“I was a choirboy most of my life,” says Ahmad Simmons. “My whole family is religious. But when I started to dance, I started to feel different in church.”
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Simmons means “choirboy” literally. He started in fourth grade at the Texas Boys’ Choir School (now the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts), where students began each day with two hours of singing, followed by academics and what he laughingly calls PE: “We’d walk along the levee across the street. We were choirboys! We didn’t really climb ropes or anything.”
Why the switch from choir to dance? “There were a lot of things that I felt I could express while dancing,” Simmons says. “That’s the cliche: when you can’t speak, you dance.
In November Simmons will perform with River North; in December, under the auspices of Pursuit, he’ll present an evening-length dance work, directed by Smith. To start the process, she offered him three quotes; he chose one by Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Letters to a Young Poet: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
River North Dance Chicago Fall Engagement 11/14 and 11/16-11/17: Thu 6 PM, Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM Harris Theater for Music and Dance 205 E. Randolph 312-334-7777rivernorthchicago.com $30-$75
