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South Chicago Dance Theatre (SCDT) presents its ninth annual home season performance, An Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre, featuring three electric world premieres by award-winning choreographers Natasha Adorlee, David Dorfman, and SCDT Founder and Director of Vision and Strategy and Resident Choreographer Kia S. Smith. The four-part mixed repertory program opens with a powerful work by renowned choreographer Donald Byrd. An Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre takes place for one night only at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 East Randolph, on Friday, May 1, 2026.

An Evening with South Chicago Dance Theatre is paired with SCDT's Inaugural Legacy Builders Benefit. Legacy Builder ticket holders are invited to attend an exclusive intermission reception and an after-party and silent disco with the artists following the performance. Tickets for the performance and benefit are available at southchicagodancetheatre.com.

"Donald, Natasha, and David are choreographers that I have admired for years. Presenting their works on the Harris stage will foster a sense of hope, connectivity, joy, light, and faith for the future as we dream together of a more equitable tomorrow. This celebratory evening advances SCDT's role as a platform for emerging and established choreographers in Chicago and beyond," says Smith.

The evening begins with It Begins, a creative fusion between the renowned choreographer behind the Broadway production of The Color Purple, Donald Byrd, and sound designer Rob Whitmer. First commissioned for South Chicago Dance Theatre in 2024, It Begins returns triumphantly to Chicago as an audience favorite.

The program continues with Smith's Suite On The Sahara, a new work conceived during SCDT's January 2026 residency at LAKE Studios in Berlin, Germany. Scaffolded by the genius of artists from the Silk Road Ensemble, the piece weaves sounds from Argentina, Morocco, Spain, and Italy, immersing audiences in a landscape flowing with light, color, passion, and a range of movement vocabularies. For this work, Smith steps away from the cerebral work of narrative building to allow her first love, music, to be at the helm of the choreographic process.

Next is the world premiere of Adorlee's Slip Force, a work that questions what structures we continue to uphold, and what becomes possible when a body no longer consents to be read, controlled, or contained. Throughout the work, Adorlee builds structures out of movement—a skeletal house, a circling train, a fragile house of cards—nodding to monuments of power and imposed systems of control. The structures are built, maintained, and repeated, despite their instability and cost. At the center, a woman appears framed within a window, suspended between artifact and entrapment. As pressure accumulates, her stillness gives way to release and acceleration, while another figure becomes newly confined. Slip Force moves between precision and unraveling, humor and severity, ultimately revealing the power of women reclaiming their voice and agency.

The evening concludes with Dorfman's Subject(s)?    Verb   Object!, a snapshot of group fervor, independence, solidarity, and joy. Addressing a moment in which we need each other more than ever, the performers embody hope and pain to fend off stasis and deceit. Kinetic and textual poetics connect the audience to an experience of feeling as alive as humanly possible, set to music ranging from spiritual and moving to a driven club frenzy. Subject(s)?    Verb   Object! is an electric celebration for people of all walks of life.

ABOUT THE CHOREOGRAPHERS

Natasha Adorlee is an Emmy Award–winning choreographer, filmmaker, composer, and educator based in San Francisco. A first-generation Asian American artist, she was the final Artistic Fellow with Amy Seiwert's Imagery and began choreographing in 2016 while cultivating an acclaimed performance career with Robert Moses' Kin, ODC/Dance, Kate Weare & Co., and the San Francisco Symphony. After her short film Take Your Time earned more than ten international awards in 2018, Adorlee became a sought-after voice in dance filmmaking, choreography, and composition. A graduate of UC Berkeley following studies at SUNY Purchase, she went on to join ODC/Dance, performing an extensive repertoire and contributing original choreography, sound design, and art direction to more than 20 works. Adorlee has since created over 20 original dance-based works across stage, film, and immersive media. She was recently commissioned by the National Choreographers Initiative (NCI) for 2025, with additional commissions from Joffrey Ballet's Winning Works, BalletX, Nevada Ballet Theatre, Kansas City Ballet, Houston Contemporary, Ceprodac (Mexico), Kawaguchi Ballet (Japan), Ballare Carmel, Ballet22, and Imagery. Her creative collaborations also include original work for Pixar Animation Studios, Oculus, National Geographic, and The New Yorker. Adorlee founded Concept o4 to produce multimedia dance experiences that expand access to the arts. Her recent honors include the Grand Prize at the 2024 Palm Desert Choreography Festival, an NEA Grant, a Dresher Fellowship, and a Jacob's Pillow Choreographic Fellowship. In 2025, she received a National Theater Project (NTP) Touring Grant in support of her new work with Crescent Moon Theater. Adorlee is currently in a prolific creative period, sharing her expertise through Dance on Camera workshops and serving as Artistic Advisor for Ballet22.

