Ayako Kato at Villa Montalvo/Montalvo Arts Center Lookout Point, 2022 | Courtesy of the Artist
Chicago Dancemakers Forum Elevate Chicago Dance 2022 presents
LUCA/Res Communis: ETHOS Episode III
Chicago Dancemakers Forum Elevate Chicago Dance 2022 presents 30 local dancemakers and dance companies from October 13 - 16 as part of the Year of the Chicago Dance.
The festival will take place across four days in six locations and feature staged works, dance on camera, virtual reality, augmented reality, works-in-progress sharings, installation performance, outdoor experiences, and industry conversations.
Ayako Kato: LUCA/Res Communis: ETHOS Episode III
October 15, 11 am - 1:30 pm & 3 pm - 5:30 pm
Rain or Shine
Palmisano Park, 2850 S Halsted, Chicago
Dance Installation & Performance Running Time: 150 minutes
ETHOS III Virtual Performance Map
Free admission, reservation encouraged but not required
*In case of inclement weather, updates will be on Chicago Dancemakers Forum’s Instagram page
ACCESSIBILITY: Natural environment with paved/maintained pathways making most performance spaces wheelchair accessible. For other accessibility requests, please contact info@chicagodancemakers.org or please visit Chicago Dancemakers Forum Accessibility.
Presented by Elevate Chicago Dance Festival in partnership with the Chicago Park District; Produced by High Concept Labs and the Monira Foundation in Joint Residency at Mana Contemporary.
ETHOS III Rehearsal on Prairie at Palmisano Park, 2022 | Courtesy of the Artist
“A compelling combination that simultaneously embraces both the molecular and the cosmic; ‘ETHOS’ is a feat made possible through an abundance of integrity evident in Kato’s work that embodies a gentle power and divine beauty paralleled only by nature itself.”
— See Chicago Dance
LUCA/Res Communis: ETHOS Episode III at Palmisano Park is part of the ETHOS project by HCL Fellow Ayako Kato, that sets art practice in natural environments. Episode III draws on the land’s history as the quarry that built modern Chicago, acknowledges the past, present, and future Indigenous people living among us, and is created in collaboration. It is organized as timed dances, land and water acknowledgements, and a culminating circle. Visitors choose to be guided by docents, or roam on their own.
Check ETHOS III Virtual Performance Map.
Titled after the “Last Universal Common Ancestor”, and the common elements necessary for human life on Earth (air, water, soil), ETHOS Episode III follows To the Shore: ETHOS Episode I (2019), which used the setting of the beachfront and Colvin House at North Sheridan Road, and Inception: ETHOS Episode II (2021), set on the beach and prairieland behind the South Shore Cultural Center.
ETHOS is a multi-year project that explores 5As: Awareness, Acknowledgement, Affirmation, Allowance, and Action. Ayako has designed it as an aesthetic and physical inquiry about an ideal ethos of humanity and how it is perceptible through dance. It is a study of fūryū, Japanese for “wind flow,” nuance, from four perspectives about the movement of humanity: looking at the past moved along with Eurocentrism from the present day (Episode I); looking at the present day from the past by recalling the ancient and ancestral human relationships with nature (Episode II); standing in the present day and perceiving the past though the future as one, bridging the internal cellular and external cosmic moving fractals, yet with gravity of human history (Episode III); and being the ones to carry cyclical nature-centric contemporary ethos (Final Episode).
ETHOS III Rehearsals at Palmisano Park, 2022 | Courtesy of the Artist
ETHOS Guidance Performers: Susana Ollin Kuikatl Tekpatzia Bañuelos (Aztec Nahua, vocal-music artist and storyteller, Aztec Dance Chicago), Danielle Gallet (water storyteller), Ambrosio Martinez (music, Aztec Dance Chicago).
ETHOS Creative Collaborator: Joseph Lefthand (of Cheyenne-Arapaho, Taos, Zuni descent)
ETHOS Team LUCA Dancers: Tuli Bera and Darling Squire (Team LUCA Co-Leaders), and Sophie Allen, Silvita Diaz Brown, Angela Gronroos, Carla Gruby, Lydia Jekot.
ETHOS Chromosome Dance & Cell Circle Dance Music (recording): Composed and Performed by Theresa Wong and Ellen Fullman, “Harbors Part 1, Harbors Part 2, Harbors Part 3,” HARBORS (room40 2020).
ETHOS Costume by: Darling Squire
ETHOS Social Media & Virtual Performance Map: Mallory Yanhan Qiu
ETHOS Consulting: Katsushi Hikasa
ETHOS Directed and Choreographed by: Ayako Kato.
LUCA/Res Communis: ETHOS Episode III is generously supported by High Concept Labs, the Chicago Park District, the Reva & David Logan Foundation, 3Arts, Artist Communities Alliance, Montalvo Arts Center, the Chicago Moving Company, the Chicago Art Department, and an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.
Open Labs: LUCA/Res Communis: ETHOS Episode III in-progress performance, 2022 | Ricardo Adame
About the Artist
Ayako Kato grew up in Japan, where she competed and danced professionally in ballet for more than a decade before turning to contemporary dance and choreography. She received an MFA in Dance at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and soon after graduating, founded Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape in 1998 in Japan. To date Ayako Kato has created work through interdisciplinary collaboration with more than sixty musician-composers, and has toured throughout the US, Japan, and Europe. She made her US debut at the Joyce Soho in 2003 with katoroebke and katoroebkebarnes, among her early dance works in dialogue bassist Jason Roebke and percussionist Tim Barnes. She made her return New York engagement at Dance Theater Workshop for Fresh Tracks soon after permanently relocating from Japan, to settle in Chicago in 2004. Ayako Kato is recipient of a Links Hall Co-MISSION Fellowship, residencies at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California (2020) and Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (2017), a 3Arts Award, the Meier Achievement Award, and a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. She has received recognition for her work as Best of Dance by the Chicago Tribune, and as one of “Fifty People Who Really Perform For Chicago” by NewCity (2014, 2018, 2020).
Recent and current projects include "To the Shore: ETHOS Episode I”, a promenade performance from the Colvin House to Thorndale Beach as part of the Pivot Arts Festival 2019, and “Inception: ETHOS Episode II", from the trilogy; "Just being", a solo performance at Steelworkers Park in South Chicago and premiered as a film as part of Bridge Dance Festival 2020, curated by Rika Lin; the site-responsive performance with pianist Mabel Kwan to Edra Soto’s “Screenhouse” at Boeing Gallery North, a public art commission of the Millennium Park Foundation and produced with the Arts Administration and Policy program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the 30th Anniversary of Winter Solstice by Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake, two of the world’s leading percussionists, presented at Constellation. Her essay on improvisation, "'Art of Being' through Emptiness", is published as part of Worlding Bodies by the Elizabeth Coleman Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, directed by Susan Sgorbati.
This engagement is supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from Illinois Arts Council Agency.