This has been a tragic year but I have taken part in and seen many examples of people navigating tragedy with kindness, generosity, and courage. That is also part of our human nature.

The year has been about pausing for me. A deeper relationship to pain has expressed itself within myself, my family, my community, and my world. A new way of working has grown out of this pausing.

This past Fall I enrolled in a chaplaincy training program. I had a question about the role of chaplaincy in the arts. I’m not doing this program out of altruism; if I’m trying to help anyone it's myself. I’ve learned so much from people and I'm indebted to those relationships. My teachers range from my students, artistic collaborators, family, local community, and the wider world. Chaplaincy for me is about meeting people with full care where they are at on equal footing. There’s something about chaplaincy that reminds me of the spontaneity found in the arts—it works in the interstices, in the in-between spaces of care. Sometimes bigger more formal organizations or disciplines cannot necessarily address these “in-between spaces” because they are too specialized and have hard-wired structures. Going forward, I’d like to see if some of our future programming could connect the dots where/when needed and be more spontaneous and responsive to immediate community concerns.

Dancers and Performers at Flamenco at El Paseo

In the summer and fall, we started an outdoor flamenco dance series at El Paseo Garden in Pilsen—it ran twice a week through the end October. It was free with a suggested donation format. All donations went to the Pilsen Food Pantry and Good Kids Mad City. Though I have been programming dance in Pilsen for upwards of 20 years, the outdoor classes attracted new faces and spawned new relationships as well as spontaneous artistic collaborations. I invited violinist and longtime collaborator Steve Gibons to join us but by the end of the series there were four musicians exchanging sounds (Balkan jazz, Flamenco, and Son Jorocho) and two dance forms (Footwork and Flamenco).

The footwork collaboration started this summer when I met Keith Warfield (AKA Chi Blu), a Chicago poet and Footwork Dancer, at Guadalupe Reyes Park, where he was teaching. There was an immediate connection in our excitement about our dance forms (both centralize around footwork and have similar historical roots). We started programming Footwork classes at our studio as well as a residency program format for other percussive dance artists.

Drawing: Dmitry Samarov (left) / Sketch: Wendy Clinard (right)

I have had some focused time in the studio this past year exploring the flamenco body in response to song and rhythm as well as reflecting back to flamenco’s origins. In light of this, I was reminded of the importance of “juerga” in place of “show or performance”; we’ll need to host some big parties in 2021. Dancing in community for hours on end is an important ingredient to the art form and to artistic growth. I feel my teaching style is getting clearer as I’ve mostly taught privates this past year, the intimacy in working with each unique body challenges me to present the techniques and forms in varied ways that speak to different learning styles and skill levels. This always leads me to further research. I reach out to other flamencas to get their perspectives, study physical therapies, and reincorporate it back into flamenco expression.

Through the volunteer work I’m involved with in my chaplaincy program I met Renaldo Hudson. Renaldo spent 37 years in jail. During that time, he became a prison chaplain and is currently working for the Illinois Prison Project as a policy advocate and community organizer. He will facilitate circle talks and restorative justice work for Clinard Dance in the coming year. This work will cross over into our International Connections Fund award from the MacArthur Foundation.

Photo: Elena Andujar

We will be working with Compania Elena Andujar in Seville/Madrid, with her artists and Gitano youth, as well as our artists here at Clinard Dance, and our senior community in Pilsen. We will be collecting stories from the youth in Spain and our elders in Chicago and, in the spirit of flamenco, create a series of improvisational music and dance responses to their stories. We look forward to sharing this project with you all throughout 2021 as it will include free classes and programs for our audiences in both countries.

I look forward to sharing the new year with you all through dance and friendship.

I’ll leave you with this article from See Chicago Dance with “shout outs” about performances in 2020 to start it off right.

Wendy