Today we’d like to introduce you to Wendy Clinard.
Wendy, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I founded Clinard Dance in 1999 as an interdisciplinary dance company. I am pioneering a unique approach to contemporary and American-style flamenco, created by a community of artists drawn from a diverse range of disciplines and cultural backgrounds. Our works have been presented in the United States and abroad including India, Syria, and Beijing, China.
The interdisciplinary approach draws on my background as a visual artist. I graduated from The School of the Art Institute in 1993 focusing on painting. So, studying dance as well as making sense of space in regards to movement, sound when I choreograph is from a painter’s perspective.
Flamenco was a platform to creatively wrestle with the questions I was asking on graduation in 1993. Flamenco offered me a place to grow, to penetrate truths in movement and space. Most importantly, it offered me a place to find, develop and relate to both a literal and figurative center. I have also augmented my dance
studies to include other dance idioms including ballet, modern, butoh and Russian folk dancing.
Has it been a smooth road?
It has not been a smooth road. The struggles along the way have always had to do with balancing life’s demands – financial, family, teaching, and creating works. I see these struggles as the sole source for grabbling with the questions that keep showing up over the years – what is a human being, why make art, what does your personal art approach and work want to communicate. When my direction is clear the struggles are just part of the joys that come from a dedicated and sincere life in the arts. I’m in it for the long haul. I believe in the wisdom in the body and the power of dance to communicate, waking us up to our shared humanity.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Our work is rooted in flamenco and understanding the unique way the guitar, son, and dance interplay (otherwise known as flamenco structure). We lift this structure to play with unique instrumentation and or devise original departures from this structure. We also extract the universal qualities –the rhythmic /percussive nature, call and response, isolations in the flamenco body so that the participants can join in with whatever the “theme or story” of a given project directs. Repurposing flamenco to find the live qualities of a particular time and place ie 2018 in Chicago is what is fundamentally and historically flamenco and it holds the potential for growth in the form.
Sincerity to place, person and the moment are of upmost important to how flamenco became an art form how it will continue to grow.
I’m most connected to our original works like From The Arctic To The Middle East and Chicago’s Watershed: A 156-Mile Choreography. The heart of these works are dedicated to people’s place and their sense of belonging and our artistic disciplines are used to serve that inquiry. The story that emerges aims to rally the human spirit.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I think that if an artist can preserve the initial love and sincerity that they have for their art form and carry that with them – 5 years in, 10 years in, 20 years in, etc. that they can do that anywhere. Chicago is a great city for vocations in the arts, if you keep your needs simple, there are live work spaces, oppurtunities to share work on large and small scales, as well as see other great art works.
Pricing:
- Classes are $16 per hour and private instruction is available.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1839 S.Carpenter
Chicago IL 60608 - Website: www.clinardance.org
- Phone: 312.399.1984
- Email: info @clinardance.org
- Facebook: clinardance
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