Grit

Chicago Athletic Association, Stagg Court 4th floor

7:30 pm - August 23rd + 24th, 30th + 31st, 2026

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Premiered March 6th - 8th 2025 - Steppenwolf Theater LookOut Series

NEW CITY STAGE - DANCE PREVIEW: “Grit” at Steppenwolf 1700

Grit is an evening-length experimental dance work created in collaboration with four femme artists. The piece examines the underbelly of achievement by exploring the isolating costs of competitive natures. Rooted in collective authorship and group process, Grit asks- what does it cost to keep pushing? What becomes possible when we focus on collectivism?

The piece resists polish in favor of immediacy, presence, and lived decision-making. The dancers individually pass through tension-filled cycles of movement that transform into playful, amorphous structures. Repetition becomes a compositional force, slowly eroding individual dominance and revealing relational dependencies that arise in moments of exhaustion.

Material objects — tape, platforms, microphones, loop pedals, clothes, and towels — are introduced as malleable architectures that divide space and bodies, establishing systems that demand effort to maintain. These structures are repeatedly constructed and dismantled throughout the work, exposing their inherent instability.

Fluidity becomes both a physical and conceptual throughline. The performers’ relationships to fluids — their own spit, sweat, and large amounts of water squirted/dripped from bottles— texturize the arc of the piece, transitioning from charged, confrontational exchanges toward pliability. As exhaustion accumulates, the performers soften into each other’s seeping bodies, dampening their brash confrontations. Accenting the shifting, malleable nature of how the group manages competition between themselves, decaying hierarchical dominance structures for more fluid ones.

Grit is both a performance and a practice — a space where bodies test the limits of effort and discover what remains when force is no longer sustainable. It is a work that unfolds through friction and failure, inviting performers and audiences into a shared experience of negotiation, vulnerability, and becoming

Concept/Direction- Maggie Vannucci

Performance + Movement Creation Collaborators- Laura Baumeister, Rahila Coats, Kate Laughlin, Hannah Marcus

Sound Design + Mixing (2026 staging) - Corey Smith

Dramaturgy + Thought Partner. (2025 staging) - Courtney Mackedanz

Presenters- Chicago Athletic Association (2026), Steppenwolf Lookout Series (2025), Lookout Series Co-Producers- Lauren Steinberg + Patrick Zakem, Steppenwolf Lookout Production Supervisor- Matthew Chapman

Promotional Photos: Gabriela Chavez

Lookout Performance photos: Ricardo E Adame

Residue Edging

Dovetail 3320 Dance Series - October 23rd & 24th, 2026

Residue Edging explores the intoxicating space between wanting and having. Tracing what happens when anticipation becomes the destination itself: the wanting more consuming than the having, the fantasy more alive than the thing. Through cycles of restraint and release, and the body's relationship to delayed desire, the piece lives in the in-between: stuck, waiting, buzzing. The dancers trace the arc from fantasy to euphoria to deflation, using humor and physical tension to hold the absurdity of how much of life we spend suspended in wanting.

Concept Direction: Maggie Vannucci

Performance + Movement Creation Collaborators: Anna Caffarelli, Jocelyn Snow, Erin Soko, Adanya Gilmore, Delaney McCarthy, Lilly Yokom, Kristen Whalen, Ali Lorenz, Tessa Olson