HANG UPS Andrew Adams and Erika Gilfether get dramatic.
In 2006, choreographer Winifred Haun and director-performer Dawn Marie Galtieri started a program called Circle in the Square: New Works in Dance Theatre. They wanted to create an incentive for a collective of artists from various genres to learn from one another by presenting dance, theater and performance art all on the same program.
Now Circle celebrates its three years by stepping onto a bona-fide stage for the first time. On Saturday 21, Circle appears at the Ruth Page Center for the Performing Arts, a comfortable black-box-style theater designed with dance in mind. “We’re putting a great deal more money into the performance this year,” Haun says. “We feel like this is a culmination of our work to date.”
Back in 2006, Circle debuted at Glade Hall, a church gymnasium in Logan Square. While Glade has a history as a performance venue, it is a far cry from a “real” stage: Theatrical lighting must be brought in, the floor is slippery, and sounds bounce off the glossy wood and echo between the basketball nets at both ends of the room.
In subsequent performances (Circle has since presented twice annually), the collective has performed in grand mansions in Oak Park. Historic Pleasant Home and the Cheney Mansion created opportunities for the Circle artists to set their works in beautiful interior spaces, and audiences could wander through several rooms and settings in one evening. However, it was never the mission of Circle to establish an ethos of site-specific work.
The artists also found that audience capacity was limited at the mansions, and not everyone could see the dances well. They considered adding more shows, but the venues had other events, such as weddings, competing for the space. “And Glade is also leased to the Park District for after-school programs,” Haun says.Because this weekend’s show is functioning partly as a retrospective of past Circles, many of the artists have reworked their pieces to take advantage of the venue’s amenities. “We’re really excited about this show at Ruth Page,” Haun says. “Especially because of the [theatrical] lighting, we can focus the audience’s eyes on specific moments, in a way that we couldn’t in the mansions or at Glade.”
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