We are a Chicago-based dance company that values making intelligent, visually rich dance theater that is driven by inquiry. We ground our inquiry in contemporary issues, the history of art and ideas, and reflection on personal experience toward our pursuit of bold, exacting and potent physicality.

Under the direction of choreographer, Carrie Hanson, the center of The Seldoms’ work is dance, however the vision extends to the whole of action and environment on stage. We see our process as a sort of alchemy, believing that movement, along with image, sound, text and location, can expand action and environment into larger restless visions. Our numerous collaborations include partnerships with international, national and Chicago artists including the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), composer Richard Woodbury, architect Joel Huffman, visual artists Fraser Taylor and Jackie Kazarian, percussionist Tim Daisy and designers Maria Pinto, Lara Miller, Anke Loh and Abigail Glaum-Lathbury. In our approach we are committed not only to serious inquiry, but also to invention, irreverence and improbability.

The Seldoms has performed at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art and The Dance Center in Chicago, Joyce SoHo in New York, the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, and festivals in St. Louis (MO), Richmond (VA) and Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

The company has also gained a reputation for bold performance in unconventional spaces such as an architectural artifacts warehouse, a historic Arts and Crafts mansion, the Lurie Gardens in Millennium Park, and a 17,000 sq.ft. vacant garage. Our 2005 work in a drained Olympic-sized outdoor pool, Giant Fix, was named by Time Out Chicago as one of the best dance moments of the last decade. The company was commissioned in 2010 by the Morton Arboretum to create a dance within the Steelroots outdoor sculptural installation.

The Seldoms is comprised of artists and educators who introduce the work in a number of ways to engage audiences, students and communities. We conduct an annual summer intensive and have appeared at educational and artistic forums throughout Chicago such as the Hyde Park Art Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, The Newberry Library and the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA).

• The Seldoms Board of Directors
• Surinder Martignetti, Board President
• Jen Grisham
• Doug Stapleton
• Sara Samuels

• Artistic Staff
• Carrie Hanson, Artistic Director
• Christina Gonzalez-Gillett, Assistant Director

The Seldoms
1010 W. Lake Street
Chicago, IL 60607
312-226-0404
mail@theseldoms.org

 
Photography throughout our website by: William Frederking, Kristie Kahns, Anthony La Penna,  T.W. Li, and Dan Merlo