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The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition brought an international array of dance to Chicago. Thereafter, the city’s dance community became a meeting place for cultures where dance styles from around the world blended to emerge in bold, original forms and strike out in new directions.

Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold offer original essays from voices at all levels of the Chicago dance scene that explore dance in the city through the rise of the 1960s Black Arts Movement. From the beginning, dance performances questioned assumptions about gender, race, and the control of culture. Immigrant groups and Indigenous performers, among others, danced to express identity and resist injustice. The Black Arts Movement used dance to build pride and community. Throughout the period, migration and segregation shaped dance scenes while dance expanded through neighborhoods, clubs, settlement houses, and schools.

The first of two volumes, Dancing on the Third Coast: Performing Modernisms shines a light on long-overlooked Chicago artists and institutions as it repositions the city as an essential part of dance history in the United States.

Contributors: Jake Austen, Bril Barrett, David R. M. Beck, Sophie Benn, Cristin Carole, Joanna Dee Das, Amira Millicent Davis, Samuel N. Dorf, Tanya Jayani Fernando, Jessica Friedman, Megan E. Geigner, Nadine George-Graves, Auna R. Hearne, Pamela Krayenbuhl, John Neumeier, Liesl Olson, Jenna Pearse-Pollack, Jessica Erin Ray, Tyler T. Schmidt, Caroline Drane Shadle, Nina S. Spiegel, Lauren Warnecke, Carolyn Watts, Dorene Wiese, Queen Meccasia Zabriskie

Precipitated by an influx of federal and corporate granting programs, the 1960s and 1970s are often referred to as the U.S. dance boom, and Chicago was no exception. New nonprofits emerged on the South and North sides, as choreographers experimented with the fusion aesthetics innovated by their predecessors and as new immigrants and Black subcultures fashioned new forms of social dance. The second volume of Dancing on the Third Coast explores the inevitable collisions of artistic identity with cultural infrastructure, as nonprofit institutions codified aesthetic preferences and social practices from the 1960s to the present.

Contributors write from their own experiences of Chicago dance. Informed by their perspectives as performers and dancemakers, critics and dramaturges, educators and ethnographers, their essays invite readers to join the ongoing work of telling the myriad stories of Chicago dance.


Contributors: Frances R. Aparicio, Maggie Bridger, Ellen Chenoweth, Sydney Erlikh, Joanna Furnans, Wills Glasspiegel, Irvin Manuel Gonzalez, Daniel “BRAVEMONK” Haywood, J’Sun Howard, Wenke (Coco) Huang, Maggie Kast, Michael J. Kramer, Mario LaMothe, Michael Landez, Lizzie Leopold, Kelsa “K-Soul” Rieger-Haywood, Rebecca Rossen, Micah Salkind, Roell Schmidt, Elizabeth Schwall, Nora Sharp, Shayna M. Silverstein, Lauren Warnecke, Zachary Whittenburg, Tara Aisha Willis