Driehaus Dance Residency enlivens Expo Chicago Week

This is the week where a big chunk of the Chicago art scene is caffeinated by the pop up art market at Navy Pier known as Expo Chicago. The Gilded Age mansion and auditorium that make up the Driehaus Museum might not be the first place you would think to go to see groundbreaking thoughtful contemporary art, but for this upcoming weekend it’s one of the most fascinating spots to see art that made up of humans moving.

Brendan Fernandes’ In The Round project activates this historic space in a way that connects the past with the present in surprising and embodied ways. The choreography is vaguely pedestrian as they move over, through and with one another and the central sculpture. The work has dancers manipulating textile polygons printed with the score that are derived from  Penrose tiles.  

This movement art work opens the newly and meticulously restored Murphy Auditorium, a Beaux-Arts building constructed in 1926 for the American College of Surgeons to gather and give presentations.  The Auditorium is an ecclesiastical adjacent rotunda with a wall of sedalia which surrounds a mirrored polygonal bench designed by AIM Architecture which reflects the light, the dancers and the audience brave enough to get close. The building also bears a resemblance to sanctuary of the famed Judson Church, where ideas about what dance was or wasn’t became the work of revolutionary artists like Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown,David Gordon and Simone Forti.  Fernandes finds himself heavily influenced by this particular “family tree” of dance practice. The composition teacher who sparked this revolution was Robert Ellis Dunn, a mentor of mine who asked more questions than he ever answered.  As a musician who studied with John Cage, he had his own” Yes And” way of asking movement artists to find the work in their bodies and their thoughts, and breaking with modern dance founders, let improvisation and chance into the studio as a valid methodology on putting forth work. 

With experimental movement art you can wander in and out any time during the three hour span of the work, and you can place yourself wherever you choose in relationship to the dancers and the structure.  There is a companion photo exhibit by Robert Chase Heishman in the Mansion’s gallery, where the dancers were interacting with the space under construction and each other while manipulating large circular mirrors. The photographs mirror the figure sculptures found in the mansion, as well as the circular gallery.  This most contemporary and ephemeral of arts interacts and comments on the design of this architectural treasure. These were spaces humans were meant to gather and contemplate important things, and those humans may have worn corsets and frock coats then and Fernandes’s dancers wear unisex satin pajamas, but humans keep moving through the space, and indeed our world. 

I only got to taste the preview, but audiences are welcome to partake of this free walk in arts experience of  Brendan Fernandes’ In The Round project from 5 to 8 pm on Friday April 10, 2026 at the Driehaus Museum, 50 East Erie Street in Chicago Illinois. For more information and additional presentations that are part of this residency bringing bodies and the now to an historic home and museum, go to https://driehausmuseum.org/exhibition/brendan-fernandes-In-the-round

For information on more programming this weekend, check out  https://www.expochicago.com/

For more reviews go to https://www.theatreinchicago.com