Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Chris Schlichting- Season 5, Episode 66

Chris Schlichting lives in the Twin Cities within the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Dakota people, and is a Minnesota-based, performer and dance enthusiast who believes in a flexible definition of dance. His choreography expresses itself as a tensile inclusion of dichotomies. Relying on the formality of structural investigation and the emotion of earnest expression, his dances evoke the grandiosity of spectacle and the delicacy of intimate moments. Schlichting develops dances outside the constraints of thematic and conceptual frameworks, allowing the choreographic process to develop focus through physical intuition and sensory awareness.Schlichting was named Best Choreographer in 2013 by City Pages for his work Matching Drapes, which also received two Sage Awards, including one for “Best Performance” and one for “Best Design”. He is a 2015 McKnight Choreography Fellow, administered by The Cowles Center and funded by the McKnight Foundation, and was the first recipient of the American Dance Institute’s (now Lumberyard) Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography, a project that provides commissioning funds, fiscal sponsorship, developmental and production support for a new work from one U.S. based choreographer every year. Schlichting’s 2015 work Stripe Tease was named a “Top dance of 2015” by the Star Tribune.Schlichting has been presented by venues throughout Minnesota, including the Walker Art Center, the Cowles Center, The Southern Theater, the Bryant Lake Bowl, the Red Eye Theater and many more; in New York at Danspace Project and as a frequent contributor to CATCH! performance series; Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, IA; ODC in San Francisco, CA; Velocity in Seattle, WA; Fusebox Festival in Austin,TX; the Storefront Theater (Chicago, IL). Schlichting’s work has also been commissioned by James Sewell Ballet (Ballet Works Project), Carleton College, The Southern Theater, Young Dance, and Zenon DanceCompany.