by Zachary Whittenburg

Full-frontal nudity in photos of Joseph Ravens were in the performance artist’s application to participate in Pop-Up Art Loop — an initiative to fill vacant, street-level retail with art — in summer 2010. However, as Deanna Isaacs outlined in her cover story for the Chicago Reader, concerns about the triptych of portraits by Alan Rovge found Ravens walking away from the temporary gallery at 220 S Wabash Ave, and to Chicago Artists Coalition’s subsequent cancellation of five months of performances, curated by Links Hall for PUAL.

Salon NOTEBOOK: Difficult Conversations: Cultural Divides

by Zachary Whittenburg

On April 16 at the Chicago Cultural Center, prompted by interdisciplinary artist Baraka de Soleil, four panelists and their audience kicked off a discussion about culture by attempting to lasso that rampant word with other words.

Hema Rajagopalan, artistic director of Natya Dance Theatre, identified culture’s three main ingredients in her view — beliefs, practices and values — but swiftly added that they are “always going to be influenced by the surrounding environment. It’s important that we understand that [culture] transforms and evolves.”

“I don’t think anyone says, ‘I want to be a body-based performance-artist when I grow up,’ ” opined Peter Carpenter, a dancemaker among other things.

Seated to Carpenter’s left, on one of four white benches arranged in a square, was Yolanda Cesta Cursach, among other things associate director of performance programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The two met on March 26 at DEFIBRILLATOR, a gallery for performance; both wore sneakers and faced a small number and wide variety of creatives. Everyone spoke at length at least once during the two-hour talk.

Chicago Dancemakers Forum is pleased to announce its support for the creative work of these four dancemakers as they embark upon the 2012 Lab Artist Program, beginning this spring. The four Chicago-based recipients, Paige Cunningham, Kristina Isabelle, Mark Jeffery, and Victor Alexander Ramirez, were selected from a highly competitive pool of candidates through a rigorous application process. Each artist will receive a $15,000 award for research and the creation of a new work, plus process-oriented support to facilitate their creative development. Proposed projects include:

Salon NOTEBOOK: Difficult Conversations: Supply and Demand

by Zachary Whittenburg

At the beginning of this year at a conference in Washington, D.C., the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts said, with regard to theater companies in the United States, "You can either increase demand or decrease supply. Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply."

Rocco Landesman hit a nerve.

Difficult Conversations: Tackling the Tricky Issues

Difficult Conversations is a year long Salon series presented by the Chicago Dancemakers Forum that seeks to tackle tricky and provocative topics at the heart of today's dancemaking field. The goal of these Salons is to create space for dialogue around the complex issues today's dance artists face, with realism, honesty and a dash of hope. Difficult Conversations = No whining allowed. Just seeking solutions...

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Co-presented by Chicago Artist Resources and the Chicago Dancemakers Forum