Building on last year’s sold-out engagement, Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project returns to the Harris stage for their annual cohort performance, featuring ten of Chicago’s most exciting companies. With diverse artistic genres including African, contemporary, jazz, tap, and many more, this performance honors Chicago’s Black cultural, social, political, and artistic architects through movement, imagination, and lineage.

The program, Dancing the Archive: Embodied Histories, Collective Power, realizes a living, embodied archive — honoring Chicago’s Black cultural, social, political, and artistic architects through movement, imagination, and lineage rather than literal representation. This performance is not a catalog of biographies. It is a civic ritual — where dance carries memory, interrogates power, celebrates ingenuity, and imagines forward. Legacy is understood not as a fixed past, but as a continuum, shaped collectively across generations. Grounded in the understanding that movement holds lived experience, CBDLP approaches dance as both archive and act, uniting life, memory, and imagination.

This performance features CBDLP’s third cohort: The Chicago Multicultural Dance Center and Hiplet Ballerinas, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, The Era Footwork Collective, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Muntu Dance Theatre, NAJWA Dance Corps, Praize Productions Inc.

Photo by Rachel Neville.