B-Series hip hop festival opens at a Dance Center fighting for survival

Chicago Tribune

24-02-2025

Fifty-one years ago, the Dance Center of Columbia College launched a series of professional performances aimed at fulfilling one of the university's key goals: to create a conduit between students and the field they aim to enter. The Dance Presenting Series looks different today than it did in 1974, evolving and fighting to stay alive every step of the way.
Fifty-one years ago, hip hop was born, too.
The Dance Center's hip hop festival The B-Series kicks off Feb. 27, opening a spring season that also includes a suite of solo performances March 13-15 by Nora Sharp and Jenn Freeman, aka Po'Chop. And on April 17-19, Red Clay Dance Company returns to the Dance Center for the first time in five years, presenting a world premiere by Bebe Miller.
It's a modest lineup compared to previous years, and according to co-directors Meredith Sutton and Roell Schmidt, it indicates both practical and philosophical changes.
'How do we transform how dance gets presented?' said Schmidt, whose previous roles include a decade directing Links Hall. 'There had been such a wall between the academic side of the Dance Center and the Presenting Series side.'
For decades, that made sense, Schmidt said. Grant and revenue streams were different. Student enrollment experienced steady growth. A robust touring network made booking out-of-towners more fiscally reasonable.
'But at this point in its history, it was just leaving it vulnerable to being cut,' she said.
Before director Ellen Chenoweth's departure in 2022, the Dance Presenting Series pushed to make Chicago companies an official part of the line-up; local companies previously appeared at the Dance Center through a subsidized rental program. Columbia's declining enrollment, program cuts and faculty layoffs forced additional changes, including combining theater and dance into one school with shared leadership and phasing out the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance. Curriculum changes broadening students' choices in the Bachelor of Arts degree are due to be rolled out this fall.
'It was going to be really, really hard to let go of dance,' said Lisa Gonzales, faculty member and former Dance Center chair. 'The college is going through so much, but it feels as charged and alive as ever.'
Sutton and Schmidt made lemonade, pulling in funding and high-profile performances (such as LaTasha Barnes' spectacular, nearly sold-out 'Jazz Continuum' last season), and marketing student performances alongside professional ones — combined into what Sutton calls 'one viable machine.'
'We are having [students] traverse this pipeline to then become the next generation of professional dancers, who are pouring back into the ecosystem of the city of Chicago and beyond,' Sutton said. 'It totally lights us on fire. It only widens the scope of the offerings we're able to present to the public.'
The B-Series also became part of the DPS last year — a change that brings resources, visibility and validation to the decade-old project. And vice-versa.
'There's nothing like the B-Series,' said Daniel 'Bravemonk' Haywood, who organizes the mini-festival of workshops, panels and a rousing dance battle with Kelsa 'K-Soul' Rieger-Haywood. Both are Dance Center faculty and collectively run BraveSoul Movement.
This year's theme is 'B-yond Borders,' aimed at showcasing kinship between hip hop and social dance forms abroad. Sarah 'Sayrah Chips' Olaniran, a Nigerian international student who specializes in Afro-fusion dance, is a featured performer.
'It's people who normally would not find themselves in an institution,' Haywood said, 'who did not think they belonged because of gatekeeping and the one-sided cultural Eurocentricity of institutions.'
The Dance Center wasn't originally imagined for hip hop. The proscenium performance space is less conducive to circular dance cyphers. Until a few years ago, shoes were not allowed on the Marley dance floors.
'In hip hop culture, the community holds you accountable,' Haywood said. 'I'm talking about the movers, the shakers, the innovators, the teachers. In academia, scholarship is something that's looked highly upon. It's going and doing the work. Putting your theories to the test. By bringing the B-Series in here, it's about reciprocity.'
Mutual respect, dogged patience and communication eventually paid off. Columbia College now offers a Hip Hop Studies minor. Rieger-Haywood's classes no longer take place exclusively in the basement, but on the very stage Mikhail Baryshnikov has performed.
'It did feel in the beginning like this coveted space, even though I was working here full-time,' she said. ''Are they gonna let us?' was the feeling.'
Barriers lowered, if only a little, students now come to the Dance Center seeking out hip hop, some coming expressly for and because of the B-Series — which no longer asks for permission.
'There's still work to do,' Rieger-Haywood said. 'It couldn't happen from our mouths. It had to happen from what we did.'
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.