CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As the early evening bustle of neighbors gathers in Carle Park for games, artmaking, food trucks and conversation, the sun begins to set. Its descent marks the slow reveal of kaleidoscopic colors cast on an adjacent house, the park and the people — shifting hues of indigo, gold and emerald.
Soon, projected images of dancers appear across the exterior of the Erlanger House, their limbs and gestures darting from tree to brick and back to tree again. They stretch into the branches overhead as a hush falls over the crowd. The moving images of striped-shirted dancers bending, contorting and balancing between graceful movement and sharp pivots capture hours of performances in the Erlanger House, the Jack Baker Loft and Studio and Krannert Art Museum.
This is “Good House Keep,” a site-specific dance work choreographed by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dance department lecturer Anna Sapozhnikov and performed in conjunction with Krannert Art Museum’s exhibition “Making Place for the Arts at Home: Performance and Midcentury Modern Architecture.” The piece, created with dance department collaborators Roxane D’Orléans Juste, Nicole Marini, Alexandra Barbier and Jan Erkert, explores themes of domesticity, movement and memory. It features an original sound score by dance alumnus Elliot Reza Emadian. Dance professor Laura Chiaramonte’s unique vision for video documentation has a movement all its own, as if filmmaking were itself a dance.
The evening marks the closing celebration for the exhibition that explored four midcentury homes in Champaign-Urbana, including the Erlanger House, as dynamic sites for artistic experimentation and community engagement. It invited visitors to consider how art and architecture intersect in domestic spaces and how those spaces hold memory and creative legacy.
The Erlanger House itself is steeped in that legacy. Designed by architect Jack Baker for his friend Margaret Erlanger, the founder of the Illinois dance department, the home was meant to support performance. Margaret had long gathered creatives there, curating a space for imagining and presenting new works.
Erlanger After Dark! celebrates this legacy in an immersive experience sponsored by Krannert Art Museum, the City of Urbana’s Arts and Culture Program and the Urbana Park District, as the house transforms once again into a stage — this time projecting outward. With the expert support of video installation artists Matt Harsh and Jake Metz, the projections animate the home’s surfaces, allowing the interior to become exterior, and celebrating the history of dance in this historic home.
Immersed in a vision of light, sound, movement and awe, I think to myself, “This is it. This is making place for the arts at home.” May we always find, shape and experience the arts in ways that bring our community closer — steeped in our histories and rooted in the imagination of what is possible.
Editor’s note: To contact Rachel Lauren Storm, email rstorm2@illinois.edu.
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