In its 20th season, The Seldoms creates multimedia performance charged by bold, exacting physicality. Under the direction of award-winning choreographer Carrie Hanson, the company designs expansive productions with practitioners of visual arts, theater, sound, and fashion. With the belief that dance can ignite thinking about pressing social issues, each of our projects is fueled by an appetite for research and informed by partners from fields including history and science. Making works on topics such as the 2008 recession, plastic pollution and landfills, and power and powerlessness in America, we’ve built a reputation for “well-crafted and researched works that don’t hold forth a political agenda, but look instead at how these towering issues reflect back on our own humanity” (New City, “Best Local Dance Company” 2012). “Floe”, our 2022 commissioned work for ART on theMART, projected over the Chicago River, evoked the watery world of melting ice and rising sea levels of our warming climate.
In our two decades, The Seldoms has toured to twenty US cities and Russia, Canada, Taiwan, and Scotland, and performed at local venues including Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Our 2015 work, Power Goes, about the legacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson was commissioned by the MCA and toured to nine US venues, engaging a diverse community cast in each city. In 2012, we created the first roaming performance through the entirety of the Harris Theater of Music and Dance in Chicago, with 12 musicians and 12 dancers. We’ve also designed works for unusual sites including a truck garage, an outdoor pool, the Morton Arboretum, and a Chicago Landmark park fieldhouse. We’ve partnered with local entities including Chicago Humanities Festival, Newberry Library, Experimental Station, and most recently the Hyde Park Art Center for our Fall 2022 exhibit “Toolbox @ Twenty” which featured our cross-disciplinary dialogue with four female visual artists. Learn more about us at www.theseldoms.org
