For the first time in 15 years, Erin Kilmurray’s schedule doesn’t include “The Fly Honey Show.” The boundary-breaking, genre-defying, queer-affirming and femme-forward burlesque show won’t return in 2026.

“I feel comfortable with it,” said Kilmurray, the creative visionary of the long-running counterculture cabaret. “‘Fly Honey’ is a really good example of a production and, honestly, a cultural moment that was long lasting because it was asked to be.”

“The Fly Honey Show” was originally envisioned as a one-time fundraiser for the multi-arts collaborative The Inconvenience, of which Kilmurray was a founding member, and the Open Space Project, a dance festival she dreamed up with dancers and choreographers Anna Normann and Suzy Grant. It was a time of richly imaginative growth among Chicago’s 20-somethings, born out of necessity. Kilmurray graduated from college in 2008, at the height of the Great Recession and the dawn of pre-algorithm social media. That origin story has branded Kilmurray as a staunchly DIY artist, despite now having created for some of Chicago’s biggest stages.

“Doing cheap stuff with your friends when you’re starting out in a garage somewhere is the tale as old as time,” said Kilmurray, who recently turned 40. “To sustain that into a professional career, into adulthood, in Chicago, is very hard to do.”

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As her career has evolved, Kilmurray hasn’t needed to be as scrappy as in the beginning, but she’s stayed firm to a set of values. Among the nonnegotiables is an ensemble of collaborators whom she gets to know as artists and human beings. She’s not a solo artist and never has been, she said. And working that way takes time.

“I’ve always been energized by the question and the wonder of what the group can do, and what we’re going to do together. I love facilitating that practice,” Kilmurray said. “I don’t set out with the goal of getting to that presentation place in mind, ever.”

But she does get to it, eventually, as any “Fly Honey” audience member picking glitter out of their hair days later can attest. The lights, the sound, the music, the vibe — the product — are as important to her as the journey it took to get there.

“The audience feels like a collaborator to me — maybe not in the studio, but in the live-ness of performing something and getting that exchange,” she said.

“Knockout,” a tour de force performed in January at Steppenwolf Theatre, could well be the perfect example of that duality between process and product. The project started as danced scribblings with co-choreographer Kara Brody during the pandemic, anathema to virtual hangouts and our collective ineptitude at navigating the messiness of meeting people. After several years and many, many iterations, which came to include critical contributions from sound designer Corey Smith and lighting designer Liz Gomez, it was, hands down, among the best dance this year.

Aesthetically, “Knockout” and “Fly Honey” are miles apart — not to mention other recent work choreographing “As You Like It” for Writers Theatre, or “Othello” at Court Theatre a few years ago. But for Kilmurray, it’s all inextricably linked. Paradoxes have been around her from the start.

Kilmurray grew up in two “polarizingly different places,” spending her childhood in northern New Jersey and her teen years in southern Connecticut. College brought her to Chicago, first to DePaul University, where she was an undeclared freshman on the basketball dance team.

“They gave me a skirt and poms, and I was like, what (expletive) is this?” she said. “I came from tear-away pants at halftime to Janet Jackson.”

It wasn’t time wasted. Kilmurray hung out in the theater school with her randomly assigned freshman roommate, Missi Davis, another founding member of The Inconvenience who would later become her “Fly Honey Show” co-producer. By transferring to Columbia College Chicago, Kilmurray committed to dance for the long haul.

Chicagoan of the Year in Dance is Erin Kilmurray, a choreographer and dancer and the creative force behind the popular “Fly Honey Show,” on Dec. 8, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

“I don’t know why I thought I could do anything else,” she said.

Peter Carpenter, Gesel Mason and Colleen Halloran were instructive mentors, providing physical and philosophical avenues to creatively transgress the lines between so-called “high art” and her interest in nightlife and club culture. But it was Kilmurray and her peers who pioneered subversive grassroots models and performance platforms like Beauty Bar. They converted warehouses and lofts, one of which — a literal open space in Wicker Park rented for the first time by the Open Space Project — is now The Den Theatre, where the “Fly Honey Show” performed for several years before moving to its final home at Thalia Hall.

And with “Fly Honey” now gone, Kilmurray can get back to basics, spending time in the studio, collecting her curio cabinet of ideas and collaborators. Making what? She’s not sure yet. That’s kind of her thing.

“’Fly Honey’ has never had any institutional support,” she said. “I’ve quite literally torpedoed every possible resource — energetically, financially, physically, culturally, socially — to all of this work. Yeah, we had a Viking funeral. We set out to do something, and we did it.”

Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/18/chicagoan-year-dance-erin-kilmurray/