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 Dance
Company.