Farewell to a Grande Dame?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Mordine did not return repeated phone calls to her office, and Duff would not comment on her status except to say, “We have not asked her to leave the college.” Yet the trustees seem determined to name a new chair for the dance department. Duff has the power to remove Mordine from the position, and clearly he’d prefer to have a new person in place for the coming academic year. But college regulations require him to formally notify the outgoing chair by February prior to the fall term, so Mordine can probably hang on until next fall.
Mordine has also clashed with Chuck Davis, founder and artistic director of DanceAfrica. The seven-year-old weekend festival, with a budget of nearly $700,000, has evolved into Columbia’s largest public program, attracting nearly 20,000 people annually. Sources say that Mordine insisted on having final artistic say over the content of DanceAfrica Chicago. Last week Davis stopped short of saying that he wouldn’t work with Mordine, but he did say he was unhappy with her level of commitment to the festival. “Shirley was there, but she was not always there,” he says. To help smooth Davis’s ruffled feathers, Simpson agreed to continue her work in producing DanceAfrica after leaving her job at the Dance Center.
As Drabinsky was escorted from Livent’s executive suite on Monday, however, writers at both of our dailies were casting the story in the best possible light, suggesting that the Ford Center’s first production, Ragtime, would open on schedule and dutifully quoting Mayor Daley’s underlings, who denied that the Livent debacle would have any impact on the Ford Center or on the Loop’s resurgence as a theater district. With the city providing $17 million to help renovate the Oriental, one can only hope that Livent, once our white knight, won’t leave us with a white elephant.
