Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet presents “Matters of the Heart” at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance — the highlight of its 2025–26 season — featuring works by two of today’s most highly recognized women choreographers, Chanel DaSilva and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa.
"Broken Wings," by Ochoa, which celebrated its Midwest debut in 2024, is inspired by the life and art of Frida Kahlo. It is set to a score by UK ballet composer Peter Salem, performed by the Chicago Philharmonic, a Harris Theater resident company. Broken Wings will not disappoint. According to our interview with Chanel DaSilva, Ochoa’s Broken Wings “is exciting in a different way than my piece, but it will stimulate excitement and interest just as much as mine will beg you to have fun.”
DaSilva explores themes of love and resilience through her ballet, “Wabash & You,” which presents its world premiere, capturing a love story set in Chicago and featuring a live band on stage, The Main Squeeze. The “love letter,” as she describes it, is “both to the city and to the hopeless romantics that live within us all.”
As a multifaceted artist, DaSilva explains, “When I think about my purpose and why God has given me this gift of art and dance and art-making, it’s to serve a few different purposes. So much of my life has been spent in the dance industry — I grew up as a dancer, I performed as a dancer — and then, around age 30, I decided that I wanted to expand how I use the arts to impact the world and society, creating greater diversity and equity in the dance profession and beyond. In that way, I call myself an artivist — to create ripples of change, moving the needle from where I met my own experience of being in the dance community, where most often I was the only brown face in the room. And I asked myself, ‘Why is that?’”
When asked when she knew she was a dancer, Chanel shared, “The story is that I told my grandmother — as I pointed up at a picture — ‘Grandma, I want to do that.’ And it was a picture of dance. She put me in a dance school in Queens, the Bernice Johnson Cultural Arts Center, and I was hooked right away. I remember knowing at three that this is what I want to do.”
Addressing her creative process, DaSilva says, “As a storyteller, I tend to blend dance languages that already exist — like ballet, modern, West African, jazz, and hip-hop — and I blend them with what I call just humanity. You know, a simple touch of the face, or a touch of the heart, or like a beating heartbeat, right? So you’ll see the swirly swirl thing, and then the dancer will just be there, and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I know that moment when your heart is racing so fast and you have to stop it.’”
On “Wabash & You,” she explains, “Yes, Wabash — like Wabash Avenue — which is performed in collaboration with a band called The Main Squeeze, an incredible band that began in Bloomington, Indiana, and is now based in Los Angeles. The stage set presents a downtown Chicago landscape, depicting Wabash Avenue under the El train. It tells a brief but unforgettable love story that happens in the Chicago Loop.”
DaSilva says her mantra for this show has been threefold: “Number one, because the content of the show and the elements — the band, the live music — are so full, I want our audience to have fun. To have fun! To come and just have an evening of enjoyment. In this world right now, I want you to be able to escape to the theater and have, you know, 90 minutes to two hours of fun.
“Number two, for my piece in particular, I would love our audience to walk away knowing that love can find you at any time. To say yes to love at any time, and to know that if that love doesn’t last, that doesn’t make it any less valuable.
“And number three, I would love our audience to continue to support the arts.”
She closed with: “Looking forward to seeing you all there — Thursday, November 6, at 7:30 p.m. at the Harris Theater, located at 205 East Randolph Street.”
Next week’s Arts & Culture section will feature the full interview with Chanel DaSilva, and you can catch the podcast — recorded at CNW Studios.
Visionary Kai EL´ Zabar has worked as CEO of arts organizations and as editor, writer and multimedia consultant accumulating a significant number of years in experience as an executive, journalist,publisher, public relations, media training, marketing, internal and external communications. Kai currently continues her life’s work as Editor-in-Chief Of Chicago News Weekly where she has resumed her column, “E NOTES.” She is ecstatic to be in the position to grace Chicago and the world with a publication that articulates the Black voice.