Visceral Dance Company

Visceral Dance Company is a Chicago contemporary dance ensemble founded in 2013 by award-winning choreographer Nick Pupillo — a former Giordano Dance Chicago dancer and two-time Dance Chicago Outstanding Choreography Award recipient whose vision for a new kind of Chicago dance company has reshaped the city's contemporary movement landscape over the past decade. Named one of Dance Magazine's 25 to Watch in 2015 — a distinction that placed Visceral alongside the most promising emerging companies in the United States — the company performs at Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park, Chicago's premier venue for world-class dance and music performance. From its founding, Visceral has committed to an aesthetic that is athletic, emotional, technically demanding, and fearlessly progressive, building a repertoire that challenges audiences and dancers alike while remaining accessible to anyone who responds to the raw power of the human body in motion.

Nick Pupillo's Vision

Nick Pupillo's journey to founding Visceral Dance Company began in the trenches of Chicago's professional dance community. After dancing with Giordano Dance Chicago — one of the city's most established and respected jazz and contemporary companies — Pupillo recognized a gap in Chicago's dance ecosystem: the city needed a company that could bridge the athleticism of commercial dance, the emotional depth of contemporary technique, and the conceptual ambition of experimental choreography into a single cohesive artistic identity. His two Dance Chicago Outstanding Choreography Awards validated what audiences already sensed: Pupillo's movement vocabulary was distinctive, physically exhilarating, and built on a foundation of genuine innovation rather than imitation. Visceral Dance Company became the vehicle for that vision, attracting dancers who shared his commitment to pushing physical boundaries while maintaining the emotional vulnerability that separates transcendent performance from mere technical display.

Repertoire and Guest Choreographers

The company's repertoire features works by world-renowned choreographers including Ohad Naharin — the legendary Batsheva Dance Company artistic director whose Gaga movement language has revolutionized contemporary dance training worldwide — Sidra Bell, whose darkly theatrical, technically ferocious choreography has earned her commissions from companies across the globe, and Robyn Mineko Williams, the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago alumna whose work combines architectural precision with deeply personal storytelling. Commissioning work from choreographers of this caliber demonstrates both the technical capabilities of Visceral's dancers and the company's ambition to participate in global contemporary dance conversations rather than remaining a regional enterprise. Each season's programming balances new commissions with repertoire works, ensuring that audiences experience both the familiar and the unexpected.

Visceral Dance Center in Avondale

Beyond the stage, Nick Pupillo founded Visceral Dance Center — a six-studio training facility located at 3121 North Rockwell Street in Chicago's Avondale neighborhood — which has served the Chicago dance community since 2007. The center offers classes across all levels and styles, from pre-professional training for aspiring company dancers to recreational classes for adults seeking the physical and creative benefits of dance. This dual identity as both performing company and training institution ensures that Visceral's artistic philosophy permeates the broader Chicago dance community, developing the next generation of technically prepared, artistically ambitious dancers who may one day join the company ranks or carry Visceral's movement values into their own careers.

Building the Set

This frame is part of Visceral's Within series. I'd made a run of personal projects with dancer Noelle Kayser, and she brought me into Nick Pupillo's production. The structure is my set, and it's the clearest example of why I build them: it gives a picture something no other photographer can rent. My studio is on the fourth floor of an old West Loop loft, and back before Fulton Market gentrified, people collected pallets off the street and sold them. I tracked down someone who could get them, hauled about 25 of them up four flights, and Noelle and I were up until midnight assembling it for the next day's shoot. It stayed in the studio for six months because I didn't want to carry it back down.

Photographing Dancers

What stayed with me wasn't the set. It was how the dancers treated each other. Put a group of accounting professionals in front of my camera and they'll ignore each other, or tease each other and think it's funny. These dancers were generous and supportive of each other the entire time. That shoot changed how I think about dancers. Dance might be the highest form of performing art. That's how it felt watching these eight.

The Portrait

This conceptual group portrait by photographer Michael Schacht — eight dancers arranged in theatrical poses in and around a pallet structure built for the shoot, under dramatic studio lighting — captures the bold, progressive movement philosophy that defines Visceral's identity on and off the stage. Made in a single frame, it mirrors the ensemble nature of contemporary dance itself: individual bodies working in concert to create something larger than any single performer could achieve alone. Shot at the 312 Elements studio in Chicago, the image serves as both artistic statement and promotional tool for a company that has earned its place among the most exciting contemporary dance ensembles in the American Midwest.