The Seldoms’ ‘Superbloom’ Involves Chicago Botanic Backyard

The Seldoms, which presents multidisciplinary performances exploring complicated points, collaborates with the Chicago Botanic Backyard to current the Chicago North Shore premiere of Superbloom, an evening-length work combining dance, dwell music, animation, and costume and lighting design.

The Seldoms Founding Inventive Director and choreographer Carrie Hanson describes Superbloom, a piece for 5 dancers, as “a multimedia efficiency about radical magnificence, wildness and wildflowers, and the resilience and fragility of the pure world. The work goals for splendor as a mirror of the chic great thing about the pure world and an antidote to grief felt within the Anthropocene epoch (our present geological age, wherein human exercise has been the dominant affect on the surroundings). A richly kinetic, sonic, and visible expertise, Superbloom conveys the unbelievable magnificence and coloration of a uncommon wildflower occasion and invokes the human expertise of awe as a technique to reconnect to the pure world.”
 
Collaborators on the creation of Superbloom, which premiered in 2023 on the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago, embrace two visible artists: painter Jackie Kazarian and video artist Liviu Pasare, who constructed video animation from Kazarian’s summary landscapes. The set includes lengthy textile trains, designed by Kazarian, that are activated by the dancers. Finom, the musical duo of Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, composed an authentic rating they may carry out dwell, and Julie E. Ballard, technical director, resident lighting designer, and stage supervisor for The Seldoms, created the lighting design.
 
For these performances, The Seldoms are reworking the Backyard’s Nichols Corridor right into a theater house, together with a dance ground, cyclorama, lighting, and proscenium-style seating. This would be the first time guests to the Backyard could have a chance to expertise a multimedia dance efficiency.

“We’re thrilled to companion with The Seldoms to deliver Superbloom to the Backyard,” mentioned Rachel Lockett, coordinator, Customer Occasions and Applications, Chicago Botanic Backyard. “The main focus of this challenge is squarely aligned with the Backyard’s goal, and we’re excited for our guests to see this charming efficiency.”
 
Superbloom continues The Seldoms’ curiosity within the surroundings, with a physique of efficiency work that conceives a relationship to Earth and to all life on Earth primarily based in stewardship and sustainability, pluralism and justice. Mentioned Hanson, “Superbloom is meant to function as cultural resistance however, extra emphatically, as cultural imaginative and prescient. ‘Biophilia’ (theorized as an innate human affinity for the pure world) is an engine for this paintings. I can consider no higher place to supply Superbloom than the Chicago Botanic Backyard, a spot that enthralls us with pure magnificence and reminds us of our important connection to nature.” 
 
Upfront of the complete performances, The Seldoms will current Superbloom POP, bloom-inspired pop-up performances on the Esplanade on the Chicago Botanic Backyard on Sunday, July 13 at midday and 1:30 p.m. Like a wildflower “tremendous bloom,” the massive motion refrain—25 Chicago dance artists becoming a member of the five-member ensemble—will deliver vibrant coloration and motion to the garden space. The 20-minute efficiency is free with Backyard admission. 
 
ART on THE MART has commissioned The Seldoms to translate Superbloom into a piece for projection onto Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, the place it seems July 10–September 7, 2025, on the Riverwalk in downtown Chicago.