Chicago, IL
the Function
Femme-powered, world-building dance work giving DIY stage craft + athletic movement
ERIN KILMURRAY + collaborators present the Function Friday Nights . Four Shows . May 24 - June 14 . 3124 W Caroll Avenue. Through genre-bending DIY stage craft, iterative, athletic movement, house-party energy, and bass-driven, sonic storytelling from DJ / sound designer VITIGRRL — the Function is a vibe. Made within Chicago’s fringe performance scenes, choreographer Erin Kilmurray’s electric, femme-powered, world-building dance performance, the Function, takes shape for its very first month-long engagement at Land and Sea Dept’s warehouse space. Staged in a runway environment that gives audience members a front row seat, the Function offers a playground of choreography and objects. A stellar cast of dancers actively design, create, operate, and destroy their own utopias; asking and imagining what is possible when we are empowered to envision and rebuild our environments, atmospheres, futures, and realities.
Audience Role
Audience will up seated up close to the performers. Occasionally, a performer will ask an audience member to hold onto a prop item temporarily.
Ages: 18 +
Content Advisories
Interaction Advisories
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Events
3
Years on EI
About Erin Kilmurray + collaborators
Erin Kilmurray (she/they) is a Chicago-based dance artist creating genre-straddling, performance work that demands aliveness and collectivity on stage, in studio, and with audiences. They facilitate a dance and community practice that relentlessly explores the celebrations and liberations of women, queer folks, and the underdog. Her work embraces mess, play, pleasure, spectacle, and lessons in how arbitrary the line between artist and audience can be. Consequently, her choreography has been presented in contemporary performance spaces, music venues, public parks, at bars, nightclubs, and on screen including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Thalia Hall, The Dance Center of Columbia College, Lollapalooza, Empty Bottle, Pivot Arts, Metro, Visceral Dance Chicago, Beauty Bar, The Chicago Cultural Center, among others. Her 2019 evening-length work, SEARCH PARTY was selected for a month-long cultural-exchange tour with dancebox-Kobe (Japan) the same year. Erin is the creator / director / choreographer of legendary all-body-loving, fiercely empowering, queer punk performance project The Fly Honey Show (established in 2010), which recently sold out the rock venue Thalia Hall, was featured at Lollapalooza 2022, and named a “Chicago institution” (Chicago Reader). Erin is recognized as a United States Artist Fellow in Dance (2024), an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awardee (2023), a Links Hall Co-Mission Fellow (2022-2023), a Chicago Dancemakers Lab Artist (2020), and recognized as 50 People Who Really Perform for Chicago (2023, 2020; Newcity Stage). Additionally, Erin has made dances for countless independent makers, house shows, parties, music videos, festivals, concerts, and theatrical productions.