Displaying items by tag: Identity Performing Arts

IDENTITY PERFORMING ARTS presents the Fourth Annual “Elpis Dance Festival” 2025, which is free and open to the public. “Elpis Dance Festival” is a marathon performance featuring 17 diverse dance companies and artists on June 14, 2025 taking place at Studio 4 at Visceral Dance Center 3121 N Rockwell St, Chicago IL 60619. This is a FREE Admission Family Friendly Event on Saturday June 14 at 3 to 5 pm. Doors opens at 2.45 pm. There will be a 15-minute intermission serves bottled water, non-alcoholic drinks and wine, with a donation.

For more information, call 312.600.3076 or visit https://www.identityperformingarts.org/

About the program:

Showcasing local, regional and national dance, this fourth annual Elpis Dance Festival offers an exciting program, free and open to the public, this year at Studio 4 Visceral Dance Center. We invite you to join us for this unique celebration of professional dance companies, cultural dance groups and faith-based dance troups and artists. 

Elpis was originally created by artistic director Ginny Ching-Yin, Identity Performing Arts, a Chicago based contemporary dance company. Lo envisioned a no cost to the public, live performance opportunity for dance companies and independent artists with diverse backgrounds. Elpis has expanding in both popularity and diversity; this year 17 companies and artists will be performing:

ALATS Dance 

Ardent Dance Company

Chicago Movement Collective

Concert Dance Inc.

Eduardo Zambrana

Elijah Richardson

Emma Barnhart

Hot Crowd

Identity Performing Arts

Kingdom Seekers

Meher Dance Company

Michelle Haskell

Seyong Kim

Still Inspired 

Tanya Lewis

The MetDown

We are Collective

This is a perfect summer event to experience  modern, Indian, African, hip-hop, gospel dance all in one performance. 

Link to our Elpis Page: https://www.identityperformingarts.org/elpis-dance-festival-2025

More information on IG and FB

About Ginny Ching-Yin Lo and Identity Performing Arts:

Identity is a Chicago-based not-for-profit contemporary dance company established in 2016 by founder and artistic director, Ginny Ching-Yin Lo. Lo choreographs dance that represents her lived experiences as a Chinese-American artist and woman of faith; her works are a testament to the beauty that comes from staying true to all the pieces of her personal history and identity. The commitment to sharing identity through dance allows the members of our Chicago community who share those experiences to feel seen, cherished, and represented. Lo has performed in the U.S., China, France and Germany with her original works. 

She has been creating dance works perpetually since starting the company with 3 dancers to 

9 dancers currently that allows her to expand her artistry and experimenting various choreographic works. Although she has her signature style, she strives to create beyond her comfort zone because of her curiosity and interest in new concepts, inspired be her personal experiences. 

The company's first live concert debuted in fall, 2021 and is one of the resident companies of Visceral Dance Center since 2022. Identity has performed locally, nationally in the Seattle International Dance Festival and internationally in Hanover, Germany. Identity hosted its own Elpis Dance Festival annually for the past three years in Chicago. All works created for and performed by Identity dancers express the beauty of our individual identities, interconnected in unity.

IDENTITY PERFORMING ARTS Presents Spring Concert 2025 

“Instinct”

A captivating performance of four distinct works on April 26 & 27

Ann Barzel Theater

Visceral Dance Center, 3121 N Rockwell St, Chicago IL 60619

Tickets $30

Saturday, April 26 and Sunday, April 27 at 7 pm

Tickets Link

https://www.identityperformingarts.org/spring-and-summer-season-2025

 For more information, call 312.600.3076 or visit

https://www.identityperformingarts.org/

About the Program:

Join us for the premiere of choreographer Ginny Ching-Yin Lo’s newest work Instinct—her 17th original choreography for Identity’s 8th season of dance performances.

Inspired by Lo’s observation of our innate animalistic nature, Instinct shows bodies on stage that crawl, scratch and scan the landscape for survival, to the sounds of jungle drumming that abruptly changes to cello orchestration. 

