In 2017, when choreographer and former Merce Cunningham dancer Kimberly Bartosik began working on I Hunger for You, her evening-length work on faith inspired by early personal experiences with charismatic spirituality, the country’s deep division following the most recent presidential election was a fresh wound in her mind. “I was, like many people in this country, in a state of distress about how we had gotten to a place where we couldn’t speak to somebody who did not share our values—our life values, not just our religious values. I come from North Carolina, and I come from a family [where] half of us voted one way, half the other way. I needed to question why I was making work at all. Why was I in the studio making dances when I felt the world was in a place of real distress?”
The memory resulted in the development of a major motif in the work, created with her company, Kimberly Bartosik/daela. “We were on a residency. It was night. I said, ‘Go outside in the night and put on your headphones and listen to a song that you can get lost in.’ We all went in different directions into the forest.” When the dancers returned, Bartosik prompted them to recreate the experience as a consuming pulse, “a deep thing in their body that moved them.” They built dance using the pulse as an energetic counterpoint to extreme virtuosity. “I think there’s something deep about watching these extraordinary performers navigate places of ultra control and ultra abandon.”
Thu 1/30-Sat 2/1, 7:30 PM, Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, 1306 S. Michigan, 312-369-8330, dance.colum.edu, $30, $24 seniors, $10 students.
