“I was 14, 15 when I made my first dance, to a piece called ‘Jezebel’–a tango. I wore a red Roman-striped taffeta skirt. I didn’t know there was such a thing as choreography! I just made up a dance.”
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There’s something girlish and gleeful about Shirley Mordine yet, though as the founder of Mordine & Company Dance Theatre, head of the dance department at Columbia College, and artistic director of Columbia’s Dance Center, she’s something of a materfamilias to Chicago dance. And indeed her enthusiasm is tempered by a very, very serious approach to her art. Shortly after that first dance, at the age of 16, she went to San Francisco to study with Anna Halprin and Walland Lathrop. She did her first tour at 17. “So at a young age,” she says, “I was put in the midst of very sophisticated art, and from the moment I entered that environment, it was like, ‘Oh boy, this is what making art is.’ It’s not just performance, people don’t just do what they feel like doing, there’s a real intelligence operating here and a vision of the world.”
“But Chicago can also be tough in that it is not very supportive of adventurous arts, of experimentation. And that’s been very, very difficult, to the point of being coercive. I think you have to fight harder here than in almost any other city to do what you really want to do as an artist.”