This program also features the return of River Squalor, premiered in fall 2024 - a quartet of dancers who move on stage as if flowing with the water, as if nothing else matters beyond their joy. This work was inspired by Lo’s experience of seeing children gleefully playing with abandon in a squalid river, forgetting their dire surroundings. 

Muted, described by See Chicago Dance as “dancers gripped through an intriguing shadowy world of silence” is paired with Voices, offering how silence can be a powerful way to be heard.

Being heard allows us to soar beyond mere agreements and foster genuine connections.   

About Ginny Ching-Yin Lo and Identity Performing Arts:

Identity is a Chicago-based not-for-profit contemporary dance company established in 2016 by founder and artistic director, Ginny Ching-Yin Lo. Lo choreographs dance that represents her lived experiences as a Chinese-American artist and woman of faith; her works are a testament to the beauty that comes from staying true to all of the pieces of her personal history and identity. The commitment to sharing identity through dance allows the members of our Chicago community who share those experiences to feel seen, cherished, and represented. Lo has performed in the U.S., China, France and Germany with her original works.  

She has been creating dance works perpetually since starting the company with 3 dancers to 

9 dancers currently that allows her to expand her artistry and experimenting various choreographic works. Although she has her signature style, she strives to create beyond her comfort zone because of her curiosity and interest in new concepts, inspired be her personal experiences.  

The company's first live concert debuted in fall, 2021 and is one of the resident companies of Visceral Dance Center since 2022. Identity has performed locally, nationally in the Seattle International Dance Festival and internationally in Hanover, Germany. Identity hosted its own Elpis Dance Festival annually for the past three years in Chicago. All works created for and performed by Identity dancers express the beauty of our individual identities, interconnected in unity. 

It was such a pleasure to see a Chicago not for profit dance company, Identity Performing Arts, now in its seventh season, meet such high levels of ballet and modern dance!

With several choreographed pieces by Founder and Artistic Director Ginny Ching-Yin Lo under her belt, the premiere of Enliven will mark her 10th creative work. Lo, born in Hong Kong and trained with the Hong Kong Ballet, is both a choreographer and dancer whose works have been performed in the US as well as in China, France, and Germany.

I can't say enough about the sensual and energizing choreography by Ginny Ching-Yin Lo!

In her own words…

Perpetual

This piece premiered in Spring 2023. Perpetual reveals the delicate balance between our dual natures. Experience the angelic and the demonic, all under the veil of ethereal love, harmoniously juxtaposed and eternally connected. While precisely executed, this piece was beautifully fluid and, in many moments, hypnotic, and was the perfect opening segment for what the rest of the performance was to offer. 

Ginny has a great gift for staging and creating multiple levels of emotional depth and the feeling of synchronicity in action for her talented group of nine dancers.

Kindred

There was an interesting and refreshing 15-minute multi-media short film presentation by director Spence Warren of the premiere of Ching-Yin Lo's piece titled Kindred.

Kindred is a celebration of the merging and new possibilities that arise when individual artists get together to collaborate creatively.  

The short film was shot in one 8-hour day in a sunny private home with dancers striking beautiful and sometimes somber poses on common objects like stairwells, tabletops and even on top of beds, which gave this piece a modern identifiable setting that made you realize that our homes can also be a place for the physical expressions of creative dance.

Enliven

The final third of the program was Lo's premiere of her newest piece Enliven.

I am including the music choices for this piece because they were so striking and perfect with Ginny Ching-Yin Lo’s flowing, powerful and sexy choreography; Enliven Music: “Lemon Tree” by Jingxuan (Guzheng) and Felix Nunes (Cello), “China Wind” by Zhuolin Wang, “Fusion” by Estas Tonne”, “Abundance” by Future of the Forestry, “Glittery Green Vibrations” by Wilson Hicken and “Mortise & Tenon” by Young Yan.

