SPDW Dance Theatre Launches Two World Premieres for 15th Anniversary

Same Planet Different World Dance Theatre (SPDW), a Chicago-based modern dance ensemble, launches its 15th Anniversary with a spring mixed repertory program featuring two World Premieres by guest choreographer Peter Carpenter and SPDW Artistic Director Joanna Rosenthal, along with reprisals of work by Chicagoan Colleen Halloran and former Stephen Petronio Company dancer and rehearsal director, Ashleigh Leite.

SPDW presents its 15th Anniversary Spring Program in the Zacek McVay Theater of the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue, March 8 –10 at 8 pm.

About the first show: Carpenter presents the fifth installment in his ongoing dance-drama cycle that explores alternate definitions of wealth. In Rituals of Abundance for Lean Times #5: Lavish Possession, accompanied by an original score by Michael Caskey, Carpenter delivers abstract treatise on the relationship between abundance, excess and ownership, while also interrogating his own process as a dance-maker. He articulates the concerns of authorship and possession through
spoken text and an unconventional, nuanced dance vocabulary. “I’ve been influenced recently
by two pieces of literature, one by Ruby Payne on the nature of poverty and the different
relationships to time based on class, and another on Buddhist philosophy by Pema Chödrön
about reconnecting with the importance of being present as a spiritual practice,” commented
Carpenter. “These two texts started me thinking about how dancing and making a dance
requires a kind of attention that values the here and now. The ramifications of ‘being present’ in
civic, spiritual and economic spheres has been the guiding inquiry of this work.”

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