Neighborhood Dances, a project by Victoria Bradford, began in July 2014 as a series of daily microdances, recorded on an iPhone and distributed through social media. These suburban and urban interventions were brief gestures exploring the civilized landscape as a frame for idiosyncratic improvised movement. In the fall of 2015, the project evolved beyond a solo practice to include a workshop structure featured at the Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery. This week-long program gave participants the tools and methods with which to make their own Neighborhood Dances, and multiple participants went on to make many more Neighborhood Dances and still do to this day.
The current iteration of Neighborhood Dances invites the public to participate through a set of basic instructions and the use of a hashtag when posting to social media. Submissions by the public will be reviewed and three selected as the source material for performances to be choreographed by artist Victoria Bradford and staged at the MCA Chicago on April 15 as part of the Merce Cunningham: Common Time exhibition.
Neighborhood Dances was sponsored by High Concept Labs in Fall 2015, selected as a featured program of Chicago Artists Month 2015, named an affiliate program of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and partially supported by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.