HAPPY CAMPER Tomlinson’s having a good season.
Photo: Courtesy of Thodos Dance Chicago
Thodos Dance Chicago’s New Dances program, now in its ninth year, steadily produces some of the city’s most promising young choreographic talents. The program enables Thodos’s dancers to create their own works on company time, which are then presented in a showcase. This year’s event comes with added excitement: Company member Jessica Miller Tomlinson recently prevailed over 11 other choreographers to win first place and $10,000 at the A.W.A.R.D. Show, a modern-dance competition that took place at the Dance Center June 24–27.
“I get my ideas [for choreography] from life in general: walking around the streets, seeing people interact, things I see everyday,” says Tomlinson, 28. And yet, Forget What You Came For?, the athletic and dramatic work that won the ten grand based on audience and expert-panelist votes, was “all about dreams and nightmares,” she says.
This year, Tomlinson’s work for New Dances suggests something even more abstract. In Architecture: Splintered and Cracked, eight dancers form a wall that moves gradually from one side of the stage to the other, breaking off from the group to move through, under, over and around their fellow performers. “The energy on one side of the wall is frenetic; on the other side it slows down, as if the dancers have to go through a thick material,” Tomlinson says.
Having matured through the New Dances process, Tomlinson says she wants to start producing herself as an independent choreographer, separate from Thodos. For the past year or so, she’s been discussing a shared program with Thodos colleague dancer-choreographer Jackie Stewart. “When I saw the post for the A.W.A.R.D. Show, I got excited. I thought, This could help pay for theater rental,” she says.
Given Tomlinson’s talent for passing through walls, we expect a Tomlinson-Stewart debut in the near future.
Witness Tomlinson’s work as part of Thodos Dance Chicago’s New Dances, opening Friday 17 at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts.
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