Spacing out

It all started because Marge Collens, a Hubbard Street Dance Chicago board member and wife of the president of the Illinois Institute of Technology, wanted to see a dance performance in Crown Hall. That’s Mies van der Rohe’s iconic glass-box school building on IIT’s campus. Back in the early 2000s, Collens introduced architect and faculty member Dirk Denison to Hubbard Street ’s artistic director, Jim Vincent. Ever since, the trio has tried to figure out how to produce the first performance ever to be staged in the 42,350-foot single-room structure.

The result of their efforts is a onetime public event on Sunday 27, financed by Collens, her husband, Lew, and the J. B. and M. K. Pritzker Family Foundation. Undergraduate architecture students—taking a design-studio course called “Dance”— staged three works specifically for Crown Hall, to be performed by Hubbard Street dancers.

The students created a flexible stage that changes for each piece, including a huge ramp that sometimes serves as a seating area (but don’t expect chairs), and sometimes serves as the performance space. “This is more of a ‘happening,’ than a straight dance concert,” says HSDC choreographer Lucas Crandall. “We’ll move the audience around for each piece. It’s spontaneous.”

The dancers won’t rehearse in Crown Hall until a day before the performance—tricky because the choreography responds to the particulars of the space. Two of the works, Alejandro Cerrudo’s Extremely Close and Brian Enos’s B-Sides (12” Mix), have been previously performed and are adapted for the space. Crandall’s work, The Set, is brand new, developed in collaboration with the IIT students. “We’re going to surprise ourselves,” says student Juan Delamora. “When it’s real, it won’t stick to what we’ve imagined.”

That’s the fun of it, according to Crandall. “This could be a hodgepodge,” he says. “But brilliant work could come out of it. The most exciting thing is the mad dash at the end. Crown gets ready for us, we get in there and see what happens.”

In addition to designing a stage set, the IIT students were encouraged to explore their own bodies, movement and the abstract allocation of space in a dance class. “We brought the students to Hubbard Street to learn to design with their bodies,” Hubbard Street’s Vincent explains. “It was awkward at first. But by the third class, they were discovering spaces they hadn’t thought of: the small of the back, the arm, the heel. They were learning to carve out the space of the self, and space around each other.”

The students responded passionately to the course, which felt worlds away from their typical curriculum. “[It was] eye opening,” says student Matthew Boder. “[It changes] the way you think about space, the materials, directionality—things that aren’t emphasized in a building.”

For student Gustovo Mendoza, it was a journey of discovery: “We learned it doesn’t take a lot to change a space.” Indeed, they couldn’t do a lot to change the space. “Crown Hall is like the Parthenon—you don’t mess with it,” Delamora says. “The place we were given made us ask: What do you do with a space while maintaining its spirit?”

“That’s how we teach design at IIT,” Denison says. “We ask a question and look for answers: This one is wonderfully abstract, yet it’s the real world. But the most interesting thing is taking dance off the traditional stage—out of its traditional space—obliterating the idea that there’s a specific space for dance [and] educating about the power of architecture.”

Spaces for Dance puts designs on Crown Hall Sunday 27.