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Julia Mayer's Blog

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AMERICA dances on Saturday, Nov. 10
It’s my favorite email to write every year—dance at CHF! This Saturday, Nov. 10 we are featuring two very different and very wonderful dance programs. The Seldoms, photo by Brian Kuhlmann First up, at 12 noon at Francis Parker School, are Carrie Hanson and the Seldoms. The Seldoms is steadily gaining a national profile for their awesome dancing as well as their sophisticated treatment of complex subject matter. Artistic Director Carrie Hanson is quite masterful at calling... Continue Reading >>
Posted Friday, November 02 by Julia Mayer
Dancing with Science
When we were considering our options for including dance in this fall’s Festival, we didn’t set out to find collaborations between choreographers and scientists. But, with technology in mind, the projects we felt most drawn to were indeed such collaborations. This weekend, we partner with the Museum of Contemporary Art to present the Dance Exchange performing Liz Lerman’s latest work The Matter of Origins. This is rich, fully-realized work that Lerman developed from a residency with the... Continue Reading >>
Posted Tuesday, September 27 by Julia Mayer
Hayes's Anatomy
One of my strongest visual and olfactory memories of my graduate studies in dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the afternoon that my “anatomy & physiology of dance” class visited the UIUC College of Medicine’s cadaver lab.   Up until that day, we’d been studying anatomy in books and putting to test that book-knowledge in the dance studio. Probably more than many med students, we dancers were eager to palpate the origins and insertions of as many muscles as we... Continue Reading >>
Posted Friday, August 20 by
More Dancing!
I have a bit of unfinished business from my last post. There are even more fabulous dance offerings this Fall: two more very exciting programs that are coming at dance from very different directions and moving it into some exciting new territory. Ananya Chatterjea, who runs the Dance Program at the University of Minnesota and is a committed fighter for social justice, will consider the ways in which dance can be a creative bridge from ideas to action. Two members of her company, Ananya... Continue Reading >>
Posted Wednesday, August 18 by Julia Mayer
Dancing Toward the Fall Festival
What a relief—to write a blog post and not worry if I’m going to spill the beans on a program we haven’t officially announced yet. While our printed program guides won’t be mailed until August and our website will switch to “Festival mode” at about the same time—the cat is out of the bag! We are still putting the finishing touches on a few programs, but nearly all of the 100 or so programs we’ll do this fall are confirmed. I’m especially excited that our Body theme lends itself to more... Continue Reading >>
Posted Friday, June 25 by Julia Mayer
CHF Spring Festival is not just for kids anymore!
CHF’s spring festival "Stages, Sights & Sounds" is in full swing! Last week, Vélo Théâtre (from Angers, France) presented There’s a Rabbit in the Moon, an utterly delightful tale of an eccentric, empathic magician named Thomas Snout who has the power to conjure soothing and surprising images to help nights pass more easily for restless young souls. This program is geared toward 4-8 year olds, but the morning I saw it, 50 or so 8th graders and their French teacher came through the door. There... Continue Reading >>
Posted Tuesday, May 04 by Julia Mayer
Step By Step
A few days ago I spent the morning discussing the work of Bill Hayes with colleagues. (That’s writer Bill Hayes, not the actor from “Days of Our Lives,” though it was fun to poke around his website, too.) Writer Hayes’s recent books are Five Quarts: A Personal and natural History of Blood, and The Anatomist, an eminently readable history of the anatomists who wrote and drew the original Gray’s Anatomy (not Grey’s Anatomy. Oy, TV is everywhere.) Then I went searching for George Romero (aka Mr.... Continue Reading >>
Posted Friday, April 02 by Julia Mayer
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