Fine & Performing Arts

If you dream of making music with your feet and your feet being the instruments, you won’t want to miss Savion Glover’s “Bare Soundz,” an exuberant show of tap and sound presented at North Central College on Tuesday, Nov. 11, at 8 p.m.  

As the show’s name implies, sound will be the featured component. Intricate and syncopated rhythms, a range of tones and varying degrees of amplification combine to make a concert of tap to sound. Performers are Marshall Davis Jr., Maurice Chestnut and Savion Glover, who also directs the show.  

Using tap as song and as an acoustical instrument, Glover merges acoustical vibrations in a concert of sounds that explore jazz, Caribbean beats and other contemporary musical genres. In his 27th year as a “hoofer,” Glover is a Tony Award Winner for the Broadway production “Bring in ‘da noise Bring in ‘da funk.” His Broadway and film credits include “The Tap Dance Kid,” “Black and Blue,” “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the movie “Tap” starring Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr., and Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.” Glover was also the choreographer for the acclaimed Academy Award-winning 2006 Warner Brothers release of “Happy Feet.” 

Local dance studio owner Ashley DeForest of Deforest Dance Academy in Elmhurst, IL, is stage manager with “Bare Soundz” and says she performs with the show as needed and hopes to dance in Naperville. She has performed in several of Glover’s productions and appeared with Glover on TV’s popular “Dancing with the Stars.” About “Bare Soundz” DeForest says, “It’s like no other dance show around. People think dance and they think visual; this is more percussive, like a music concert. Very unique, there is no band, no instruments playing. The tap dancers are creating the music and rhythm with their feet.”  

“Bare Soundz” starts at 8 p.m. Nov. 11 in Pfeiffer Hall, 310 E. Benton Ave. Tickets are $50/person; call the North Central College Box Office at 630-637-SHOW or visit http://finearts.northcentralcollege.edu/x45199.xml.

The works of Dick Locher, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune and artist for the “Dick Tracy” comic strip, will be featured in a month-long exhibit in North Central College’s new Schoenherr Art Gallery Nov. 3 thru Dec. 4.  

Titled “The Art of Dick Locher-Dick Tracy, Political Cartoons and Beyond,” the free exhibit will showcase selected political cartoons, comic strip and fine arts pieces, including bronze castings, in Schoenherr Art Gallery at the College’s new Wentz Concert Hall and Fine Arts Center, 171 E. Chicago Ave., in Naperville. The gallery will be open weekdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and one hour before most performing arts events in the Fine Arts Center, including weekends. 

Locher is recognized worldwide as a cartoonist and commentator on the American scene. His unerring ability to capture the absurdities of life through his political cartoons garnered him a Pulitzer Prize in 1983. A leading editorial cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune since 1973, his cartoons are nationally syndicated by Tribune Media Services and have appeared in Life, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, Playboy, The Congressional Record and hundreds of newspapers throughout the world.Since 1983 Locher has been the artist of the “Dick Tracy“ comic strip and in 2005 took over as both writer and artist. He assisted Dick Tracy’s originator Chester Gould from 1957 to 1961.