Clinard Dance is committed to pioneering a unique approach to contemporary and American-style Flamenco. Our productions are the result of sustained work and collaborative inquiry within our community, surrounding neighborhoods, and between local, national, and international artists. We use the traditional Flamenco structure to organize seemingly disparate disciplines to create a unified whole. We do this by substituting the conventional Flamenco interplay between dancer, guitarist, and singer for the given disciplines in each project. Our inquiries bring together people from multiple disciplines and cultural backgrounds, our inquiries center around individual's ideas of place, sense of belonging and how art can educate and excite change.
Founded in 1999, Clinard Dance is pioneering a unique style of flamenco dance. We have parted with the representational ties to the form. We rely heavily on the flamenco body's rhythms and sense of improvisation. In our quest for innovation, individual isolations are our search for a free, spontaneous body that can interact and dialogue with other compositional forces, namely, music, composers, visual artists, and text.
Our productions result from years of sustained, collaborative inquiry into a vast range of ideas. This inquiry can take many forms, but it always brings together people from various disciplines and cultural backgrounds that have to do with people's place and sense of belonging.
We have created several complete evening works as well as minor choreographic works. Our pieces have been presented in the United States and abroad, including India, Syria, and China.
At Clinard Dance, we strongly believe that art and culture can create authentic and meaningful change in the lives of working-class communities. This is one reason Clinard Dance has operated a flamenco school in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood for over 20 years. Please visit our "Pilsen Community" page to learn more about our outreach programs, free monthly performance series, and community classes.
Clinard Dance recognizes that flamenco is a way of life for the Gitano communities of Spain. We acknowledge and seek to honor the Gitano culture of struggle against discrimination, displacement, and persecution.
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