Event Details
For decades, the Stevenson High School campus has been a hub for creativity through the Odyssey Fine Arts Festival. Since 1996, the festival has welcomed thousands of guest artists, inspiring students and fostering a lasting connection to the arts. Building on this tradition, Odyssey Festival now offers a week of immersive fine arts experiences, including co-curricular workshops and in-school field trip performances across dance, music, theatre, and visual arts.
As part of the Odyssey Fine Arts Festival, Chicago Dance Crash will present four in-school performances of a 30-minute adaptation of LXIV (six.four) for Stevenson High School students.
Premiering to a sold-out audience in 2025, LXIV (six.four) is a high-energy fusion of chess, dance, and storytelling that brings the game’s strategy and symbolism to life. Structured in two contrasting halves, the work introduces each chess piece as a fully realized character navigating power, hierarchy, and the roles they are expected to play.
The program opens with LXIV (six.four), an original ensemble-driven work curated by Artistic Director KC Bevis and Rehearsal Director Phillip Wood. Built through collaboration and the amplification of each dancer’s individual strengths, the piece uses the chessboard as a framework to explore human relationships, pressure, and inherited systems. Part battle tactics and part narrative, the work transforms the board into a living landscape, revealing how people enter systems already in motion and make choices that carry lasting consequences.
The performance concludes with James Morrow’s Immortal Games, inspired by the legendary 1851 Immortal Chess Game. Blending the intensity of dance battles with the logic of chess strategy, the work examines risk, sacrifice, and calculation through athletic movement and real-time decision making. The score, composed by Rob Flax, was created using a custom-built MIDI chessboard that generates sound in response to each move, allowing strategy and instinct to shape both the music and the dance as the game unfolds.
*Event not open to the public*