, Jackie Kazarian and Anna Kunz, percussionist Tim Daisy and designers Maria Pinto, Lara Miller, Anke Loh and Abigail Glaum-Lathbury. In our approach we are committed not only to serious inquiry, but also to invention, irreverence and improbability.

The Seldoms has performed at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, and The Dance Center in Chicago, Joyce SoHo in New York, the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, at festivals in St. Louis (MO), Richmond (VA) and abroad in Russia and Taiwan.

The company has gained a reputation for bold performance in unconventional spaces such as an architectural artifacts warehouse, a historic Arts and Crafts mansion, the Lurie Gardens in Millennium Park, and a 17,000 sq.ft. vacant garage. Our 2005 work in a drained Olympic-sized outdoor pool, Giant Fix, was named by Time Out Chicago as one of the best dance moments of the last decade. The company was commissioned in 2010 by the Morton Arboretum to create a dance within the “Steelroots” outdoor sculptural installation.

The Seldoms is comprised of artists and educators who introduce the work in a number of ways to engage audiences, students and communities. We conduct an annual summer intensive and have appeared at forums for arts, education and the humanities throughout Chicago such as the Hyde Park Art Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, The Newberry Library, the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) and the Chicago Humanities Festival.


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