movies

Chicago’s Watershed: A 156-Mile Choreography

Wendy Clinard, choreography

EStrella Piano Duo, piano

Wendy Clinard, Andrea Petersen, Marisela Tapia, dancers

Dmitry Samarov, art work

Renato Velarde, video and audio producer

With Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as the starting point, our bold new work pairs Wendy Clinard’s original Flamenco-based choreography with exciting EStrella Piano Duo’s performance and Dmitry Samarov’s video-projected ink work for an exploration of the dissonance and consonance of the Chicago River and the city it sustains.

Wendy Clinard: “My Chicago’s Watershed choreography, like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, is constantly shifting, changing – slower, faster, layered, singular; one minute hysterical, the next calm…like the river and its’ web of intricate relationships.”

This project was premiered in June 2014 at the University of Chicago Logan Center for the Arts.

A reading of Stuart Dybek’s “Vigil”. Hand-typed and illustrated by Dmitry Samarov for Chicago Independent Bookstore Day, 2015.

In 2014, filmmaker John McNaughton directed five clips for a TV show he was planning based on my books about being a cabdriver, “Hack—Stories from a Chicago Cab” (2011) and “Where to? A Hack Memoir” (2014). McNaughton was assisted by Steve Jones, John Fecile, Rick Paul, Bryan Racine, and Brooklyn Demme.

Another collage book.

A collage book.

Selections from the blog “Hack: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Driving a Cab,” by artist and cab driver Dmitry Samarov, are now being offered through the Chicago Reader. Directed by Lauren E. Bohn in 2010.

A set of marker done on CTA buses and trains in 2017 and 2018 by Dmitry Samarov.

Music: “43rd Street Bus Stop”—Jimmy Mitchell/Mack Simmons

Some moody footage shot in an apartment in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago in 1991 by Caroline Stephenson.