This event featured a work-in-progress showing of Chicago-based artist and performer Courtney Mackedanz’s Dead End Host. The piece, which traces how the body emerges from and within ecological conditions, is shaped by the artist’s experience since contracting the tick-borne illness Lyme disease. The performance is presented by the Movement Theory Lab, part of the Arts Labs initiative at the Neubauer Collegium. The Movement Theory Lab is a forum for faculty and graduate students interested in dance and movement studies. It consists of a reading group and a series of workshops at which members focus on embodied experimentation in partnership with professional dancers.

About the Artist
Courtney Mackedanz is an experimental dance maker working across embodied research, expanded choreographic practices, and multimedia performance installations. Meandering gradually through cumulative iterations, their movement based performance practice gravitates toward the quiet complexity of the post-natural landscape while pursuing embodiment as a method of sensing toward technological systems, beyond-human beings, and the scalar complexities of such relational entanglements. In 2025 they pursued their research in collaboration with the Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid) and with the support of the 2025 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Award (Chicago). They were a 2024 DanceWEB Scholar with mentor Isabel Lewis (Vienna) and a finalist for the 2024 Artadia Award (Chicago). They have presented their work at The Arts Club, Links Hall, and High Concept Labs (Chicago), amongst others, and have performed within the work of Alexandra Pirici (Chicago Architecture Biennial), Otobong Nkanga (MCA Chicago), and Tino Sehgal (MCA Chicago), amongst others. Mackedanz earned their BFA in Performance and Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute (Chicago) a long time ago.