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Chicago Tribune
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Modern dance pioneer and Dance Center founder Shirley Mordine dies at 89
Dancer, choreographer and dance educator Shirley Mordine has died. Her five-decade career in Chicago included founding the dance department at Columbia College Chicago and originating the college's revered Dance Presenting Series. A prolific performer and choreographer, Mordine also served as artistic director of Mordine and Company Dance Theater from 1969 to 2019. Mordine died early Friday from complications of Alzheimer's disease, according to her daughter Ann Mordine. She was 89. Born Shirley Ann Macaulay on Jan. 8, 1936, Mordine grew up in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California. She attended Fremont High School there and received dance training from the San Francisco Ballet School. Mordine also studied with noted choreographers Anna Halprin and Welland Lathrop, who were key influences in forming Mordine's idiosyncratic, theatrical style of modern dance. Mordine graduated from Mills College in 1958, where drama professor Arch Lauterer deepened her interest in theater. It was a boom time for modern dance on the West Coast. Several of Mordine's contemporaries moved to New York to pioneer a burgeoning postmodern movement (Simone Forti, Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer among them), but Mordine initially stayed in the Bay Area, piecing together freelance performance and teaching work. She met Glenn Mordine in an Oakland bar while listening to Dave Brubeck. The couple married and quickly had three children, Alex, Ann and Michael, settling in Chicago's northern suburbs in 1967. Mordine lived in Evanston for decades and was a longtime member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. She often tapped into Chicago's architecture and culture as sources of inspiration. 'She loved Chicago,' said Ann Mordine. 'She loved the grittiness and tapped into that as a resource.' Mordine picked up teaching gigs at Hull-House and Urban Gateways. She was an artist-in-residence at Evanston Township High School and took a part-time job teaching dance in the theater department at Columbia College Chicago. In 1969, Mordine simultaneously launched The Dance Troupe (later called Mordine & Company Dance Theater) and a new dance department at Columbia College. She would chair that department for 30 years. 'It is impossible to fully measure the profound and lasting impact Shirley has had on the Chicago dance community,' said Chicago Dance History Project executive director Michael McStraw, a dancer and managing director for Mordine & Company Dance Theater. 'What can be measured, however, is the transformation she elicited in me as a dancer, arts administrator and admirer of her incomparable artistry and body of work.' In 1972, Mordine spearheaded the formation of the Dance Center Columbia College to house the school's dance department. By the late 1990s, the Dance Center had outgrown its landmark building on Sheridan Road in Uptown, moving to the heart of Columbia's South Loop campus in 2000. In 1974, Mordine originated the Dance Presenting Series, which brought prestigious contemporary dance companies and artists to Chicago, often for the first time. In 1991, Mordine produced the first Dance Africa Chicago, which ran for well over a decade and has periodically been revived by other organizations. To date, Dance Center Columbia College remains the city's only arts presenter dedicated exclusively to dance. During and after her time at Columbia College, Mordine's insatiable curiosity kept her creating dances for Mordine & Company, which made regular appearances on the Dance Presenting Series. 'I always think of making dances in terms of what I observe in the world,' she said in 2017. ''Every dance should be new, strange and beautiful.' I don't remember who told me that, but I like it.' Mordine & Company Dance Theater operated as a repertory company for 50 years — earning credit as the Midwest's longest-running modern dance company. Mordine relocated to California in 2021. Former dancer and longtime board president Philip Martini dissolved the company in 2023, handing Mordine's extensive archive to the Newberry Library. A network of former dancers, led by longtime company member Danielle Gilmore, remounts select works for various companies and festivals. 'There are so many of us that can say with conviction that we genuinely owe Shirley for what we became,' said Martini. 'From the few companies that used gymnasiums and storefronts to stage their work, we now have a vital community that extends far beyond the borders of this state and the Midwest that can trace its beginnings back to Shirley.' Indeed, generations of 'Mo & Co' alums form the fabric of Chicago's contemporary dance scene. Several still teach at the Dance Center. Among the qualities they hope to impart to students today are Mordine's uncompromising standards and tenacity. 'Shirley surrounded herself with visionary artists, collaborators and dancers who shared her passion for dance and theater,' said Pamela McNeil, who joined Mordine & Company in 1992 and recently retired from the Dance Center. 'She was uncompromising when it came to the work, never settling — always pushing for more.' 1 of Shirley Mordine watches her dancers rehearse for an upcoming 50th season celebration at Links Hall on April 24, 2019, at Indian Boundary Cultural Center in Chicago. Mordine & Company Dance Theater was founded in 1969. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune) As an observer of her choreography for more than three decades, former Tribune dance critic Laura Molzahn said her eager, restless mind stood out. 'She often seemed to rethink and revise her works,' said Molzahn. 'And she was always looking for the source of the next dance, whether it was a novel or a new aspect of current culture or an abstraction or the way that modern dance might intersect with classical Indian forms. Shirley was tough, in a way most women choreographers had to be to get by.' 'She wasn't just a dancer,' said Ann Mordine. 'She did something big and lasting, contributing to dance, to Chicago and to other people's lives. I'd like her to be remembered in that way. She worked hard and left something meaningful behind.' Mordine is survived by her former husband, Glenn Mordine, and their three children, Alex, Ann and Michael.
Chicago Tribune
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
B-Series hip hop festival opens at a Dance Center fighting for survival
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.
