In our current reflective mood during our 10th anniversary year, we are doing some thumbing through the memory pages of our body-of-work album. This is an exercise that is simultaneously affirming, humbling, and mostly - surprising - at the sheer amount of creative work by so many artists/collaborators that has been built and shared with audiences over this past decade.
We'd like to share these reminiscences with you. Maybe you were there for our first shows at the Viaduct or Vittum Theater...or at the Hamlim Park Pool for our dance in the drained pool...or more recently with us at the MCA Stage or the Harris Theater. For our most enduring audience members, you may notice how our work has evolved and matured. For those of you who have just recently been introduced to The Seldoms, you may enjoy learning about past projects.
This first installment of our "Flashback Friday" series looks all the way back to our debut as The Seldoms, in "POST" in May 2002 at the Viaduct Theater. Founding artists Carrie Hanson, Susan Hoffman, and Doug Stapleton each presented premieres - a varied program of dance, dance-film and spoken word pieces, with topics ranging from the events of September 11, 2001, to the disruption of identity in the event of displacement/exile, to the representation of body/movement/self with the camera. (Seems we launched our Seldoms project with some heady stuff!) Illustrious guests included notable Chicago movement artists Jeff Hancock, Matthew Hollis, Julia Rhoads and Mark Schulze. POST marked our first collaboration with architect Joel Huffman/Vertu Inc, whose comprehensive set design involved a group of movable corregated plastic walls that contrasted the Viaduct's dark, cavernous appearance and shifted to change the room for each work, as well as discrete set pieces for Hoffman’s In Shadow that suggested shards of buildings in ruin.
With POST, we laid the groundwork for some lasting core artistic values - charting out underused and new venues for performance, rich interdisciplinary collaboration, and a full consideration of the visual environment.
Susan Hoffman in In Shadow
Set by Joel Huffman/Vertu
