Chicago dance troupe The Seldoms has been known for a few things over its 22-year history.
One hallmark is site-specific performances, in such places as a warehouse, a garage, a swimming pool — and in and out of the passages and rooms of the Harris Theater.
The group is also known for making dances about relevant themes, with previous productions touching on the likes of climate, the economy and political power. They once even performed a dance inspired by the bullying behavior of Lyndon B. Johnson after founding artistic director Carrie Hanson read a biography of the former president.
The Seldoms’ “Superbloom,” taking root at the Chicago Botanic Garden this month, follows the playbook, unfolding in an unusual location on a resonant theme. Scored for five vibrantly costumed dancers moving energetically in front of a riotously colored backdrop, the piece illustrates a rare botanical phenomenon where the normally barren desert erupts with wildflowers, something that happens only once a decade or so.
“It takes a very particular set of factors — enough rain, enough cloud coverage, enough heat — and it usually happens after a period of drought,” Hanson said. “It’s nothing that we can count on, or plan on, or control — a reminder that we don’t control nature.” She cites the idea of the untameability of wildness she read about in “The Practice of the Wild” by the poet-ecologist Gary Snyder.
This kind of reference, evidence of Hanson’s research and thought informing the creation of the dance-focused work, is typical. A 2021 work called “Grass,” pairing commentary on our societal obsession with perfect lawns and newly legal marijuana in Illinois, brought interviews with academics into the sound design. And her 2008 piece “Monument,” about the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, grew out of conversations with a man Hanson calls a “garbage king” who also happened to be her landlord.
Her process is not just bringing in information, but also people. A progressive performance called “Floe,” created while Hanson was an interdisciplinary artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, recruited graduate students in climate science to narrate their research as the audience traveled. The students would talk about “bogs and peat as carbon sinks, or different kinds of clouds, or different types of green fuel,” Hanson said. “Then the audience would move past these little pop-up performances.”
The visual artist Jackie Kazarian has worked with Hanson on a number of projects, including “Superbloom.” A video stitched together from stills of Kazarian creating a superbloom-inspired painting forms the active backdrop for the dance. “[Hanson] really wanted the dancers to appear as if they’re flowers emerging from the paintings,” she said.
“I’m not really a collaborative painter,” Kazarian said, underscoring the appeal of working with Hanson and The Seldoms. “I’m kind of a studio artist. I sit, I paint alone and I don’t have assistants. But I found that working with dancers — I felt like we speak the same language.”
The “Superbloom” production, occupying Nichols Hall at the Chicago Botanic Garden, projects Kazarian’s painting onto a video backdrop. Hanson refers to it as a cyclorama, with a dance floor, proscenium seating and the local indie duo Finom playing their score live — all in what’s normally a multipurpose vanilla-box space, rather than a theater. “Superbloom” is scheduled to be performed three times July 25–27.
In case that isn’t enough site-specificity, on July 13, an adjacent performance called “Superbloom POP” will blossom in situ on the Botanic Garden’s Esplanade, with the five dancers from “Superbloom” joining forces with 25 other local performers from across dance genres for a 20-minute show — a superbloom all its own.
A video adaptation will also be projected on the Merchandise Mart in the Art on the Mart series, beginning Thursday.
Even bearing all those hallmarks of Seldoms style, Hanson said “Superbloom” differs in one respect from some of her other ecologically informed projects, in that it’s less overtly ideological. The focus is less about a message than transmitting beauty, color, joy and awe. It’s a post-COVID conception: wildflowers blooming out of a dry landscape.
Hanson kept returning to the phrase “radical beauty” while producing it. She told the dancers, “I want you to feel beautiful in this dance, and also luxuriate in that.”
With all the research and like-minded collaborators informing it, however, some pro-conservation messaging is bound to seep in. “It is a piece that has a kind of environmental message, although it’ll be a quieter one,” Hanson said.
Graham Meyer is a Chicago arts writer.
