Grit

Steppenwolf Theater LookOut Series

Premier March 6th - 8th 2025

Grit is an evening-length experimental dance work made in collaboration with four performers, crafted primarily through improvisational scores and instant composition structures. The project interrogates the underbelly of achievement by examining the isolating costs of competitive drive — particularly how rigor, ambition, and endurance can fracture collective care. By blurring the line between exhaustive pleasure and exhaustive pressure, the work asks what happens when intensity is no longer sustainable, and what new forms of connection can emerge from its unraveling.

The piece unfolds through tension-filled repetition, playful provocation, and amorphous compositional structures. ‘Grit’ accumulates through cycles of effort and collapse, gradually revealing an emergent collective. The dancers operate inside improvisational scores that are guided by their individual thresholds of choice, resistance, and adaptation — both in response to their own limits and to the shifting energy of the group. These scores serve as containers rather than prescriptions, allowing the performers to generate the work anew each time it is performed.

Material elements — including tape, platforms, and towels — are used to create barriers, divisions, and temporary architectures within the performance space and between the performers’ bodies. These structures are repeatedly built and dismantled, each iteration exposing their unsustainability. Over time, the performers’ initial rigor and force begin to dull, making space for negotiation, dependency, and collective recalibration. The repeated failure of rigid systems becomes the engine for transformation.

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

Concept/Direction- Maggie Vannucci

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

Dramaturgy + Thought Partner- Courtney Mackedanz

Sound Design + Mixing- Michael Cunningham

Presenters- Steppenwolf Lookout Series

Lookout Series Co-Producers- Lauren Steinberg + Patrick Zakem

Steppenwolf Lookout Production Supervisor- Matthew Chapman

Performance photos: Ricardo E Adame, Rehearsal Videos: Gabriela Chavez