Small Dance Showcase
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Solari, who helped build the annual Spring Festival of Dance into a major dance event, views his new festival as a giant marketing campaign for dance in Chicago: “We want to raise the visibility of dance and try things that were really not feasible downtown at the spring festival venues.” He expects to bring in companies that have rarely played a 925-seat proscenium theater like the Athenaeum, and since overhead at the nonunion Athenaeum is significantly lower than at unionized downtown venues such as the Civic Opera House and the Shubert, where many of the spring festival events were held in past years, he estimates that the festival will only need to fill about 250 seats per performance to break even. Festival codirector John Schmitz has secured $75,000 in grants from Philip Morris and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to help underwrite the festival’s approximately $160,000 budget. Solari hopes to keep most tickets in the neighborhood of $15, with subscription prices dropping as low as $10 a performance.
Last week’s Culture Club reported on producer Karen Leahy’s belief that a reduced performance schedule and word of mouth would save her beleaguered Song of Singapore. It didn’t. The show closes Sunday.
