Echoes of the Circle
Echoes of the Circle was founded on a conviction: Beauty is not ornament. It is necessity.
We create exceptional interdisciplinary performance works — works that bind performer and audience through trust, vulnerability, and shared meaning. In an alienated world, we believe the act of gathering together to witness something beautiful and true is itself a radical act.
Kevin Iega Jeff is the lead founder of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater in Chicago. Jeff trained in New York City at the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Center, the High School of the Performing Arts, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, and at the Juilliard School. At twenty-one, Jeff founded his first company, Jubilation Dance Company. Jubilation was created out of a need to provide a forum for African-American artists to be nurtured holistically through the arts. In 1995, he co-founded Deeply Rooted Productions in Chicago. The company aims to diversify the aesthetics of contemporary dance by bringing together modern, classical, and African-American dance traditions. Jeff has received numerous awards, including being named in 2015 as one of the Juilliard School’s 100 Most Outstanding Alumni for the school’s centenary anniversary.
Tanya Jayani Fernando received her AB in History and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago as the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. In her scholarship, she works on modernism and the avant-garde across the literary, visual, and performing arts. After pursuing a career in academia, she is now focusing on playwriting. Fernando’s writing is fluid: her scholarship and creative work each inform the other. She is spearheading a project between artists and scholars: a cycle of three experimental plays being created collaboratively by visionary artists/intellectuals that explore the questions: How do we share a world? How is beauty both the vessel and the work?
Dance, Salome! Dance! is set in the rehearsal studio of a premier ballet company. It plays off of Oscar Wilde’s decadent reinterpretation of the biblical story of Salome, the original text of dance and patronage. Like Wilde’s play, this piece is a full-length work in one act where the question that propels it is: “Salome, will you dance for me?” This points to the ethical limits of what it means to desire and collect. We know the price of the dance: the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.
Dance, Salome! Dance! examines the perplexing entanglement of patronage, commodification, and desire. There is a twist to the play. In this meditation on the arts and society, the principal dancer is a Black ballerina.
Through text and dance, this play explores questions of patronage, politics, and history to ultimately ask: Why do we create art? What is its meaning?
The Performance Lab allows for a two-week choreography workshop to develop the dances at the heart of the play.