Donald Byrd is the Artistic Director of the Seattle based Spectrum Dance Theater, a TONY-nominated (The Color Purple) and Bessie Award-winning (The Minstrel Show) choreographer. He has created works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Dance Theater of Harlem, and The Joffrey  Ballet, among others; and has worked extensively in theater and opera including The New York Public Theater, The 5th Avenue Theater, CenterStage (Baltimore), Seattle Opera, Dutch National Opera, The Atlanta Opera, The Israeli Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and San Francisco Opera. Awards, prizes, and fellowships include Doris Duke Artist Award, James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award, Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts (Cornish College of  the Arts), Masters of Choreography Award (The Kennedy Center), Fellow at The American Academy of Jerusalem, James Baldwin Fellow of United States Artists, Resident Fellow of The  Rockefeller Center Bellagio, Fellow at the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (based at Harvard), Rainier Club Laureate, the  Gordon Davidson Award (Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation) and the Mayor's Arts Award for his sustained contributions to the City of Seattle.

David Dorfman has been making movement-based dance theater since graduating with an MFA in Dance from Connecticut College in 1981. In 1987, he founded David Dorfman Dance (DDD) in New York City with the intention of creating politically and socially relevant work. A lifelong educator and activist, Dorfman has been a professor at Connecticut College since 2004, where DDD is Company-in-Residence. Dorfman choreographed Broadway's "Indecent," for which he was given a Lortel Award for its Off-Broadway run; other accolades include a 2019 USA Fellowship in Dance, a Guggenheim Award, four NEA fellowships, and a Bessie Award. Dorfman's early performing years were happily spent with Kei Takei's Moving Earth and Susan Marshall & Co. Dorfman co-created and toured internationally a body of tragi-comic physical theater with Dan Froot, entitled "Live Sax Acts", and he continues to dance profusely with wife Lisa Race and son Samson Race Dorfman.

Kia S. Smith is a Chicago-born choreographer and artistic leader and the Founder and Director of Vision and Strategy, as well as Resident Choreographer, for South Chicago Dance Theatre. Under her leadership, the company has developed several signature initiatives, including the Associate and Emerging Artist Programs, South Chicago Dance Festival, the Choreographic Diplomacy™ Program, Education and Community Programs, Dancing Across Generations, and a Workforce Development program. As a sought-after freelance choreographer, Smith has created work for companies including the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Madison Ballet, Chicago Repertory Ballet, Houston Contemporary Dance Company, Chicago Opera Theater, Giordano Dance Chicago, Opera Laguna, New Dance Partners, Resilience Dance Company, Columbia College Chicago, and the Scottish Ballet School. Smith's first evening-length work, Memoirs of Jazz in the Alley, premiered at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre in 2023. She is an active member of the International Association of Blacks in Dance and received its Joan Myers Brown Artist Development Fund Scholarship in 2018. Her honors include a 3Arts Make A Wave Award (2021), the Ann & Weston Hicks Choreographic Fellowship at Jacob's Pillow (2021), and recognition as a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist (2022). Smith was named a Rising Star by Chicago Magazine (2023), a "Player of the Moment" by Newcity (2023), and one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch" for 2024. WBEZ identified her as a breakout artist for 2024, and Chicago News Weekly has called her "one of the fastest rising stars of the dance world today."

About South Chicago Dance Theatre
South Chicago Dance Theatre (SCDT) creates artistic experiences for all people through its world class repertory dance company and innovative educational programming. Led by founder Kia S. Smith, the Berkshire Eagle lauds SCDT as "a company to watch in 2025 and beyond," and Smith was named one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch" in 2024. SCDT is known for Smith's signature dance theater works as well as a robust commissioning platform for global emerging and established choreographers. SCDT's touring history includes venues throughout the United States and international engagements in South Korea, Vietnam, the Netherlands, Colombia, and Germany.