Those folks at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago sure know how to throw a party. I didn’t really think they could top last year’s Spotlight Ball featuring THE Mikhail Baryshnikov, but all the fancies came out of the woodwork for a beautiful, inspiring, and incredibly lucrative night for Hubbard Street. Between gala tickets, silent auction and an exciting live auction netting $200K, Monday’s Spotlight Ball brought in more than $800,000 to benefit artistic and educational programming, so it was a pretty good day in the office for them.
I managed to rock my $10 dress from Marshalls and didn’t get embarassingly drunk. So I call it a big win for me, too.
In anticipation of next season’s series featuring the work of William Forsythe, his new boss at USC Glorya Kaufman introduced the guest of honor, whose lovely speech returned again and again to the importance of dancers to a career choreographer. “It’s all about dancers,” he said. “They are very, very valuable, insanely focused, rigorous, disciplined [and] they made me.” Forsythe encouraged dancers and dance makers to stay humble, remain curious, and be open to whatever happens in the room that day, and that moment. Not a bad bit of inspiration to listen to over a delicious short rib; not a bad way to spend a school night, either.
Sometimes I just have to pinch myself. #starstruck
Lauren Warnecke 
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