Kate Corby Dance Concert 2026

UW–Madison Dance Department presents “Residues,” New Work by Choreographers Kate Corby and Erin Kilmurray

MADISON, WI — The UW–Madison Dance Department and Kate Corby present “Residues,” a split-bill, contemporary dance concert featuring work by Professor Kate Corby alongside long-time collaborator and guest artist Erin Kilmurray September 25-26, 2026 at the Margaret H’Doubler Performance Space in Lathrop Hall. This visceral, electric program pairs two compelling contemporary choreographic voices that push aesthetic boundaries and ask big questions about the body, performance, and the ways in which we interact with ourselves and others.

The concert opens with Corby’s premiere of “Residues,” a duet that explores the themes of agency, confinement, trauma, and archetypes, stemming from Corby’s investigation of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, Catholic-run institutions which imprisoned women, forcing them to do severe unpaid labor and exposing them to physical and psychological abuse. The work will be performed by Anna Peretz Rogovoy, dance artist and educator who teaches for the Dance Department and Meaghan Schimke, a UW–Madison dance alum, choreographer, dancer, and instructor based in Madison, WI.

The second half features the choreography of 2025 Chicago Tribune “Chicagoan of the Year in Dance” Erin Kilmurray. Kilmurray is a former performer with Kate Corby & Dancers, known for creating genre-straddling, radical performance spaces—including the famed Chicago project The Fly Honey Show. Kilmurray will present “Untitled (fka Nightshade), a work in development that will be performed by Chicago-based Kara Brody, Damon Green, and Deandra Alaba.

Acknowledgements

This concert is presented and produced by the Dance Department and supported by the Buff Brennan Professorship of Dance. Erin Kilmurray’s work was made possible with support from Links Hall + Department of Cultural Affairs Special Events/Chicago Cultural Center. Images above include a photo of Anna Peretz Rogovoy performing Kate Corby’s “Residues” taken by Tori Duhaime (left) and a photo of Deandra Alaba in Erin Kilmurray’s Untitled (fka Nightshade) taken by Sarah Joyce (right).

About Kate Corby

“Compelling” and “full of gestured conflict and impish daring” (Chicago Tribune), Kate Corby’s dance works have been seen extensively in the Midwest, New York, California, Seattle, Atlanta and internationally in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Taiwan and Hungary, where she traveled as a Fulbright fellow. Corby, featured in Dance Magazine as one of six choreographers “on the cusp of making waves in the larger dance world,” has been a professor at the UW since 2008, and is the inaugural Buff Brennan Professor of Dance. She served as the Dance Department chair from 2017-2020 and the chair of the Department of Theatre & Drama from 2022-2024. She established Kate Corby & Dancers in the Midwest with Chicago-based dancers Erin Kilmurray, Emily Miller, and Anna Normann in 2009. In addition to regular seasons in Chicago and Madison, some of the company’s past projects include: the Chicago Cultural Center’s SpinOff Festival, the World Dance Alliance-Americas Festival in Vancouver, BC and Puebla, Mexico, a collaboration and live performance with cellist Zoë Keating, commissioned by the Wisconsin Union Theater, the Live Art, Live Rio! Festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2010: Chicago at the Dance Center of Columbia College. From 1999-2004, Corby was based in San Francisco, where her projects were supported by the Zellerbach Family Fund and Theater Bay Area, and performed in the Cowell Theater and ODC Theater, among others. Corby’s choreography has been called “ingenious” by the Chicago Reader, “haunting and memorable” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and was a Critics’ Pick in Time Out Chicago five times from 2011-2012.

More recently, Corby began creating dance films and her work has been screened extensively since 2016, including in Flatlands Dance Film Festival, the Tiny Dance Film Festival, the Midwest RAD Festival, the Jacksonville Dance Film Festival, the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, and Screen.dance Scotland, among many others. In addition to teaching master classes nationally and internationally, Corby served on the faculties of Beloit College, Columbia College Chicago, and the Pedagogy Department of the Hungarian Dance Academy. Corby also co-founded and co-directed Performing Ourselves, with dance/movement therapist Mariah LeFeber, a community dance program based in Madison which employed undergraduate dance students to teach movement and wellness curricula in local community centers and schools. Performing Ourselves served a total of approximately 1,000 5-14 year olds from 2012-2022, and was a founding partner of the UW–Madison’s Community Arts Collaboratory.

Corby received her MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was the recipient of the Nettl Award for outstanding student choreography and was a teaching assistant and a University Fellow. She found dance as a theater major at Beloit College and spent much of her childhood in rural Wisconsin, graduating from Three Lakes High School in Oneida County.

About Erin Kilmurray

Erin Kilmurray is a Chicago-based dance artist creating genre-straddling, femme-forward performance work that demands aliveness and collectivity on stage, in studio, and with audiences. They facilitate a dance and community practice that relentlessly explores the celebrations and liberations of women, queer folks, and the underdog. Her work embraces mess, play, pleasure, and lessons in how arbitrary the line between artist and audience can be.

Erin is the creator / director of legendary, immersive, all body loving, queer punk dance and variety performance project The Fly Honey Show, where pleasure is king and it all favors the queens. Fly Honey was established in a DIY living space in 2010 and grew to sell out iconic rock venue Thalia Hall, was featured at Lollapalooza 2022, and named a “Chicago institution” (Chicago Reader). 

Named Chicagoan of the Year in Dance 2025 by Chicago Tribune, she is also recognized with a 2024 US Artist Fellowship Award in Dance, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awardee (2023), a Chicago Dancemakers Lab Artist (2020), and one of 50 People Who Really Perform for Chicago (2023-2019; Newcity). Kilmurray was one of three “groundbreaking artists” presented at the inaugural Chicago Performs program at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2022).

Additionally, Erin has made dances for countless independent makers, parties, music videos + festivals, as well as theatrical productions with Court Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Writers Theater, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. 

She teaches at Northwestern University and University of Chicago,  with histories at Visceral Dance Center, CONFLUX Intensive,The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, University of Minnesota, Loyola University Chicago,  Beloit College, Oberlin College, among others.

For more, visit www.erinkilmurray.com.

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