“Coming up as a young artist, I didn’t know many artists who were parents,” says choreographer, writer, performance artist, and mother of three Angela Allyn. “Maybe that was because I hung out with a lot of gay men. And most of the women dancers I knew in New York never married or had children. So I had some pretty wacky ideas about how I was going to accomplish all this.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Allyn moved to Chicago to head up the Chicago Dance Coalition shortly after earning a master’s degree in dance education from Columbia University in 1985. Six or so months later she revived her New York performance group Abiogenesis Movement Ensemble, a multidisciplinary collective whose members ranged in age from 17 to 70; over the next decade the group became known around town for site-specific pieces that had dancers doing things like rappelling from Upper to Lower Wacker Drive and rising from the waters of Lake Michigan. Allyn’s signature piece, Liars, is a dance and audio collaboration with This American Life host Ira Glass on the subject of pathological liars; her Vessels is a group piece for pregnant and recently pregnant dancers that features castanets made out of speculums.
She focused on parenting and a series of day jobs, but continued to occasionally choreograph and perform. She also started writing plays and–after her second child was born–poetry. “It’s a very good creative outlet for me,” she says. “It’s something you can do in small snatches of time, any time of day. It was also something I could E-mail to my other friends who were going through similar situations. It was nice to network with other people who were frustrated.”
Domestic Blitz–which will be mounted in a larger production this fall–will be performed Sunday, March 16, at 4 at the Musical Offering, 743 Custer in Evanston. It’s free; call 847-866-6260.
