Deeply Rooted celebrates its past
while boldly pointing toward the future

Taylor Ramos in Ulysses Dove’s Episodes

Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre (DRDT) initiated its hard-fought existence exactly thirty years ago when it was a small company intent on celebrating the unique cultural contributions of Black America through dance. Now, three decades later, its success allows it to fill Chicago’s largest concert hall, the Auditorium Theatre, and showcase how it became a beacon of dance excellence while remaining true to its core objectives.

Saturday evening’s one-night-only performance, Love Joy Resistance, was a tribute to the company’s thirtieth anniversary and, in large part, a beautifully curated victory lap. One that overflowed with superlatives.

Sam Ogunde and Nyemah Stuart in Nicole Clarke-Springer’s Sacred Spaces, 30th Anniversary Edition

Opening comments aren’t unusual in this kind of setting. But when Makeda Crayton, Deeply Rooted’s Executive Director, stepped through the curtains in a shimmering silver cocktail dress to welcome the audience, there was a very different level of intimacy and urgency fueling her words as she described the road that brought the company to where it is today. The passion and conviction driving her statements were fresh, relatable and stimulating. There was an unexpected force behind them. And when she declared, “our humanity is worth celebration,” it seemed as if a trip was thrown.

Recorded narrations acting as dance prologues kicked in immediately following her remarks, further stoking embers of anticipation. Once the curtain rose, Tricheur, Menteur, Voleur burst into life, a brand-new dance choreographed by one of the company’s co-founders, Gary Abbott. French for “liar, cheater, thief,” Abbott describes it as “Black dance noir.” That it certainly is … and a whole lot more.

Gary Abbott’s Tricheur, Menteur, Voleur

Filled with characters that haunt the night, Tricheur, Menteur, Voleur slides into their skin as they prowl their way through a myriad of adventures dressed in Matrix black and moving with the lionesque grace of hunters. Working with Tracey Valcy, Abbott is also credited for the polished costume designs of these sleek predators. A hyper-dynamic score by David Lang, Evan Ziporyn and Real Quiet, along with Abbott’s bold excursions into movement writ large, made excitement a keystone of this piece, whose thrills were complemented with heady doses of intrigue and swagger.

From beginning to end, daring and danger seemed to cover the stage and every next breath held an anticipated promise of delight. You sense you know and understand this world. That maybe you’ve even lived through pieces of it.

Gary Abbott’s Tricheur, Menteur, Voleur

Here, brash confidence lies on both sides of the gender divide, allowing women in the corps to flex their muscles as power dancers. Everything about the dance mirrors some aspect of current existence. What’s so stimulating is the way it pushes those knowns and places them in some not-too-distant future. Making this world premiere a harbinger of where you hope dance may be headed. A place where theatricality, expanded dance prowess and visionary choreographic imagination in the way movement expresses thought takes the art form to the next level. It’s heartening too to see the dancers wear nobility with such clear pride and ease. Many in the company are DRDT veterans and their maturity comes through in the small and large tells that mark a seasoned and fully invested dance professional.

More Perfect Union, a second world premiere, was created and presented by the company’s other co-founder, Kevin Iega Jeff, and was also preceded by a recorded introduction. This one called into question humankind’s penchant for division and destructive duplicity. Broken into three parts, or movements, More Perfect Union uses dance to look at who we are and what it would take to be improved versions of that.

The second movement, Constituents, proved particularly engrossing for the way it portrayed superficial differences and attitudinal biases. It was an inspired way of using dance to demonstrate and lampoon the folly of our tribal natures.

In the piece, one camp of dancers wore red gloves, the other blue. And through the progression of the work we’re shown how external differences are only that—surface markers that have little bearing on what’s underneath.

Kevin Iega Jeff’s Church of Nations

Dramatic and spirit-filled, the last movement, Church of Nations, is a powerful antidote to the forces that foment inter-group conflict and turmoil. Its message of victory through perseverance and faith is a source of strength, especially when faced with forces that seem determined to stymy dreams. Precisely the type of resource Deeply Rooted’s leadership relied on to help them reach the milestone they now commemorate.

Kevin Iega Jeff’s Church of Nations

After a pause, the program plunged into the secular with Ulysses Dove‘s scorching-hot Episodes, a fiery glimpse into “the power struggles involved in human relationships.” Dove, a wonderfully gifted dancer and choreographer, premiered the work in 1987 at the London Festival Ballet, nine years before he would succumb to the scourge of the AIDS epidemic. Episodes has all the markers of a Dove masterwork: speed, power and eroticism. Further enlivened with Robert Ruggieri‘s core-rattling percussive score, John B. Reade’s voluptuous lighting and jaw-dropping dance on the part of the company, Episodes is a piece that you openly crave would go on all night.

The Company in Nicole Clarke-Springer’s Sacred Spaces, 30th Anniversary Edition

But it was a return to the place of spirit that would close out the celebration with Deeply Rooted Artistic Director Nicole Clarke-Springer‘s Sacred Spaces, 30th Anniversary Edition. Music is the bedrock of this panorama of dance that includes gorgeous solos and galvanizing ensemble components. Clarke-Springer confessed Sacred Spaces is something of an homage to her mother who, she confided, probably wouldn’t find it particularly sacred. But with the voices and music of Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, Donny Hathaway and Bobby McFerrin, the divine has ample conduits to convey its clarion call for the resistance and resilience that this formidable company so handsomely embodies.

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photos by Todd Rosenberg

Love Joy Resistance
Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre
Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive in Chicago
performed May 30, 2026
for more information, visit Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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