Photo by Kelly Rose / Savage Rose Photography

Why not keep dance available for the public year round?

Artistic director Rachel Damon, of Synapse Arts Collective, is dedicated to providing dance through site-specific set works at affordable admission prices, even free!

Synapse Arts Collective is a Chicago-based performance group that focuses on developing new works and artists through a laboratory process involving improvisation, mulit-media collaboration, and feedback. Fearless in their approach to dance and what dance can be, the group demands engagement from their viewers by challenging them to receive and think critically about the topics being presented.

Coming up on March 8-10, 2012, Synapse is collaborating with The Space/Movement Project and Erica Mott, also bold and like-minded artists, for one phenomenal event at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago.  In this program each artist presents work that asks the audience to view the art of contemporary dance with a different approach.

Space/Movement Project plays with the idea of occupying the stage with a series of line dances to communicate the different present day human interactions, the quirkiness and misunderstandings of them all. Rachel Damon, in collaboration with musician Frank Rosaly, take the viewers on a mood swing roadtrip from a playful community of four dancers to savage-like intensity that naturally breaks into individuality. Damon chose to enhance the ever shifting environment by supporting her movement with a changing landscape of water, sound, and motion.

Erica Mott concludes the performance by presenting a piece of five male dancers that balance between the ideas of masculinity and territoriality. A sound score encompassing Icelandic and New Mexican environmental field recordings, plus on-stage gramophones singing country classics and Viking metal, calls for no mundane song and dance.  All three artists utilize the dynamics of space-creating a shared space, transforming landscapes and environments, and engaging the audience in an unrivaled experience.