I would like to acknowledge the dancers, all of whom were classically trained and surpassed my high level of expectation for a dance troupe under Lo's direction. The dance ensemble included Josephine Castillo, Mark Gonzalez, Mackenzi Bolyard-Pizaῆa, Amelia Harris, Audrey Hartnett, Wilson Hicken, Hayley Midea, Hanley Simpson, and Tiana Thompson.

While the two male dancers were clearly skilled and dynamic in their own right, it was the seven women in this troupe that really exuded full expression of this stunning and complex choreography and were just fascinating to watch. Also, the use of lighting for both live works performed was perfectly managed to effectively heighten the experience, creating dream-like sequences.

Ginny Ching-Yin Lo states that her mission is to create dance that addresses "universal societal issues and affirms the values of our individual and community diversity with the intent to heal and restore." And I really felt a sense of meditative restoration and exuberance while enjoying this program. Lo has achieved and will continue to achieve her goal of "healing and restoring" the senses by reminding her audiences of the healing qualities of eternal and ethereal love in motion.

Recently performed at Ruth Page Center for the Arts and again this past weekend at Studio5 in Evanston, I highly recommend this exciting, stimulating yet peaceful dance program and future performances by Identity Performing Arts to audiences of ALL ages for dance lovers who are accustomed to seeing high quality ballet and modern dance.

For upcoming events and more information on this wonderful dance company, visit www.identityperformingarts.org.

This show, performed at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, was promoted in Buzz Center Stage (www.buzzcenterstage.com) last month as an upcoming event, and here’s the skinny on the actual performance. Spoiler alert! It was terrific – but let me share some details.

We were greeted at the door by the choreographer, Ginny Ching-Yin Lo – she was obviously thrilled about this premiere of her tenth and latest work, ENLIVEN. This friendly personal introduction was characteristic of the entire show – IDENTITY is committed to connecting with their audience. Filmmaker Spence Warren took time to speak with us both before and after the show. He sat near us and I loved watching as he bopped and wriggled through the performance, clearly very invested in the action.

IDENTITY PERFORMING ARTS is a very diverse company:  Josephine Castillo, Mark Gonzalez, Mackenzi Bolyard-Pizaῆa, Amelia Harris, Audrey Hartnett, Wilson Hicken, Hayley Midea, Hanley Simpson, and Tiana Thompson were all onstage variously through the evening. Their minimalist costumes brought uniformity to their diversity, rendering each individual genderless and monochromatic, it is characteristic of IDENTITY to showcase each dancer’s personal brilliance while melding them into a unified whole.

The choreography was totally unique: balletic, gymnastic, flexible, and asynchronous. My companion was reminded of Cirque du Soleil – though I’ve not seen Cirque myself, I find his comparison apt. Individually and corporately, the dancers were agile, buoyant, and ever graceful. Even their most ethereal and flowing passages were imbued with a singular vivacity, a brio and zeal that spoke eloquently of each artist’s love for what they do.

Spence’s fifteen-minute film KINDRED was sandwiched between performances. In it they danced through various rooms of a (perfectly gorgeous) modern home: Pliés and port-de-bras using the dishwasher as a barre, fold overs in the living room, and several maneuvers in the bathroom. Oh dear – I’m not making this sound very good, but it was absolutely magical! Seeing the dancers perform in a home rather than on a stage personalized the work, ‘bringing it home’ in a literal sense. Eit seemed even more magical when Spence admitted to us that the entire series had been filmed in a single 8-hour day!

Ginny Ching-Yin Lo is IDENTITY’s founder, choreographer, and Artistic Director. Her works have been performed in France, Germany, and China as well as the US. It is IDENTITY’s mission to ‘connect, create, and affirm’, using dance to express societal issues and heal the community.  Since its founding in 2016 IDENTITY has striven to carry dance to the underserved, to those who have limited access to its magnetic appeal.  

There is but one additional performance of ENLIVEN, Saturday 18 November at Studio5 Dance Center in Evanston. And keep watch for Spring and Fall performances in 2024!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED